skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Financial independence in high cost of living city?
Hi HN,

I'm a recent grad with about 2 years of professional experience, currently working as a software developer. Even though I think my salary is higher than average for where I work, I am still struggling to come to terms with the high cost of living in my city.

The average cost of a detached home in Toronto has just passed $1M Canadian dollars (~$820k US). Even if I were to commit to a commuter lifestyle and live outside the city, a 20% down payment could require upwards of $100,000. Some say that a recession in the housing market is inevitable, but with so much foreign investment and insatiable demand for detached homes, I just find it hard to believe. Worst of all, with real estate prices having climbed ~10% each year for the past few years (faster than the average salary, and at a higher rate than a typical mortgage), real estate ownership is getting further and further out of reach.

When I look southward, I see such vibrant cities in the US where developers are getting paid more, and the cost of living (and real estate ownership) are much lower.

I fear that I am coming off sounding as entitled, as many of my non-techie friends are struggling to find jobs relevant to their studies, while I am in a situation where I am quickly paying off my student loans and trying to increase my savings. I'm still young, and perhaps I am just asking for too much. I would very much like to spend more time working on my own projects, and would like to one day do that full-time. However, I can't imagine that happening without a large safety net (not having to worry about a mortgage, or rent).

I guess I haven't really asked a question yet ... I was just hoping to discuss this topic and hear your stories.
I think remote is quite realistic if you have decent chops. It's the part-time that will be problematic. Nobody wants to hire part timers. Most places aren't even happy with 40 hours a week. I work remotely (9 time zones apart!), but I find that I spend at least 2 hours of my day on communication. Since I'm fairly productive the rest of the time (6 hours), I can more than make up for it. If you were only working 3-4 hours a day, I can imagine that in many circumstances it would be a struggle to be productive.

Having said that, there are some teams who are super organized and can just ship off short stories if you are an amazing coder. They are few and far between, though, so you will really need to network to find them.

Good luck!
Factors to consider while desinging #UI
225,000 Swedish retirees below the poverty line
That is a fantastic blog, thank you very much. I love reading stuff like that.

I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional' sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level. One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.
I imagine that might be found unconstitutional? I haven't heard anyone speak (intelligently) about whether this sort of business > government in terms of the Constitution. Is it true that democratic power can be signed away in an international treaty?
The end result would be corporate control, but the existence of the draft agreement is a result of lobbying. That said, I agree with you that it is an extremely scary prospect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city

There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still, but basically it's an Orwellian Neoliberals dream.

AFAICT the idea is that Smart Cities wire up as much as they can to central decision making capabilities - this would include human intelligence about the residents living in the city including how happy they are, how much waste they produce, electricity they consume, where they go to collect mass traffic patterns, etc.

The idea here is that the cities will be able to response to emergencies and opportunities better because they can act as one city immediately. Smart cities presumably can capture individual innovation, but also collective data for collective decision making, and machine/computer information.

The difficulty here lies in the fact that it is supposed to then be owned and operated by private individuals. There is not really a mention of a vote - smart cities are independent of governance structure. The pitfall is that modern senses of the importance of 'efficiency' may lure some into thinking that having the intelligence/data and a well greased economy are enough to understand the underlying population's preferences (on the whole, behavioral economics has proven this false).

That's not to say getting some real and real-time data about an entire city isn't an exciting prospect.
> My advice is to create your own company and to take advantage of this problem, you know in the business world we call them "opportunities". As remote communications improve this is going to explode.

Any advice on where to start? How to find customers? Is there a good lecture about this topic?
Is it possible to check if my data has been affected by this data corruption issue?
"When workers are on site, particularly in an open plan office, the boss's brain receives reminders every hour of every day that he is wielding power over underlings."

Teaching: you have to trust people. You can't be the 'pit boss'. Might be why I stayed in teaching I suppose - management has to support performance, not wield power.
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>> "Compared to sv all of Europe has cheap engineers"

Salaries are often set relative to cost of living. e.g. I get paid more as an engineer in London than I do in my hometown but the difference is almost equal to the difference in cost of living. Therefore comparing an SV salary to 'Europe' isn't easy as there are very rich European cities as well as very poor ones. SV and in particular SF has an incredibly high cost of living compared with pretty much anywhere in Europe so it's not easy to compare SF salaries to even those in more expensive European cities like London.
But the US _is_ the bad guy!

