mancerayder

How do you define cost here? The medical cost of the vaccine and nurse time? Or the risk to health? I'd pay for it out-of-pocket, even as an old. But I wouldn't know where.

>The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).

I love it! And posts on HN about Big Ideas and uses corpspeak to justify driving people to long hours. The engineer who's picked up talking points of his employer because he's well-paid and trapped on the spectrum, making it hard to comprehend a life of Play outside of work.

They're fighting higher costs, and data centers use energy, increasing costs. There's no need to make simple things complex - people who aren't engineers or executives with a large equity stake or millions in FAANG money aren't invested in changing the world in the way SV dreams about it.

And it doesn't help that we are "low value capital" to these people.

It's doubled in five years while inflation's gone up by 30+ percent. Where exactly is there to hide? Not gold - that peaked and went down a lot. Let's not talk about BTC, either.

Real estate? You've got taxes on that in the US, it's how our governments can pretend to not tax us as much as in Europe while still taxing us as much as in Europe (property tax goes to schools)

What's left?

And Linux?

What were you trying to tell it to do?

I recently took the risk there by having it run xattr commands to fix some MacOS bug with Tahoe that broke auto update for what seems like all software.

You definitely don't have the (implied) constitutional right to much on an airplane. Why not wear no shirt, a balaclava and hold up a flag above your head - go ahead and try it. As soon as the plans lands, something terrible will happen to you. In some destinations, even worse things.

If you're mid-career it's good. You can get jobs really easily, you have the networking time, you're in demand, they trust you're going to be learning shit quickly, you have the right stuff on your CV.

Late career is a different story. Tech is Up or Out. A lot of people here are off-the-grid contractor types living in LCOL areas, fully remote, with varying degrees of financial comfort. Those people in HCOL areas who got used to expensive lifestyles - sometimes because, let's face it, return to office meant living in a HCOL area, and eventually buying when the rents got tiringly highter - well some of us have choices to make. You can be not wealthy enough to retire, but still trapped in expenses, and seeing how you can pivot to continue the high.

Then the planning begins to where you'll live in a LCOL area.

Some others in early career are really suffering. People who were laid off are having issues at the moment. It's K-shaped.

So enjoy your mid-career bump. Or, you're in the lucky few late-career types with googleable reputations, you accumulated FANG money/shares, and then you're golden.

If they were smart after the ban, they'd hire him for mucho dinero. These corporations are nervous but if they're not stupid they pay out. It's Microsoft, so it's perhaps nof the most progressive when it comes to these things, so who knows if they've realized it.

Rich Beato can finally take a breath! Musicians truly hate the AI generated stuff, I guess in a way that only artists understand. I think it's completely different from AI generated code, in the sense that code is made by code, instead of code making music. People make music.

Run the numbers - mortgage with interest deduction, SALT deduction (property taxes apply), appreciation, add the principal as paying yourself back. Compare it to renting comparable home, with the rent going up with inflation (which in some places is being generous). After a few years, you'd be surprised how the math looks.

And people aren't including the interest deduction on income - up to 750K loan amount worth. This is a form of subsidy that renters are handing over to mortgaged owners.

Stop - have you also accounted for 750K loan amount in mortgage interest tax deduction, and the SALT cap of 40k?

Are we looking at markets where we had massive appreciation in real estate values in the last 5 years? Because while you might say they were outsized and abnormal, the stock stock market was, too. The years of ZIRP made everything nuts.

There are pros and cons to home ownership - this article is both U.S.-centric and focused on the cons.

Obviously maintenance costs are high, maintenance is time-consuming, and transaction costs buying and selling are insane. I'll add one - property tax will turn that high income tax (especially in an expensive blue state like CA or NY) and add a massive additional tax, easily transforming that 35-45 percent of income into 55-60 or more, a math absolutely no one does when comparing taxes with W European ones which are supposedly much higher.

