programmertote

> Other aspects of the myth must be stripped away. The Buddha’s father Suddhodana was probably not a king. In an early story, the Buddha remembers attaining a meditative state as a child, while sitting under a tree as his father worked nearby. Are we to imagine that the King of the Sakyas had to work his own fields?

Interesting. I grew up in a Theravada Buddhist family in SE Asia. What I read from the texts available to me was that the father of Buddha was at a ceremony that celebrates the start of the season of growing rice, so as a king, he joined in.

Indeed! As she was applying for residency programs, my wife briefly entertained the thought of becoming a radiologist because boy, they made a load of money for 8am-2pm work! We both are 100% self-aware that healthcare industry has a lot of bad actors including doctors, pharma companies, hospital admins, lawyers and pretty much everyone involved.

If residents cry about 60+ hours/week of work during the first year residency, I don't pity them much. First of all, the hours aren't really that bad even for a hospital in metro NY area (speaking from my wife's residency experience so far). In our home country, residents have it worse; my wife had night float EVERY THREE DAYS over there. In the US, it's at most four times a month! Second of all, the "grueling hours" are for the first year of residency (in fact, during those hours, there's not much happening especially in night floats, so you can get decent sleep) and after that, things got much, much better. Sacrificing just one year and paying exorbitant exam/school fees--in the region of ~$250K total--to make $250K as starting salary is TOTALLY WORTH it. If any of the doctors complain that they are debt-laden, they are either fiscally irresponsible or are simply exaggerating. They can repay $250K debt + interest in less than 5 years if they really want to. Of course, it's much easier to use these (debt and hours/years sacrificed) as excuses to justify their pay.

If the doctors are true and honest, they should be advocating AMA to relax the residency and medical school requirements. No more than five years total (no undergrad necessary) is needed to treat garden variety problems. Then each specialty/fellowship can take however long it needs to take. But AMA and its leechers (KAPLAN, ECFMG, USMLE, FSMB, etc.) won't allow that because they make loads of money from exam and preparation fees. Everything about healthcare is business now and whether it is good or bad depends on one's moral compass (and how strongly one feels about capitalism).

Exactly the way it works in a SE Asian country I grew up. The private and public hospitals have price quotes on different procedures and it's for everyone to see. The comments above using Boglehead's quote as a justification of why medical pricing has a lot of variance is mostly a lie. My wife, who is a doctor trained in our home (SE Asian) country and is doing her residency in the US, and I were just laughing at the fact that it's much, much more expensive to get an X-ray here in the US than it is in our country (which costs ~$4 at most). Here, there's no price list for procedure as simple as taking an X-ray.

Hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and pharma companies are all scamming the US population. Every evening, my wife and I watch TV (WNBC to be exact) and we see many commercials from hospital networks, insurance companies and drug companies. This reminds us everyday that medicine and healthcare is commercialized to the max in this country and the only way from here is downhill. We both don't hope to retire in the US; when we grow old, we will go back to our home country and live there in the hope of getting much more affordable (and yet, of more or less similar quality) medical treatments.

The same goes for all UNGOs and NGOs that operate around the world for various humanitarian causes. I have interned at places like World Vision, World Concern, and Save the Children; my sister has worked for almost three years at a well-known French NGO that operates in my home country (in SE Asia). A few other people I know work for various non-profit orgs like UNICEF and UNOCHA etc.

We notice one consistent thing: these purpose of organizations/institutions isn't as simple as "serve the best for the native population that they are supposed to save from natural/economic/humanitarian disaster". The need (say, for regional/program directors) to find the next funding to keep the project going trumps EVERY OTHER altruistic purpose. Also, these program directors don't stay for longer than 2-3 years (let alone getting to know the native population they are trying to help) and most of them are always trying to get in on the next action/conflict in another country, and/or to simply move to a better pasture (a more developed country). The management in these non-profit orgs--such as save the children, world vision, UNICEF--are always whitewashed (I do not intend this to come out negatively, but have to keep it real here) and they rarely promote native workers to have a say in things that matter (although native workers are the ones who have to do the day-to-day, on-the-field hard work). On Facebook, there has been a growing resentment by native workers toward these 'foreigners of ruling hierarchy' that work for non-profits (while taking up most of the salary+benefits and wasting donation money). I don't know how far it will go and am interested to see it out.