Largely through ignorance, incompetence and inaction, the US has allowed its elected government to be bought (at embarrassingly low prices, I might add) by corporate interests and persuaded/bribed to work for the interests of corporations and against the interests of its own citizens.

At the point where this thoroughly corrupt government and its awesome military and economic clout are used to push the interests of corporations on other countries and their citizens, the US is clearly stepping into "bad guy" territory. Be clear about this: the US is using its economic clout (and threats of using it) to coerce other countries to bulldoze the legal provisions that help safeguard their citizens. How much higher than this would you set the bar for "bad guy" behavior??
Boohoo. It's just one small detail. Free trade between US and EU will boost prosperity of each economy by a lot and enable the free market to be less constrained by bureaucratic governments and their nonsensical laws. TTIP should have been passed 30 years ago.
"I think investing same money in ... startup will be worth more"

You are correct on a micro-level but there are also macro-level issues when capital and rent (rent of money) are tied up in non-productive assets. An individual who buys a $1M house cannot put that $1M into a startup, but also on a societal level a bank that loans $100M of mortgages cannot loan that $100M to build infrastructure or a new manufacturing plant or a (large) school. So high price of non-productive assets hurt the macro scale as much or more than it hurts micro scale. Its very bad for the economy when the best thing to do with a pile of money is buy something that doesn't produce anything or grow anything. Its as bad economically as stuffing the money into a mattress.
Or to emphasise to people that not having one, where you're earning >100k, is very bloody stupid? It's not an unreasonable thing to point out.

Not that I'm not sympathetic, but the primary lesson people should be taking from this is "do not spend above your means if you can possibly avoid doing so".
My Dad worked for Marconi in Liverpool fixing radar and radios for ships late fifties and early 60s before they became a large multi-national. Certain kinds of staff were not always needed in the workshop e.g. radio officers signing off on repairs.

They hung out in a Dock Road pub. The techies wired up a loudspeaker to the pub (not radio, I suspect they hacked the Reddifusion cable radio) and called the staff when needed. I was quite impressed as a small boy (and, no, we as a country were not big on efficiency in those days).
You found an unlikely and emotion invoking scenario that wouldn't happen in real life. Most likely it would be a business that is unfairly constrained from trading with US freely or vice versa by arbitrary and nonsensical laws written by misguided anti-growth bureaucrats.
As a person with half a brain, so do I.
Treaties are always negotiated in secret? I'd expect at least the decision makers to be in the information loop. I'm not sure that's really the case. Isn't it unusual that (as I've been hearing) even the Congressfolk who are expected to vote on this contract are unable to obtain preliminary copies of the in-progress document other than through WikiLeaks?
Alright, but if governments work for the people, as we're told, then they'd also erm.. "regulate" news organizations and make them actually serve the public. You know full well they could, if they wanted to.

That would include warning us of cancer-causing shit that we come into contact with all the damn time.

Strangely enough, they don't. What does that tell us?
The European Commission is proposed by the (elected) heads of governments and then approved via a democratic vote by the (directly elected) members of the European Parliament. I'd call that a strong democratic mandate.

The European Parliament has the power to reject Commissions they don't see fit and did so in the past.

That's even more power to the members of parliament than in most member states where the head of government can freely appoint ministers without approval of the parliament.
SF is just as expensive housing wise as London or Paris.

Ok London has better transport links than SF but that isn't cheap either.
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Hi!
I am about to launch a new community and I was wondering what are the best communities (no specific niche) built with Discourse?
I would like to see more of the good ones so I will be able to implement on my own one.

Here are the best I know:
https://meta.discourse.org
www.growthtalk.co
twittercommunity.com
http://bbs.boingboing.net/

What others do you know and use?

