skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that many things are probably wrong with our economy that are affecting you. But what you said doesn't add up to me. Maybe there are many things chipping away at your wealth which you haven't been accounting for?

If $110k is your take-home (after taxes), you are single, and your expenses are so low, it seems you could be saving quite a lot. I know many people with similar income and expenses, and they save tens of thousands per year. This allows them to spread savings across IRAs, mutual funds, and regular savings accounts to build wealth.

Perhaps like many who make a ~100k range salary, you pay upwards of 30% of it to taxes? This is a huge chunk.

You drive; are you sure you haven't spent more on gas than you have on dental? You mentioned dental as your third biggest expense in the last two years. This seems unusual. Gas, food, and other common expenses often make up for a large portion of total expenses.

If your medical and dental expenses are that high, that's unfortunate. But you say you have some decent savings, so good for you! That shows you have the financial strength to make it through tough medical situations :)

If you have more savings than most people you know, maybe you shouldn't be feeling so pressured. Most people aren't "making it" because they have no savings--but you are!

Having debt is a common reason for feeling financially stressed. If you have debt, see a debt counselor or financial advisor and create a plan to get rid of it, fast. They may advise you to use a chunk of savings for eliminating debt.

You say you eat out "some of the time". Most people I know say that, and they mean "at least one meal per day". This is not good for your finances! I personally increased my monthly savings by 50% once I limited my takeout to once per week, cooking the rest of my meals myself.

Lots of times it helps to have a financial advisor. If you do this, spend plenty of time finding a good one who you're comfortable with, who listens to your concerns, etc.

Bottom line: track down where that $110k is disappearing to! You should feel comfortable at that salary. Especially over time, as you save and build wealth!

Hope this helps, or at least gives you some ideas.
Hahaha! It has always amazed me how people indebted to intellectual discussions via the culture of a forum completely disregard all historical context of an ancient peoples. xD

I get that it's the "in" thing now to hate on ancient texts to seem smart but ...

Quoting a writing from the ancient Jewish leader Moses is equivalent to studying the history of the peoples in those times and locations. Please, note that basically ALL nations used an enslavement "banking" system that basically boiled down to: You pay off your credit card by working for the creditor for a few years (or for however many years the owner thought was sufficient).

It has absolutely nothing to do with recent American slavery traditions embedded in deep racism and superiority complexes.

The only similarities are the translation of the word: slave.

The economics of ancient cultures was drastically different from how it has been for all post-1600s Bank of England cultures. :P
If the exemption came from the sovereignty of the Native states/tribes, why would it be narrowed down to just peyote? Versus letting those nations simply decide for themselves their own "scheduling" of medications?

I'm going off a few quick searches, but the peyote bit seems to exclude it for any "bona fide ceremonies" for the Native American Church, regardless of race. I didn't see any mention that they must be on reservations either. Wikipedia also notes that some states have a "bona fide religious" exemption that's not related to the NAC (which is at least somewhat more consistent, but "bona fide" is still silly to apply in this scope).
My question is, what is the problem, really

Take a look at Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO); many "fun" municipalities like Seattle have restricted development to the point that housing is extremely expensive. If you move from Seattle to, say, Houston or Dallas, you'll probably see your effective rent shrink by 35 – 50%.

Secondly: see Tyler Cowen's books The Great Stagnation and Average is Over. Those books are too sophisticated and deep (though they're quite readable) to summarize here, but the shortish version is that Western economies are undergoing a lot of profound shifts driven by a combination of technology and Baumol's cost disease.

in the last couple years have been rent, medical, and dental in that order

Alex Tabarrok's Launching the Innovation Renaissance is also good: regarding medicine and dentistry, part of the issue is Baumol's Cost Disease and part of it is the powerful lobbies that restrict entry into those fields through licensing regimes and other means.

Finally, a general note: be wary of any answers in this thread that don't cite any sources and ideally those sources should be books. The issue is too complex for simple answers, and the simple answers that one tends to hear also tend to be wrong or missing a lot of important information.
It could be familiarity, but for small- to medium-scale "scripts", I still find Perl to be the best alternative to bash+sed+awk+grep thrown in, when I want to go to something more conventionally programming-ish. Basically its original use-case, before Modern Perl.

You can use Python for that, but the jump from Unix shell to Python feels bigger; everything is more verbose and less awk-y in Python. Which can be good for maintainability of bigger scripts, but feels heavyweight for some stuff.
Three major issues I see

(1) People aren't saving enough [1].

For the past 50 years, Americans have come to expect their employers and/or government will finance their retirement, healthcare, unemployment, and other major dislocations, so personal savings became something one did with windfalls, but not on a regular, life-or-death basis. (My grandparents are fond of tellling me that in their childhood, people were "poor as church mice" before Social Security)

But these commitments are being tested as people are living longer, massive healthcare inflation is occurring, and the birth rate is falling, causing the ratio of wage-generating members of the US economy to constitute a shrinking portion of the population relative to retirees.

