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Comment by thesimpsons1022 | Hacker News Reader

maybe this is off topic but all my cs major friends seem a lot more selfish than my non-cs friends. Ie instead of sharing or letting someone borrow something they want the exact cash value. Even if you've shared with them in the past with no strings attached.

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Get better friends, maybe? I noticed the same thing among capital-L Libertarians -- down to calculating the exact amount of money needed per pizza slice when buying pizza and sharing among friends. I prefer to hang out in mostly gifting/sharing circles these days ;)

Capital-L Libertarian here, and frankly when it comes to friends I don't care about money, one big happy 'circle of mooching' as my best man labeled it.

However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Consider perhaps you are not good friends with these people.

Those people are irrelevant. They do that even with their closest friends because they all seem to be intent on not getting screwed. I'd rather share and gift extremely liberally, to the best of my abilities, among my circle of friends and even far acquaintances. Are there freeloaders in economic terms? eh, sure, but a lot of that is income dependent as well. But mostly what goes around comes around and a lot is going around -- velocity of gifting is > than velocity of money which is great. But then again I'm a small-l libertarian socialist.

>However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Technically that's not true. In the cases of con men, social engineers, and manipulators "giving free stuff" is a common psychological tactic to gain leverage over others. I.e. the sub prime mortgage scam bubble of 2008.

There seems to be a correlation between being a CS major and being a Libertarian. Or at least being an HN user and being a Libertarian.

I did this with a recent roommate. I loaned him a couple thousand dollars for furniture and such to get situated in the US, and since I use accounting software to keep track of my finances I find it easier to just issue him an invoice at the end of the month for the remaining debt and any additional transactions that I paid for. If I order food and split it, I charge him 50% on said invoice.

Sometimes he tries to say, "Oh, since I got a pizza last week, you can pay for this Chinese food and we're even", and I have to tell them that it's harder to keep a running ledger in my head than to just go through every transaction once at the end of the month and ask, "Is this a 0%, 50%, or 100% expense?"

I have him pay via ACH into my dedicated 'incoming personal payments' checking account.

This system only works if he also issues invoices for communally-consumed things that he paid for.

I use Splitwise for this and it has been the perfect system for me and my roommate the past 6 months. Small things don't always get added in (like sharing some beers here and there), but most stuff does, and most importantly all of the communal items needed for the apartment. Who ever ends up owing at the end of the month just uses Venmo on there and it automatically zeroes everything out.

Yeah, neither you nor I are statistically significant sample size, but I am surrounded by extremely generous techies.

How does that work with, e.g., a phone conversation? Do they bill you for their time? And if so, at what rate?

Interesting, sounds like they are just in it for money. Because all of the CS people I know have a serious passion for sharing knowledge and are so excited to tell me about the new project they came up with or algorithm they just learned. They also let me borrow electronics all the time :)

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