THANKS
I don't know who you're thinking of, but this George Orwell is the author of 1984, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, etc.
I did the same thing and ended up with the same feeling.
I second this anecdotal evidence. It's a very tight real estate market but somehow, cheap compared to salaries, with high quality options and a high quality of life. Thanks to EasyJet, Swiss (the airline), and the always great Swiss public transport, you're also next to a budget hub (ZRH) allowing you easy access to the rest of Europe.

I moved cos my next job took me to Geneva (which is nowhere near as nice) but remember the city fondly. Switzerland is generally a wonderful country to live in and work, if you can cope with not being in a culture hub (which is the only real drawback, relatively easily mitigated by weekends elsewhere).
Anyone looking for a remote modern Perl job in Europe, email me at pete@perl.careers
Good article.

Definition: What is Depth? A multiplayer game is deep if it is still strategically interesting to play after
expert players have studied and practiced it for years, decades, or centuries.

We often talk about skillcaps. The more skillcaps a game has the better it is. Ideally, you want a game to have an infinite number of skillcaps. A skillcap is a level of expertise which allows the players in it to dramatically beat the players which belong to the lower level of expertise. The idea behind skillcaps is that, if you, as a player, are in a lower skillcap, it means you're not entirely exploiting all the possibilities of the game. Many skillcaps means that increasing things like reflex is not enough. The player needs to increase its understanding of the game. Incidentally, that game is very deep.

Also, there is a measure for player expertise called the Elo rating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Definition: What Is Balance? A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options
available to the player are viable--especially, but not limited to, during highlevel
play by expert players

Well, not really in my opinion. A game is balanced if you cannot find a single way-of-playing to beat an equally-expert opponent more than 50% of the time when the opponent is not allowed to use that same way-of-playing. (Note we are talking here about robots which automatically play each game with the exact same level of expertise.)

EDIT: oh the author calls that fairness. Fair enough then.
The font rendering on the linked blog article is pretty atrocious on my PC: http://i.imgur.com/DL5pZKE.png

This is in Firefox Developer on Linux with the Infinality font rendering installed.

I'm probably doing something wrong
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Looking through the slides referenced, this only seems possible/reasonable due to the styles being applied using React's DOM manipulation engine.

Perhaps that's assumable, but recommending this path seems pretty dangerous without significant caveats on its DOM-diffing requirement. Otherwise, just the raw amount of DOM injection is a severe performance risk.
>So don't.

Isn't that my argument? Maybe I should try again to clarify my position.

'Just' an airgapped computer solves neither backdoored RNG nor backdoored bitcoin software.

A trusted airgapped computer comes close to solving both.

Using dice only gives me half a solution; why bother?
Very nice, but I would appreciate the option of not creating an account and keeping everything local. I have far too many accounts on far too many services already.
Matrix multiplication sounds good
Because its a good piece of software but for starting a free community you have to pay minimal 100 bugs for this software maybe this a (to hard step in) when you make ex. a gaming community with your private money.

For companys it maybe not. Why not use slack instead ?
I like Steve Blank's definition: A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

See: http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
Was confused by that aspect, yeah. I'm not sure how McCain would have made the global financial crisis abruptly stop...
License confusion here. Isn't that font Apple only? How can that blog (http://www.nicholastodor.com/blog/use-apples-new-san-francis...) make it available for download?
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It's shorter because with +1 you need to write the variable twice. That said, I do prefer Python's += operator over ++.
Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
Not the guy you're asking, but I recently said "portico" when I meant to say "patio." I mixed up the two words because they both start with a P and have something to do with architecture. I think this is the kind of thing he meant by "replacement," and it's been happening to me (55) more frequently in recent years.
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I have music on Spotify and I get 2/10ths of a cent per play. I've earned enough to buy a cup of coffee and not much else. I can't imagine anyone trying to make an actual living that way.
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I don't mean to be a downer...but at this point, wouldn't it just make sense to use vanilla JS? I guess I'm not seeing the use case...

When I don't use jQuery, I've been using Sprint[1] (another lightweight jQuery-like library). If I need anything lighter than that...I just assume use plain JavaScript.

