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vecinu

1,433 karma · joined May 24, 2012

I write code, spin pedals and have an obsession with Hi-Fi.
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vecinu··on The bachelor tax – what it costs in taxes to be single
Divorce is way more expensive than your savings. I went through this; you save $12-16k/yr for 10 years and if you invest the difference smartly, it's $300k.

Without a prenup, and most don't cover earnings during your marriage anyway (They're hard to keep updated yearly), you're giving away half in California, which can be over $1M if you're a diligent saver and investor. Then if your spouse is REALLY nasty, you'll owe her spousal support that can be thousands per month, depending on your income (and income POTENTIAL), for the rest of her life (after 10 years of marriage in CA).

Any cost savings are completely nullified by divorce if you're a high earner and almost never make sense. Don't get married for tax savings, marry for other reasons and have the most iron-clad prenup you can afford and get your partner to agree to. I promise you, your future self will thank you.

vecinu··on FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices
I notice this with my Uber cash credit I get from my AMEX Gold card. The prices are always higher.
vecinu··on Apache ECharts
Something's off here. The data appears as "life-expectancy-table.json" but the title refers to Income. Not sure where the mistake is.
vecinu··on IBM and NASA build language models to make scientific knowledge more accessible
This might be a naive question but how does one determine what "best" is for multiple subjects?

Even in your example, physics and mathematics could be curated for "best" when dealing with equations and foundational knowledge that has been hardened over decades. For history, climate change of invasion of Ukraine, isn't that sensitive to bias, manipulation and interpretation? These are not exact sciences.

vecinu··on Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
> Here I am, just fine, a self-made millionaire today.

That says everything about how you view the world. "self-made". Nothing about how your adoptive father contributed, your peers or the entire society you grew up in.

Something else I'd love to get away from is that having money != being a well adjusted individual.

vecinu··on California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses
Property values should not be an investment or retirement fund, it is selfish to think so. Literally, by definition, if you think the value of YOUR home and SOME of your neighbors should increase to price others out, that is selfish.

Housing should not be an investment, period.

vecinu··on California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
OP is not arguing against cars completely, they just have very limited use within high density city centers. Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done.

When you need to go further or out of the city, by all means, jump in your environment-destroying metal cage but you don't need it daily, I guarantee it. Please don't cite extreme exceptions like disabled people or families with 10 kids.

vecinu··on Cystic fibrosis treatment wins Breakthrough Prize
A friend works at Vertex and couldn't tell me for the longest time what the secret sauce was. The FDA approval was the only thing blocking their right to basically print money.

It's awesome people are benefiting from the drug, even if the money extraction schemes are dubious or marginally ethically ok.

vecinu··on California Forever
You should look at home price growth for California in the last 15 years, Irvine isn't even in the top. The Bay Area, parts of LA and San Diego lead the pack in price increases.

You might not be aware because you haven't looked for a home in the last 10 years?

vecinu··on California Forever
> almost any house in irvine is a 10 minute walk from a grocery store and a handful of fast casual restaurants.

How many people actually walk in Irvine? Based on the number of highways and lanes through Irvine, you will have a very difficult time convincing me it's different from most suburbs where you leave your house and jump into a car to do anything.

Putting a "grocery store" or a "handful" of restaurants near a home is useless is they don't want to use that store or restaurant. I end up having to drive 15-30 minutes RT to get to a TJ's or ALDI because the Ralph's where I live is incredibly overpriced and has horrible selection of fresh fruits and veggies.

> It's one of the most popular places right now to move to Where is the data for this claim? The data I see doesn't list OC as growing. [1] The only articles saying Irvine is one of the fastest growing cities is usually local Irvine news sites and they don't even cite any data for the last year. [2]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-05/here-are... [2] https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/orange-county/inside-the-issues...

vecinu··on California Forever
Isn't Irvine full of strip malls, copy/paste corporate restaurants / chains and lack identity or urban planning (With public transit, lots of parks, walk-ability)?

I fail to see why we would hail Irvine as a great city when it's just a money maker for the Irvine company as a generic suburb.

They just happened to develop land that was in high demand due to its proximity to the coast, what else does it have going for it?

vecinu··on Tesla asked officials to redact info of driver-assistance in use during crashes
I wish I could find the other HN comments from the last few years but I have seen your exact comment from different people over the last 2 years.

Why has nothing changed? If so many people are having problems, how is Tesla allowed to continue?

vecinu··on Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption
I have seen some arguments that they don't care about your privacy and it's all right there in the privacy policy if you're willing to read it. A video on the subject [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/r38Epj6ldKU

vecinu··on Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps
Core inflation is going down, just not as fast as other sectors. People losing their jobs is not a hard fact of a recession, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in history.