This also creates a problem because financial gains drive pensions, and absent capital accumulation, "normal" people (pensioners) can't participate in the upside of higher corporate profits and/or interest rates.

(2) Wages are stagnating. I don't know why this is happening, but suspect it's due in large part to globalization, in particular, better communication technologies being used to substitute cheaper labor for what was previously only available locally.

The decline of labor unions might be a good thing for owners, but it's unquestionably bad for wage-earners.

Also, more and more jobs are getting automated as technology gets better and better, which reduces the demand for unskilled labor.

(3) Major across-the-board inflation. Healthcare, fuel prices (which directly affect the cost of driving, flying, shipping, food production, pretty much everything), education costs, higher tax rates (Cook county, IL, where I grew up, has over 10% sales tax, a 5% state income tax, plus federal taxes -- not inflation as such, but it does have a big effect on depleting purchasing power), food -- EVERYTHING is costing more. "Six figure" incomes just aren't what they used to be.

I think the combination of no pensions + higher healthcare costs + more taxes (largely to fund government-sponsored retirement funds, not provide broad-based services like education/public works) + inflation is making 120k feel like 80k or less, it's just not that visible because in nominal terms, wages aren't going down.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/07/11/Gui...
Infinite scrolling like this works pretty well if you want to do scrolling for, say, search results.

It's all around horrible for something like Twitter, IMO.

The problem with Twitter is that it's conversational, and it's showing the newest part of the conversation at the top. So instead of having a nice conversation history:

Hi!
Hello to you good sir.
How are you doing today.
I'm fine.

You get:

I'm fine.
How are you today?
Hello to you good sir.
Hi!

...and you lose the navigation state, so it's impossible to tell where you were at last on Twitter except by memory.

tl;dr: don't copy Twitter's UI. Please.
Where is all your money going? Living in a studio apartment making $110k, you should be able to save thousands of dollars a month. Sounds like a budgeting problem.
If you read my comment and understood it fully, you'd notice that in most states, a pure electric vehicle is NOT "about as good as a hybrid vehicle", but cleaner than the cleanest hybrid. Electric vehicles are also getting cleaner with the electric grid while non-plugin hybrids have made no progress in over a decade.

Keep in mind that producing one gallon of gasoline uses more electricity than it takes to drive the same distance in an electric car as that gallon would take you in a gas car.
My understanding is that bad news did not bubbled up. They stayed hidden and that one is cultural problem.Instead of president being informed that project will be late, programmers were informed that failure is not an option. Turned out it was an option.

Cultural problems like this are often caused by leadership.
Whether you will be told bad news depends a lot on your management style and on people you decide to work with. You do not have to micromanage, but if they are scared to tell you the truth, then it is often your own fault.
Expedient way to cd around Linux
I have a solution for a common problem. When you're SSH'd into a server or AFS, it's a pain in the ass to cd around. Well, I wrote a small bash script that should make this much quicker.

It operates on the habit of bookmarking. If you're at a directory that you want to bookmark, you do this:

aguo@unix1:~/Documents/10605$ j add

Type an alias for the current working directory, or ^C to quit:

ml

and "j ml" -> ~/Documents/10605, etc.

To install, just save my .jrc file as "~/.jrc", and then ". .jrc" in your ".bashrc".

https://github.com/mallochine/jarvis2

--Alex Guo
5Boys – Body (Bay Area Talent) MUST SEE
DEVILS BUSY WILL RUSSIA SEND IN RED ARMY
How is that?

Again, I don't really mean to press you too far with the questions, I'm just a young guy who hears $110,000 and thinks "gee, that's a lot of money".
"...of its own sort."

i.e., not making a direct comparison about the physicality of the work...

I remember reading about a guy who gave up the freelance web game to become a lumberjack and loved it. Physically hard, but easy to switch off and relax at the end of the day. I think it was on HN a few years back when I first joined.
I wish that stuff happened to me... I only have been invited to a job once, or something like that, I don't remember other attempts...
This dentist had it all figured out 3 years ago http://tumbledry.org/2011/05/12/screw_hashbangs_building

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741
Reminds me a lot of the Misfit Shine http://www.misfitwearables.com/ whithout the shiny light thingies.

There seem to be hundreds of these popping up recently. 2014 is shaping up to be the year of wearables, and it is going to get more insane with the Google Watch, and a potential Apple wearable (watch? headphones with heart rate monitoring?) later in the year.
I used to get recruiter spam, then I tried this one weird trick and all the recruiters stopped emailing me...

Actually, it wasn't that weird. I just moved out of the US. Changed my location on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and the recruitment spam stopped overnight.