[1] https://github.com/bendc/sprint
Tox connects directly over P2P though, so unlike this it exposes your IP address to everyone on your friends list (possibly even everyone in the world - I haven't looked too closely at how it announces addresses), and allows a passive adversary to easily see who you're talking to and when.
I found it sad simply because we now have soldiers dying on foreign battlefields who were only children when our government - speaking for the will of the majority at the time - decided to get into these conflicts.

We now have soldiers dying for a war that they were too young to understand or debate about whether they should enter it at that time. So even if a young man or woman wants to enter the military with the ideal to serve their country, but not necessarily on the old battlefields of the last decade, he or she really has no choice. Either you enter the military and sign on to the fact that you may enter a war that you had no say in or you choose a different path in life. For some, that could be a difficult, sad position to be in. When they lose their life, it's even sadder.
I think that the outright banning of p-values is not the right way to go. The researchers that misuse them and the reviewers that apparently don't understand them are a much bigger problem than the p-value metric itself.

What's needed is a better understanding of empirical conditional statistics and the application of that understanding to the degign of experiments and the analysis of the results produced therefrom.
One thing that I think doesn't come up very often when discussing BI is the fact that many other laws will have to dramatically change to make the experiment successful. Just imagine the enormous increase in things like contribution to open source, creation of art and culture, etc. I don't believe that the current environment of hyper-strict IP and patent laws can continue if BI were to be implemented, as many more people would use their increased leisure time to create. Today we can already see conflicts between big IP companies and individual creators, and if BI is introduced it will get much worse.
You will find, if you spend the effort to look, that different people process information completely differently.

To someone who views this as a table, the above is so much more readable that it doesn't even bear thinking about. To someone who reads code the way a computer parses it (as I do), the added space can completely throw them for a loop. What the hell are you doing with n? Oh, if I look far enough, there is an assignment there.

Very likely you will see what I've written and find it incomprehensible because you have never looked at an expression the way I do. What's worse is that there isn't just 2 ways to look at it. Coding style purists usually don't realize that they are simply fooling themselves into thinking that their way of looking at something is optimal for everyone.

As someone else mentioned, the day when we can express how we want our code formatted and our editors will instantly format it that way (for everyone) can't come soon enough. But until then, it would be best to simply realize that there is no "best" way and that you should go with what the majority of the team likes, no matter what you personal preference is.
My understanding of the Constitution on this matter is that all international treaties and agreements must be considered very high law, but may not invalide or contradict any part of the constitution themselves lest the particular section or whole agreement be considered void and nonbinding. That was my ametuer reading of the section on that.

Also, regarding TTIP and TTP, I think we have to admit NAFTA was in the same vein but we allowed it to pass. The problem here though is we are putting what thin thread of sinewy national sovereignty we have up for grabs. Nader in the 92 debates was right (which is also consequently why the two parties jointly bought out the debate organization to keep other Naders out of the pucture.)
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Not really true. Most countries have a residency rule (for personal income) that if you live more than 165 days (or something to that effect) you will be taxed as a resident of that country. Even if you register a company in another country within the EU, you may still be liable to pay corporate tax on your residence country as some countries also have conditions on that (if you own more than X (usually around 70%) of a company, and the company country is considered a low tax jurisdiction (this can depend for some countries where some have lists, others have a corporate threshold and others have countries corporate tax < owner resident country corporate tax - 10% is also a tax haven) they will want to tax that company as a resident.

As others mentioned, while more common, intra-community workers are a bureaucracy nightmare if you don't register a subsidiary in the employee's country, which if you do, then you have tax/social security+other stuff you need to take care in the employee's country.

Best way to do it is for employee to setup it's own company in country of residence and play by the rules, and then just be paid for services rendered and be responsible for all taxes/other.
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Most anyone in sales will tell you there is absolutely no substitute for in-person, face-to-face (not face-to-face-on-screen) meetings. It establishes trust. There is more to conversation than words (and our brains are built to pick up on it). Not everyone is an architect, but even sharing knowledge, code review reviews, and so on - all better in person in general.

Remote isn't bad, per-se, but having worked remote, managed remote workers, and now owning a business, it is my anecdotal experience that things generally run smoother, more efficiently, and with deeper levels of trust and involvement between people in the same room.