Both me and my fiance (now wife) are millennials as well. I hate the ring culture and all the wedding rituals (spending so much money to please others) surrounding it. In fact, I don't even believe in marriage in traditional sense (like going to courtroom to sign on a government issued certificate, which only applies to legal realms)

My fiance, whom I believe is fairly reasonable and frugal in all aspects considered, also learned (thanks to the movie, Blood Diamond) that diamonds are not worth the price and unethical. But she still wanted me to spend some amount on rings. So I had to buy decently priced wedding bands (cost about $1700 each). Otherwise, I am sure my fiance wouldn't be too happy (thinking that I married her for cheap). I really was surprised when I first heard my fiance complaining about me not planning to buy rings for our wedding. The marketing and brainwashing of women about rings and wedding culture really work.

To add to above comment, WHO recommendation is "no more than 6 teaspoons (25 grams) of added sugar per day for women and 9 teaspoons (38 grams) for men" [1]

[1] https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overcon...

So it's real. Thanks for confirming my experience!

A bit tangential. But I have posted what seems to be a shady practice by Amazon's Prime Video.

A few days ago, I was watching Goodnight Mommy (2014) on Prime video (I'm a prime subscriber). I stopped before I finished the movie and went to sleep. But this evening, I decided to resume the movie, but Prime wants to charge me $3.99 to rent it.

This is not the first time I have noticed this. There were a couple of other movies that I returned to watch in a matter of a couple of days and Prime decided to start renting it.

What's worse, a couple of days after seeing them asking for $3.99 to rent that movie, the video became available again for free for me to watch!

I feel like it could either be coincidental (i.e. Prime taking the movie off for rental) or by design. Regardless, I lost my faith in Prime a little after repeated experience like that.

I think it's household, so maybe multiply by the number of average people in a household (say 2.6 is US average household size, so we can say 1 out of 26K owns $111m)?

I'm a bit confused as to what 'tax unit' mean here. Is that the amount of tax (in monetary unit like USD) one is supposed to pay if s/he hits certain percentage of wealth class? Thanks in advance for the reply!

Maybe a bit tangential, but I have been having a difficult time using Google Sheets lately in Firefox (like starting about 2-3 months ago). I keep track of my expenses (like groceries) in Google Sheets and always use Firefox to do data entry. Nowadays, Firefox browser freezes for a minute or two when I load/modify cells in Google Sheets.

I only have one extension, 'muBlockOrigin', installed in Firefox and have been using that for many years, so I'm sure the extension is not getting in the way of loading Google Sheets. So that leads me to believe that Google is probably supporting less and less of Firefox.

I grew up in a third world country in SE Asia and moved to the US for college. One thing that astounds me about public workers in US is that they are super rude and entitled, while seemingly having poor work ethics.

I take MTA subway every week day and at least once a weekend. On weekends, you'll see workers repairing or doing maintenance on tracks because .... Hurricane Sandy (circa 2012) apparently destroyed the infrastructure. I mean I moved to NYC in 2016 and that maintenance has been going on every weekend since then (probably it started even before 2016). Some of the trains will not run or will skip over some local stops and it really inconveniences millions of commuters every weekend. The trains are supposed to slowly move around the areas worker are 'in action' (I read somewhere that it's because a few worker died by being hit by moving train, so they now require trains to move very slowly while blaring horns to warn workers ahead; I still felt that's unnecessary unless there's a clear distinction between which line workers operate on and as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines. Anyway, enough about that). While the trains move slowly, I see a lot of workers simply just sitting around or doing nothing.

The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.

No wonder these public projects take years to finish and have budget overrun. No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.

Ditto. Nowadays, I found that it's easier to just go straight to HN comments and determine if I should spend time reading the articles posted here. :) Of course sometimes, I end up spending more time reading comments, but at least, I feel like I am better informed to judge the articles if I decide to read them after reading the comments here.

You know, I might one day end up sharing her my perspective. I just need to phrase it in a nice, non-condescending way. Thank you for the encouragement.

Just a personal anecdote. I was born in a family of Theravada Buddhist parents. My late dad was an avid meditator. He'd go on week-long retreats to meditate at least a couple of times a year, and my mom also does similar. I tried meditating a little and gave up because I personally found that I am not able to stick to a routine (like meditate every day for 15 minutes). As I grow old, I became an atheist and read a lot of philosophy. I picked up stoicism and parts and pieces of everything I liked from reading. I use them to be self-aware and always try to see things as if they are impermanent. That really helps me calm down in stressful situations and be content with my life in a lot of ways. I do not meditate because I don't have the discipline, but I feel like I found my inner peace and live a pretty content, minimalist life.