Here are pros and why you should probably buy:

If you want a house in a low density but in demand area, you won't find anything for rent. Because appreciation goes up, because renting gets more expensive every year, because lease renewal every year is a stressful waiting game and decision point, because renters subsidize owners via interest tax deduction.

And most importantly, you are free to do what you want inside your house. Just avoid HOAs.

Pairing bulbs is either working perfectly or is a nightmare. You tape up a wall switch on an older home to 'On.' Some devices use wifi, others want a proprietary device (like Lutron blinds). Google home never hears the same thing twice, despite your best efforts to say things the same way.

You'd think the tech would have matured by now.

That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.

Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.

I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.

300k in SF or NYC is FAR from early retirement unless you live 'frugally' - Manhattan average rents are 5K for 1 bed. You pay city, state and federal tax. Food and alcohol are 30-50 percent higher than Paris. And no one talks about property taxes.

In the US, local and federal taxes plus property taxes are easily 50-60 percent of your income.

Inflation runs higher in NYC than the rest of the country, as well.

I understand - and I think our respective feelings on the matter are deeply tied to where we are geographically. High-cost of living vs low-cost? Jobs nearby versus not so much?

For me - remote jobs seem few and far between, and highly competitive. Stuck locally, I suffer from being forced into commutes, forced into high cost of living situations, and being that I despise high density living/noise and I'm sensitive to crowds, for me remote work is a paradise-like fantasy. I can picture myself working throughout the world exploring new lives rather than being stuck in dystopian city life.

Most of us where I live are "four days a week in the office." No choice. I think what's missing here is the dimension of choice. Some people thrive in noise, others not so much. Sometimes 2 days a week is good, for others 0, for others 5. For some, it might be that they love coming into the office, but want to spend a month in the rainforest. Etc.

Remote versus office requirements are 100% about control.

One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone.

It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.

But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.

That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.

Oh, boy. I guess that means they haven't gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.

Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.

Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.

"You're absolutely right to question that.

Let me restate that correctly. Just facts. No fluff."

If you're doing heavy compound exercises like 3x5, 5x3 squats, you kind of need to wait three minutes in between! Even adding something in between like press or pullups is quite hard on the nervous system.

The people who walk 45m on the treadmill while watching a show, or people who sit around chit chatting, yes... A waste of space.

Things felt a lot more optimistic when I was in high school!

I knew people dropping out to work in tech, back in the late 90s. Even after two recessions, we tech workers with hot and difficult to gain skills always bounced back, and back then indeed older skills (as in older or easy to hire tech stacks) had problems finding new roles.

This time feels different. Is it really?

It feels like it to me, but then I spend my entire existence planning for some sort of scarcity situation and every day I think of what if. I did this before any AI threats, unfortunately for me.

>I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos

My friend, do you see how C-suites, even in our own companies, are talking? Here's one that made headlines all over the business-press, I think it speaks for itself:

May 19th, 2026

StanChart CEO Winters Says AI to Replace "Lower-Value Human Capital"

“It’s not cost cutting; it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital.” Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters delivered a blunt message on the future of the bank’s workforce. Aisha S. Gani explains the growing trend among finance leaders acknowledging the realities of AI technology replacing jobs."

"Thanks for calling that out"? That's what Claude and ChatGPT tell me a few times a week.

You're absolutely right to call that out. Let me restate that with the correct assumptions and that feedback, honestly and directly...

Wouldn't they save an enormous amount of money by getting rid of either you and the token quota, or a bunch of other people to continue paying your salary plus this insane quota?

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

I've just finished watching 'The Capture' which is a UK spy show about AI facial recognition and deep fakes, which takes all of this one step further. While it's fictional, they're show these central command type rooms with big screens that let a group of people on PCs manage automated tracking of people based on criteria they pop in, and various probability statistics of recognizing people. I've always wondered how it looks, all these thousands of camera feeds, when the authorities are searching and monitoring all those feeds.

Another idea: why can't these claim reviewers pass some sort of government or medically-licensed authorization to do this work?