As for the few recruiters who are still working off of old lists and still have me as living in NYC, I just politely reply that I'd be interested in talking with them if the position they're hiring for would consider a remote working arrangement.

So far, not a single recruiter has replied that they are ok with remote...
He never said that. The post is based on a machine translation of a French blog: http://www.frandroid.com/actualites-generales/198006_pour-su...

And it's woefully inaccurate.
I have a monster resume that gets 30+ emails a day.

http://www.xyhd.tv/2008/05/how-to/seo-when-updating-your-res...

Emails aren't offers. They are typically auto-generated. As an executive I use the honey pot that gets bombarded with recruiters as a way to filter out which recruiters I won't ever work with.

I want to work with recruiters who will give my company a good name. When they spam people and include my company name they are hurting my reputation. That's not something I can risk.

That said, as a candidate SEO for your you CV is important. A good recruiter will look for certain phrases that you need to have to drive up your odds of getting noticed. This is especially true for specialized jobs that can be great paying because of the limited number of candidates. Did you use some weird software that is proprietary to an industry or company? Put that on "A" CV.

You can have more than once CV and tuning them to every kind of job you could do is a great way to get to the phone call stage. Then send a CV tuned for what that employer actually wants after you get a job description.

But most importantly, "It isn't the number of jobs it is the quality of the job" (at least until you are desperate then it is take what you can get)
>Idea: Can you make a list of questions, exercises, or problems can be answered by interacting with the model.

This would be great.
yes, and there are a lot of programmer jobs where the same is true as well - maybe as a percentage it's less than in a sales role, but it still exists.

but it actually doesn't really matter - you choose to be a programmer, so you choose to put yourself into a role that requires such accountability. i'm sure you are quite qualified to be a barista, but would you get satisfaction? doubt it.
He says: "I live in a studio apartment near Seattle. ... My biggest expenses in the last couple years have been rent, medical, and dental in that order."

Medical and dental can be really pricy. So can big city rents. Last I checked, an SRO in San Francisco was $1000/mo or more. Most areas, higher average income correlates quite closely to higher local living expenses.

So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
The difference with Google is this:

1) Google quality of indexing doesn't have any competition yet.

2) They can calculate a page rank across different domains

3) No single entity can make the same efforts or is so smart to build a similar thing

If you follow the 2-tier route:

1) Each entity takes responsability to optimize the quality of search locally.

2) They know their own domain or they can learn how to optimize their page rank at a local level instead of a global level

So, at the end you have distributed the work of local optimization across different intelligent entities. For example, when you look at the Linux kernel or other open source projects you can count million of man hours that are difficult to have if you run a single entity.
Do Your Agents Know the Score?
Placing emphasis on specific metrics is a great way to get agents excited about competition, which in turn drives performance.
This is a billing change. Having integrated in-app payments to both T-Mobile and AT&T, I can tell you that both of them outsource their billing systems on the Israeli company Amdocs, widely accused of being Mossad-affiliated and aiding and abetting intelligence gathering globally. Somehow I don't see this change impacting their insidious reach.
you would be surprised how many with insurance don't go or don't listen to their doctor. it has nothing to do with insurance and more to do with fear or just laziness
ATAP Project Tango – Google
They used markLogic NoSQL store http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/12/03/healthcare-govs-heart-be...

Just for the record, contractor did not wanted to use it and argued the team have no experience with it. Someone in government decided it must be done that way (in spring or summer).
Defense is a decent-sized portion of government spending, but entitlement spending (especially when you consider state budgets) is much larger.

If you would like to see the government spend money more wisely, focusing on making entitlement costs tractable should be the top priority.

That's not to say that government contracting isn't grossly dysfunctional.
@grecy, do you follow Mr. Money Mustache? He is all about cutting costs in ways I'd have never thought of. His goal was to retire early, but it could be anything. This requires quite a bit of "badassitude" as he would say.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

I'd also agree that taking some time off is very helpful. I took 1 year off to do some volunteering. It taught me to live a simpler life and respect for the dollar (when your income is 0 you make it work the way you can).
I don't know if you ever used the music service Lala back before it got bought by Apple and shut down, but they had a really nice infinite scroll implementation.

When viewing your music library, the scroll bar grabber would be the correct size for how many items were in your library so grabbing it and scrolling would work right. It didn't load all X number of items you had at a time though either.
Gen X-er here. The downvoting your post is receiving makes me think that there might be some truth to it.

But in fairness to the Millennials, my generation also has more than its fair share of thin-skined entitlement children. As is the case with the Baby Boomers.

You could make the case that the offensive response in question might reflect her sense of entitlement.
"Without insurance, I couldn't have afforded the half-dozen trips to the doctor or the meds."