I have a friend from home country who works in wall streets. She went to Princeton and is pretty high up there in management echelon. She has a fierce and competitive personality. She would always encourage me to go on meditation retreats in MA (Massachusetts), and she goes there pretty often. She also goes to a meditation group who meet near Times Square every few weeks. But you know what, I found her life to be miserable. She has had at least two mental breakdowns that I know of. She is always inquisitive of what I am doing, what job I have, how much I make at the moment whenever I see her. In my mind, I wanted to tell her, "Sister (a way of addressing someone older with respect in my culture), you're always stressed out and need meditation therapy because you are always worried about what/how others are doing. Meditation wouldn't help you much if you keep doing this." But of course, I don't want to spoil our friendship, so I never told her that.

I think I see a lot of meditation posts in HN because people here are chasing a lot of things at the same time. In other words, people here tend to be over-achievers and ambitious. I am not one, and I'm okay without meditation. I always try to take middle-path (that is the core of Buddhist teaching from my understanding) if I can; limit my wants and only try to fill my essential needs; try to always judge myself as a human (with needs/wants) first and then from a third person's point of view (to be self-aware so that I can control myself when I'm too upset/having a bad day); and in general, I just try to reduce as much "ah-ku-tho" (bad karma including greed, envy, anxiety, anger, etc.) as I can from my daily life.

Hope this lengthy post is interesting to some.

I have been looking for a entry point to start learning containerization and other fancy, related tools that I've been reading on HN in the past couple of years. I mostly write backend code/scripts, so I'm very new to dev ops stuff.

The immediate need for me is to package up a C#/.NET web app and its components (DB, etc.) into a container so that I can deploy it on any big-name cloud provider (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud). Now after reading through the comments in this HN post, I am not sure if I should choose Docker or something else. If you have any suggestion, I would love to learn. I'm more than happy to provide you with feedback and such (even for free) if I can learn from your tutorials. Thank you.

Thanks for sharing this! Besides examples shown here [http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/examples/], is there another resource for DC.js where someone who is new to both D3.js and DC.js can check out the demos and source code like Highcharts demo here [https://www.highcharts.com/demo]?

I've distanced myself from politics, so I do not know much about what other things Andrew Yang stands for. But I have to agree with him on the aforementioned point about moving people to higher ground; I wish there is some think tank type city/urban planning group that is devising ways to engineer people to move to 'safer' places if climate change turns to worse.

Aside from buying physical gold at a refinery, is there a place to buy gold from the equities market? Sorry if this question sounds naive/ridiculous. If it's in my country, people would go to gold/jewelry shops and buy gold. In the US, I'm not sure if it's the case. Thank you.

Could you elaborate on this a bit more? How could one gain anything from buying negative yielding bond?

Not just in America, but in SE Asia as well. My gf grew up in one of the largest cities on coastal area in our home country in SE Asia. Her city got flooded every year for third year in a row now whereas it wasn't the case before then. This year is the hardest one among three; the water rises up to chest level and lives were lost.

I worry that poor countries like my home country, which has not much resource to migrate people in mass, will face serious issues in the near future. Having said that, I also believe in the resilience of the people there. They have been through military dictatorship and whatnot, so I have faith that they will survive albeit with huge cost of lives and property...

Climate change will disturb world's political and economic systems, and I hope (and kind of believe) that the humanity can survive through this ordeal. In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, and the best we can do is to do our individual parts to mitigate the effects and come up with ways to cope with it the best we can.

It is already happening. NYU Langone has been pushing hard on people to 'see' the doctors online for small stuff like allergies and fever. I wouldn't be surprised if this practice eventually extends to replacing doctors with a semi-automated (human-computer based) system .

For what is worth, a physician assistant can diagnose quickly (and they can be assisted with a ML/rule-based diagnosis system that is trained on something like "Pocket Medicine: The Massachusetts General Hospital", which is what most doctors in training use as a handbook) and escalate the difficult ones to the specialist doctors.

This a hundred times! The shortage is real and urgent. My gf, who is in her second year of a low-tier residency program, received many offers from various hospitals promising her $300K/year to work for them. This is well known among residents that once you survive residency (which is not a high bar to begin with), you will make at least $250K/year.

