siberianbear

Probably, the parent is implying that they make a lot of money in overtime, and/or that the "hidden" pension benefit isn't included with the base pay rate.

> DOS was rock solid

Boy, that's not how I remember DOS. I remember playing with all kinds of variants of driver load order in config.sys and passing obscure arguments into himem.sys to avoid odd hardware conflicts and crashes.

I have a laptop bag, but I usually don't bring it and just put my laptop in my backpack.

I have the "Sky Train" bag from Red Oxx and I love it. It's a bit expensive, but it's very well made. I've abused mine a lot over a ten-year period and nothing has broken. The shape and size makes it perfect for overhead bins.

https://www.redoxx.com/sky-train/91019/product

I don't even get why everyone has these roller carry-ons. I have a soft-sided backpack designed specifically for air travel. It always fits in the bin and it's way faster to carry than something that rolls on the ground with wheels. And ditching all the hard sides and wheels makes everything weigh less.

Yeah, it was a typo on my part. I wanted to say something like, "If my idea was clear..."

I can really appreciate your point "When you're an adult, nobody corrects your grammar once it's good enough to be understood." It's true. I speak near-fluent Russian as a second language, but it's hard for me to get better because people are too polite to correct my mistakes. If my idea clear, people don't want to appear impolite.

I can't be too critical: I do the same thing when people speak broken English to me. If the idea they want to express is clear, it seems improper to correct them.

This story reminds me of a quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I've met many people in my life just like your classmate. They're especially common in the real estate industry. You're right, the world is crazy.

This reminds me of the famous quote by Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

In Sacramento, for awhile from about 1988-1992 there were monthly meetups where everyone who had an Atari ST would bring them and play MIDI Maze. We occasionally had so many people that we would make two rings because we exceeded the limit of 16 computers.

I owned two Atari STs at the time, so I was always popular at these events.

I used Airbnb for years, but after a lot of strange experiences like this I was just tired of it. It was just constantly so much grief. And some of Airbnb's policies and customer support was just plain useless or outright hostile.

At one point I realized that if I just stayed in Marriott-branded hotels all the time, I could get platinum status. Now I have it, and I'm much happier with Marriott than I ever was with Airbnb. They give me lots of extra care and free stuff because of my status with the chain. If anything at all doesn't meet my expectation, I just ask them and they always fix it.

Yes, I had that same impression reading that chart. The top marginal tax rate in California is 13.3% and the top federal rate is 37%, so the top total tax on earned income is 50.3%.

This was too funny!

This article was interesting, but the photo in the article is just too much! That seal looks so relaxed, like he doesn't even know he has an eel in his nose and he's just having a relaxing day on the beach.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Some (but not all) of my American credit cards charge an explicit 3% foreign exchange conversion fee on top of whatever exchange rate they give you. It can happen even if the transaction is denominated in US dollars.

Matt Levine [1] is a lawyer and he wrote [2] once that he doesn't think it's a violation of insider trading laws to transact in real estate with insider knowledge:

The insider trading laws apply only to securities markets — even insider trading in commodities markets is mostly okay 2 — and that probably is because of some background expectation of a level playing field in those markets. Nobody expects real estate to be fair; it is not exchange-traded and liquid and fungible; it is just obviously a market where some people know things that others don’t. Insider trading in operation is about theft, not about fairness, but the reason that the law concerns itself with the theft of one particular kind of information — or, rather, with one particular misuse of other people’s information — probably is about fairness.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-22/front-...

Edit: I stand corrected, Matt Levine is a lawyer.

There's an anecdote [1] about Steve Jobs and the original Mac's boot time similar to this story.

One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the most was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple of minutes, or even more, to test memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder. One afternoon, Steve came up with an original way to motivate us to make it faster.

[...]

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

Yeah, that surprised me, too.

At one time in my life, I considered becoming a doctor, and had even started to take some of the required undergraduate coursework required to apply to medical school (organic chemistry, biology, etc.)

I started to talk to doctors about my choice, and nearly all of them advised me not to go into medicine and often went into a long rant about dealing with insurance companies, billing issues and being told how to practice medicine by people with only a high school diploma at an insurance company.

I might be a doctor today if it wasn't for them. I think it was for the best: I found electrical engineering in Silicon Valley to be interesting and highly remunerative.

The tone of this article seems like the writer really has an axe to grind. And several of her points are not clearly morally correct.

I personally believe that the Holocaust happened, but if some clown wants to claim it is on Facebook or somewhere else, I'm in favor of supporting his right to do so. I care about free speech much more than I care about people being offended.