This is actually the problem for a large group of insured. It would be cheaper to pay out of a health saving account and have catastrophic insurance than pay the continuing insurance premium. This is especially true for young workers who we are now forcing into an additional cost to support older workers. For the price you were paying for insurance, the health saving account and paying out of pocket for those exams would have been cheaper. People unable to pay that should have been the ones helped by a health care law, not the typical consumer.

If we would get rid of this "one size" crap and deal with the groups we actually have (e.g. "ongoing expensive care", "typical person", "catastrophic"), we would have had a much better system. Grand visions suck for normal people.
Java generics done the very wrong way
I love your message here, though it's amusing that you recommend buying something as the cure to buying too much.

Another interesting data point to support taking some time off is the increased security of students who have taken "gap years" before starting college. In my experience they're almost all much happier, more thoughtful people pursuing what they'd really like to do in life rather than your average college student who's there because his parents told him to be (like me and most of my peers in college).
A Facebook investor's new target: the $11 billion mayo market
OP said he's not looking for advice and thinks his situation isn't utterly terrible. His description sounds fairly frugal. Are you suggesting that he stop spending a single cent on discretionary things and just live on rice and beans?

Saying his problem is living in Seattle misses the point. Many people can't afford to move someplace cheaper even if they wanted to, which is a real problem - he can afford to move, probably, but other people cannot, and he's asking about problems like that.
Not only a large collection of porn. A large collection of kiddie porn. Many of those webcam users are underage.
it should be possible for the page to fix, I think, by listening for a pagedown or spacebar press and changing the scroll position based on the height of the viewport minus the height of the stuff that obscures the viewport.

I think it would be really difficult for the browser to come up with a solution that would work anywhere.
Interesting. I created a throwaway account to ask a question on HN (through submit button).

I am able to access it only through my throwaway account but I don't see it in regular HN feed or in Ask HN tab. Any idea of the reasons? New accounts have to wait for sometime before Submitting stuff?
Bah. I learned Perl with Perl 4, which was a lovely little regularization of sed, awk, sh, and unix system calls. Absolutely fantastic, loved the heck out of it.

Perl 5 is an abomination.
Trying to recruit DHH for a junior RoR position is quite a faux-pas. In that position (no ... I'm not famous), I'd be very tempted to show up for the interview after submitting an appropriately junior resume!
I would feel kind of okay with infinite scroll if it wasn't creating memory problems. Especially on image-heavy (tumblr) / DOM-heavy (facebook) pages. If I browsed the web in 90s mode (one window, one page opened) that would maybe work, but when I have dozens of tabs opened, youtube playing in background and I start browsing an endless memory-hungry page, my laptop (3 GB RAM) starts dying.

Another issue is the one mentioned in the other subthread here, often when you accidentally click some link on the page, you can't go back, it'll start loading everything from scratch. Happens to me e.g. on facebook on IE Mobile (apparently they don't use pushState). This effectively means I have to open links in a new tab.
I agree, the issues are quite complex. I cited a fed paper in my reply below -- thanks for taking the discussion up a notch.

Something I'd like to understand better is why capital (and not labor) is capturing a higher share of firms' overall income than in past years. As I noted in my reply, the decline of savings means this is a double-whammy for people, as they get hit on the front end with lower upfront cash payments, and on the back as well, when they don't share in any upside of corporate profits, due to no share ownership.
They asked: “are you an artist?”

The question quite sublime.

For truth be told, in recent months,

It’s not the first of times.

The first was in Los Angeles

A pre-opening event

He who questioned me sure was,

Thus knew quite what it meant.

So thrown aback I did reply

With an honest heartfelt question

“Why life is art, isn’t it?”

A smile, then nought was mentioned.

And come again, the question did,

Before I left that nation.

But identify I have not yet:

In ambiguity lies elation.

Then half a world away today

In leftist lands anew

An art college in Kerala

Invited, I took my cue.

Walking about I could not see

The show that was promoted

Behind door one a library

The second looked quite verboten.

Some students came and talked to me

While each of us did smoke

My country declared, they then decided

To get to know this bloke...

They asked: “are you an artist?”

The question quite sublime.

For truth be told, in recent months,

It’s not the first of times.

Are you an Artist? (June 2011) http://stani.sh/poem4.pdf
Shutting down the government because you don't get your way isn't hardball? I suspect if we flipped some D and R labels around, like say this was President Romney's healthcare plan, you'd have a completely different opinion about every detail, up to and including the severity of shutting down the government to try and defund something.
Yea I posted my resume to a few job databases about 7 months ago and still get calls and e-mails on a daily basis. I'll always reply to something that seems like a personalized e-mail but when someone is contacting me asking for an updated resume or their e-mail doesn't include my name I can tell they don't really care. I feel like if a recruiting firm went for quality over quantity they'd end up with much better results.
Any developer can now make a Google Now
Meetup.com is down
That means you're a developer.