Finally, someone said this. It's very rare to see putting some blame on doctors for such exorbitant medical prices in the US. I have made several comments about that on HN describing similar observation that I found. A recent example was when I went to see a doctor for ear infection. She put a otoscope in my ear, looked at it for one minute, prescribed me some anti-bacterial, and wrote up $250 for the service. The first time I came to the US, the same thing happened (I have had ear infection occasionally). I went to a hospital in NJ because my host family at the time drove me there. I didn't have insurance and they sent me to the ER department. I was charged $500.

In the US, the journey to become a doctor is made unnecessarily complicated and once people become doctors, they do gatekeeping and make sure it's equally as hard for others to become one. But the reality is that the physicians who treat garden-variety diseases can be trained much less expensively. No wonder physicians make loads of money while complaining about their massive student loan. My gf is a medical resident; my host parents in the US are both doctors; I have so many doctors as acquaintances; and I know that what they do is NOT even remotely difficult in terms of intellectual demand (only physically tiring and emotionally draining sometimes when you have to deal with difficult patients). I, as a programmer, would switch my salary with them in a heartbeat (regret leaving medical school in after second year in my home country, though I hated it at that time because of the sheer amount of rote memorization one had to do) and I do believe what I do everyday requires at least equally tasking mental load than what doctors do.

I won't be surprised if 'imaginary friend' thing is probably tied to specific culture/regions. I grew up in a SE Asian country and there, we never heard of kids talking to imaginary friends. I myself grew up only imagining that I was fighting with robots, cars, machines, etc. When my sister played, she pretends she's selling some stuff like food to us (my brother and I). I also used to imagine that I am superman or someone who can fly. That's about it. Never imagined having an imaginary friend who I talk to regularly, and never heard of my friends or any family members saying it's normal to imagine like that.

As I am now in my 30s, I think of ways to design different room and land layouts for my imaginary apartments, houses, island, etc. That really helps me fall asleep quick (as a side benefit).

Exactly! Medical training in the US is unnecessarily long. The med students don't need 4 years of undergrad studies on top of another 4 years of med school. In my home country, 5 years of med school and 2 years of residency is sufficient to train a competent generic physicians (not brain surgeon). Physicians from my country, when they came over to the US to be trained in the residency programs here, found that the medical exams and residency training to be not that difficult (it is extremely difficult to get into one because they are foreigners, but once they get in, almost every one of them become multi-millionaires by their 40s).

My gf externed at a hospital just outside of LA in California. The attending physician there earn ~300K/year for a total of 14 days of work per month. She met two physicians (both from my country again), who work at two hospitals near that area as attendings; they go to one hospital for one week; then work at another the week after; and the cycle repeats. Each of them makes easily >$500K/year (one of them said so to my gf).

Despite majority of Americans are led to believe by doctors, born and trained in the US, that they are the most hardworking folks out there doing 70-hours/week shifts, it is simply an exaggeration. Sure there are some outlier residency programs that made its first or second year residents work maybe 60-hours/week, but 70 to 80-hours? I know so many former and current residents in a the biggest metro area in the US (and another one who just finished her residency at JHU), and asked them about their working hours. NONE of them had to work that much. The average for first year residents is ~50 hours. Then it drops off to normal 40-hours/week starting second year and third years.

I share the same thoughts. That's why I even wonder how data scientists and UX/UI folks, who work at Netflix, feel like when their recommendations to the management are not heeded by the latter. Maybe Netflix data scientists have a hard time finding useful insights out of the trove of data they have.

Second this! My gf used to do part-time work (before she started her residency) for a couple of doctors doing mostly data entry works (to eClinicalWorks and whatnot). She would always tell me how these doctors instructed her to add more diagnosis codes so that they can get paid more (esp. from medicaid/medicare patients).

My host family father is a doctor in the US. He said to me once something like, "Be prepared to be scammed by people whether it is a brain surgeon or a carpenter. Never ever trust the original price they quote on you and be critical of their output."

Have you seen how pharma reps treat doctors? I have. Hundreds of dollars worth of dinners/lunches (one of the dinners my gf and I were invited to, it served unlimited Wagyu beef for bbq; of course, we had to sign in before the dinner). I am disgusted by how cozy the relationship between pharma companies and docs are.

The more I talk to and observe doctors, pharma and healthcare industry in general, the more I lose respect to the parties involved (of course, there are a few respectable professionals, but they are a minority because of the sheer amount of money to be made in that industry).

That is true. As a side note, I also empathize with the cries from citizens of the US who have been residing here since they were born and have been facing competition from global economy and migration.