There a more environmentally sound form of disposing of bodies called alkaline hydrolysis [1]

The environmental benefits of alkaline hydrolysis are significant. Its carbon footprint is about a tenth of that caused by burning bodies. Mr. Wilson said liquefaction uses a fraction of the energy of a standard cremator and releases no fumes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/flameless-cremat...

Speaking for myself, I was glad to escape California. Not only because of real estate, but also because of taxation. A top marginal state tax rate of 13.3%? OUCH!

Well, you're not wrong. You're just pointing some inconvenient truths.

1. Most people are incapable of saving for their own retirement, because they either lack the discipline or the skill set to do so.

2. Because of (1), people want the government to take care of it. But government does a mediocre job of most things.

3. Elected politicians have an incentive to get in bed with unions of government employees and screw taxpayers by cleverly mis-evaluating the present cost of future retirement payout streams.

4. Bad actors in the world pray on everyone involved: the employees, the pension funds, the government, individuals, etc, to get management fees from the corpus of retirement programs.

For people outside Silicon Valley or still studying at the university, Google probably seems like an awesome place.

It's just another Silicon Valley bigco. That's especially true now. In the early 2000s, it was probably a very cool place. But all big companies get more awful as they get bigger. I'm sure the bureaucracy and politics there are stifling, like all bigcos.

I was happy at the other companies I worked at. I selected and targeted all the companies I worked at, and Google wasn't one of them. I never answered the voice mails from Google recruiters and never responded to their LinkedIn messages.

When I was living in the United States and studying Russian, I started to read some Russian literature. After reading some short stories by Chekhov, I decided to delve into something harder: Dostoevsky.

I couldn't understand the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary. Dostoevsky has a very eloquent way of writing with very long sentences and complicated grammar, but it's very hard for a non-native speaker to understand.

So, I went to a Russian colleague of mine, who recommended that I try to read "The Master and the Margarita" instead of Crime and Punishment. I found that I could read and mostly understand it, but the plot made no sense.

I told this experience to my Russian teacher, and she laughed uncontrollably. She said that it's true that the grammar in The Master in the Margarita is easier, but you'll never really understand the plot without having lived in the Soviet Union. She said that every element in the story is a jab at some aspect of life or politics from that era.

I continued to stick with short stories by Chekhov and Gogol after that.

If you're not already a tax resident of Portugal and you decide to legally move there, you can apply for a special tax rate as a "non-habitual resident" that gives you a lower tax rate for ten years.

https://www.livinginportugal.com/en/moving-to-portugal/tax-r...

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Dan clearly made some sort of typo in that URL.

"Shorting" a stock means selling it without owning it, essentially owning negative stock. You're betting that it will go down, and then when it does go down, you close your position by buying the stock (to get back to zero shares).

The risk in doing this is unlimited. If you short a stock at $100, and then it goes to $500, you've lost $400.

Your broker doesn't want to take liability for your loss if you're not able to cover it. So your broker will forcibly close your position for you.

Even if your broker doesn't close your position, you might do it yourself to stop losing money.

When a lot of people do this all at once, it's called a "short squeeze" as everyone who was short buys shares to close their short positions. It can make the price go up.

I don't follow Tesla's stock price, but Musk getting on Twitter saying something that could make the stock price go up could (and perhaps did) cause a short squeeze.

Wow, that Swiss A340 video was amazing. The pilots were just so chill. "Let's have some chocolate for the landing" LOL

tl;dr: It looks like there no opportunity for Italian scientists and engineers: they're all moving to Germany and the UK.

I worked at a small company in Silicon Valley that was very successful and became a very large company.

A lot of people did leave when they had the chance.

It surprised me how many people stayed. As another poster here noted, a lot of very senior people stayed who were at or near the VP level stayed. Some of them wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they left. And I think some like the status and power that comes with managing a huge org.

But I was also surprised how many individual contributors who became rich stayed, and just continued to write software or Verilog or whatever. They were bright people, and nobody messed with them because they were well-known and were just allowed to do their own thing.

Watching what people did when they came into a lot of money was an interesting life experience. Hell, watching what I myself did when I came into a lot of money was also an interesting life experience.

When I first came to Silicon Valley I was so excited to be surrounded by so much great technology. I got to play with so much very expensive test equipment: it was like being a kid again. As time went on, it wore me down, and it wasn't so interesting. I encountered a lot of bad actors: the other anecdotes in this HN post sound very familiar. When I had FY money, I left. At that time, I hated my job. I have no interest in writing code or using fancy oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. I don't want to look at another C function as long as I live. And I will never go back to Silicon Valley.