I'm just indexing and staying happy, worry free, it worked for the last 100 years and I'm sure it'll work for my lifetime.

vecinu··on Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps
I don't think I'm following, you didn't "lose" anything if you didn't sell.

Even if you invested in 2007 at the peak and lost 50% of a 100% S&P500 portfolio by 2009, by now you'd be extremely wealthy, adjusting for inflation.

A $10k investment in 2007 is now worth $27k and that assumes you didn't contribute another penny for 16 years.

vecinu··on Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps
Hot take but I'll bite, what's your rationale? We're only ~9% down from VTI's ATH and what happens now doesn't matter when your investing horizon is 15+ years.
vecinu··on Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years
Super cool trip down memory lane. I remember finding your site eons ago when I was in high school too.

It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!

vecinu··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
I lived in Potrero Hill (I see you misspelled it, are you familiar with the neighborhood?) for over a decade and can tell you it didn't feel safe at all.

Had a bike stolen from my garage with power tools, caught a man with an angle grinder in another garage cutting through locks and threatening my life, mentally ill people yelling in the street and saw a few people with machetes walking around.

I used to go to Whole Foods, to Chez Maman, to the library and the rec center all the time. I moved out in 2020 and will never return, my mental health has improved significantly and I'm not exaggerating. I feel so much better now, it's like a flip switched and I started appreciating the beauty of life and community again...

vecinu··on Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
It's funny because it reminds me of stories my grandparents told me about communism in Eastern Europe where the higher ups would come inspect their factories and the execs would know in advance and prep everything to look perfect.
vecinu··on Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator
Did you bother to browse the entire page? There are videos showing live editing and changing a backdrop. This is a teaser of a live product that is actually working remarkably well.
vecinu··on GPT-4
Why doesn't this work?

Lion ->

<-

Cabbage ->

<-

Goat->

vecinu··on The global housing market is broken, and it’s dividing entire countries
Could you expand on your idea of how taxpayers are subsidizing mortgage rates and downpayments?
vecinu··on New divorce app to help couples split assets in New York without lawyers
Wow...that does sound quite exceptional. My wife got 50% of all my RSUs and all other equity I earned throughout my career. Nothing I could do about it since it was earned during our marriage and that's the law in CA.
vecinu··on New divorce app to help couples split assets in New York without lawyers
> You’re entitled to keep a larger portion of it (as you get a credit for it).

Doesn't this depend on if you have a pre-nup especially in states like CA? I got married super early and had to divide everything equally even though I earned much more than my spouse.

vecinu··on Visa changes chargeback dispute program
I hope I don't come off as rude but do you really not remember spending $1000 on shoes? Basically any transaction over $100 stays in my mind for a while and I never get confused when I see my CC statement.

I guess if you're making $1M/year your threshold is different but I feel like larger enough transactions should still register.

vecinu··on Waymo car swarmed by skaters in San Francisco 'hill bomb'
> "I really have no desire of going back until <50% of you people leave"

There are quite a lot of personal attacks and assumptions in your post so I'm just going to ignore them.

I came from a very safe metro area in Canada and had no notion of elitism as you so randomly assumed about me. When I moved, Canada was a lot more balanced and there was not a large income/wealth gap as it currently exists in the US.

I had no rose colored glasses or impression that because I was "sharing a zip code with billionaires" I would be safe. I took every day as it came and discovered that just existing and living near downtown felt unsafe for me and my family.

The most powerful force around discussions of safety and lifestyle is comparison. When you see multiple places with your own eyes and body, it's a lot easier to compare and you get a sense of what feels right or wrong, for you.

Your entire response is very strange, it might be helpful to reflect where your perceptions, biases and opinions around wealth come from because you threw a small net and ended up empty handed.

vecinu··on Waymo car swarmed by skaters in San Francisco 'hill bomb'
I doubt the OP is joking. I left the Bay exactly for reasons like this, I don't want to become collateral damage due to factors outside of my control that are well documented and happening way too often for my liking.

Even a few years later, it still surprises me that people in the Bay normalize this type of activity but I guess Stockholm syndrome is strong in the average person.

vecinu··on Tesla laying off 229 Autopilot workers, shuttering San Mateo office
> Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling, which involves determining if Tesla’s algorithm identified an object well or poorly, according to one source.

Sounds like product or engineering were not affected.

vecinu··on Peter Thiel-Backed Crypto Lender Vauld Suspends Withdrawals
Some markets were less impacted than others, San Diego for example went down a mere 20% at the trough. Over a longer timeline, housing has appreciated by hundreds of percentage points in SD.
vecinu··on Peter Thiel-Backed Crypto Lender Vauld Suspends Withdrawals
Right, I just tried to simplify the thought experiment to counter the argument that tech and commodities are as important to the consumer as housing is.
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