But I think that is going to be the norm going forward (unless we come up with a better alternative to capitalism); none of us are promised abundant freedom and opportunity unless we strive and work hard to take it. In other words, prosperity does not come easy in this competitive age...

I see the trend in my coworkers at a big-four ad tech firm as well. At least a couple of them have gone home in the last six months (one of them had her H1B approved less than a year ago as well; and another one already is nearing her STEM OPT extension of 18 months).

I came to the US in mid 2000 to study at a fairly well-known liberal arts college (with full scholarships). I worked at a start-up in SF after graduating in late 2000--earning a decent wage of 72K/yr at that time. The CEO didn't want to go through the trouble of applying for H1B for me, so I--at the end of 18 months' OPT STEM extension; after ~2.5 years of working at that start-up---had to apply for a PhD program and started it in 2010's to keep myself in legal status. I finished my PhD in less than 5 years, and joined my current company with OPT (an extension of F1 student visa for practical training in one's major that s/he graduated from) earning low six-figure salary. When my company applied my H1B visa in 2016, it received request for evidence (the USCIS asked me to prove more that my work--data engineering--is related to computer science, which is what I studied my PhD on. I wrote up 3 pages of explanation and finally got it approved in late 2016. Because I worked pretty hard, I was able to convince my company to apply green card for me. But because of the more stringent regulations applied by Trump administration (and partly because my company acquired standard--not premium--service from the law firm that is working on my case), even after 2 years of the process, I am still at the very first step of the application process where the company is waiting for the department of labor (DoL) to provide prevailing wage determination (pretty much stating how much average worker with my salary is earning in the region where I work). I cannot move jobs when this process is pending because my H1B is tied to my employer and employers that are willing to sponsor employees green card aren't that plenty.

If I want to go back and visit my old and widowed mom in my home country, I would have to go through the interview process at the US embassy of my home country to get a new H1B stamp on my passport (the stamp expires within a year of issued date; some countries, such as India, have better deal with the US and their citizens usually get stamps valid for like 5 years or so if I remember correctly). It carries the risk that I might be denied either by the embassy or the port of entry immigration officer (none of the three that I have met so far treated me nicely--in fact, two of them were quite rude--despite me being courteous and nice to them) when I re-enter the US with H1B visa, not to mention that the cost of renewing the visa costs about $400. So, the ability to go back to home to revisit my mom as frequently as I like (without much hassle) AND the freedom to move to another job are why I really want to get permanent residency.

This is a common path for someone who goes through legal (hardcore) means to become a permanent resident in the US. I only put up with such extremely long journey to become a green card holder because my home country is not China. If it were China, I would be back there by now (I said the same to my departing coworkers). There are easier (in terms of effort/time required) ways like marrying a citizen; seeking asylum (but most of the asylum seekers are doing so for economic reason, meaning they are mostly fake although the success rate of getting approved in democrats administrations are quite high); winning Diversity Visa lottery; and having an immediate blood-relative who submitted application for your green card a decade ago. But none of them are eligible for me or I'm not interested in playing pretend-asylum seeker or paying a US citizen to marry me temporarily.

Throughout the years I've been in the US, I worked hard; paid all my taxes; never even have a minor violation such as traffic citation; donated and volunteered at various charities; donated blood more than a dozen times; etc. I thought I did pretty well as a good, law-abiding, immigrant-wannabe. During the ~16 years, I have experienced quite a few (at least a handful of times that I can recall--including being mocked with 'ching chong ling long' by a panhandler, who was trying to sell me a rap CD in metro area) obvious discriminatory abuse from random strangers (I live in a big metro area).

I am writing this in detail so that I hope HN readers would realize that it is not an easy route for many of the legal immigrants like myself. Sure some of the shady companies abuse H1B, but majority of H1B workers had to go through a pretty rough route to get their H1Bs. If you ask me, I would totally streamline the H1B system so that the companies are required to pay above the average salaries for H1B hires; H1B hires aren't tied to the employers; getting an H1B approved does not require law firms (quite expensive) and a lot of red tape (like in some countries, the wannabe H1B worker can apply for it her/himself); and more importantly, H1B holders (regardless of their country of origin) can enter and leave the US for either business or personal trips unlimited times without much restriction. Then I really do not have a need for green card because my goal is to eventually go back to my home country and retire there in my late 50s. Life in the US, in my opinion, is a lot more stressful than it should be for a developed nation (worrying about healthcare affordability tops the list for me).