BadCookie

It’s not hard to afford Bay Area rent if one partner is still employed in tech, especially if they are older and have savings or home equity to cash in on.

The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations.

Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.

In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.

Maybe you aren’t aware, but house prices skyrocketed in many locations (like Idaho and Florida) during the pandemic because of an exodus of Californians who were told that they could keep their high-paying jobs and live almost anywhere. The tide has reversed now.

As for interviews, I have read multiple Hacker News comments from people saying that their solution to rampant AI cheating has been to make interviews in-person again. So I’m not convinced that you’re right about that either…

Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.

Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.

32x earnings is high. 32x revenue is probably insane.

You didn’t ask me, but (aside from the effects of tech and social media) my #1 hypothesis is the rise in single parenthood. Parenting is so hard that I doubt pretty much everyone’s ability to do it well on their own.

It doesn’t seem insurmountable. A simple tax credit that reduces taxable income when someone spends money on journalism could make a real difference.

If you are okay with plastic, Gravitrax is similar, cheaper, and fun. My son and I like to build marble runs together.

I think it is a mistake not to celebrate the holidays. You don’t have to pretend that everything is okay in order to celebrate each other.

I am similar to your daughter in some ways but much older. Lately, I have felt that I have reached a dead-end in my career (though I am still employed).

I have a few thoughts that might be useful. One is the concept of ikigai: finding the intersection of what you enjoy, what you are good at, and what the world needs. For a long time, it seemed like building software hit all three marks for me, but in the last couple of years, it no longer seems to hit the last one very well.

When I was younger, my reaction to difficult things was to simply try harder. I’d throw myself at the problem repeatedly until it yielded. That can be the right thing to do, but with age I have gained enough wisdom to realize that sometimes it’s better to go after the lower-hanging fruit.

I am not suggesting that your daughter give up, but if I were you, I would help her identify a back-up plan. Help her get excited about the possibilities in case plan A does not work out. If she feels that she has other options, she may regain her confidence regardless of what happens.

Oh, and make sure that she knows how much you love and respect her no matter her job situation.

Merry Christmas.

P.S. Cold applying is probably a waste of time. Too many people are applying using AI bots. Find ways to network with real people if possible. Maybe contact career services at MIT?

Maybe, but the typical person I have worked with in this industry is too smart to do something for 10 years and not learn much during that time.

I am afraid that this “1 year of experience 10 times” mantra gets trotted out to justify ageism more often than not.

And the biggest problem of all: They expect it to be free.

It comes down to who is liable for the edge cases, I suspect. Adobe will compensate the end user if they get sued for using a Firefly-generated image (probably up to some limit).

Getting sued occasionally is a cost of doing business in some industries. It’s about risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.

Getty and Adobe offer models that were trained only on images that they have the rights to. Those models might meet Netflix’s standards?

It’s better than “RIFed,” at least.

What about requiring new employees to sign non-disparagement agreements? Maybe companies are getting “smarter” and requiring employees to agree to not say anything negative about their employer from day 1 … not sure about the legality here.

The ad load isn’t heavy to convince you to subscribe. It’s heavy because many readers use ad blockers, and the publisher wants to stay in business somehow.

Hijacking the back button, on the other hand, is just rude.

No, it’s not. Yes, we have Medicaid in the U.S., which makes everything free for the poor, but GP is saying that effectively everybody (including the not-so-poor) can get this level of care in Hong Kong. Definitely not true in the U.S.!

Pricing transparency also does not exist here as GP is claiming it does in Hong Kong. I am supposed to get certain imaging tests done every year, and I never know how much those will cost me until after I have already done them (in the U.S.). Maybe there is some way to get a non-binding estimate ahead of time, but I have never received such a thing and am not even sure it is possible. So I can’t easily “shop around”—or if can, tell me how because I (and I think most people) don’t know how.

I most certainly cannot pay $300 to see a specialist the same day in the U.S. I would have to pay that much to see my GP after waiting 6 weeks despite my employer paying more than $20k/year to insure my family. To see a specialist, I would have to wait a few months and probably pay $1-2k for one visit, not counting any tests or imaging that is ordered.

The description of Hong Kong’s system sounds amazing if true.

I grew up in a blue collar family. One thing that Dems tend to overlook, I think, is that most people do not want to receive charity. They want to be able to afford things on their own through their own hard work. It hurts their pride to receive anything that could be construed as "welfare." It makes them feel like they, and their country, are failing. So I'm not sure if the Medicaid/ACA approach to healthcare is a particularly good one from a purely psychological standpoint. (Some folks are scared to accept Medicaid because of estate recovery, too.)

In my state, a full 1/3 of the population is on Medicaid ... which seems extremely high for a program originally intended for the poor.

From a financial standpoint, it doesn't seem like either party has succeeded at significantly slowing the growth in healthcare costs overall. How much more can it grow without breaking? The Dems haven't proposed a solution either.

This reminds me of a case report that I ran across about a boy on the spectrum whose toe-walking gait was resolved via lymphatic drainage massage: https://web.archive.org/web/20200506111344id_/https://www.cl...

I am not sure if anyone has ever tried to reproduce this result on a wider scale.

Maybe not restaurants, but other small businesses import directly from China. Ever heard of Alibaba?

“Difficulty accessing healthcare” brings to mind doctors and hospitals being too far away—a real concern for lots of rural Americans, especially the ones who cannot drive. Or perhaps doctors are nearby, but wait times are too long. This is also a real issue. I have seen wait times for primary care doctors creep up to 4+ months in my area.

So I just wanted to highlight that even if those problems don’t exist, you still have the scary unknown cost question that might be the largest impediment of all.

I’m not sure if “difficulty accessing healthcare” captures the whole problem. Even if you live next door to a hospital, you still don’t know how much it will cost you if you check yourself in. Sure, there is some theoretical maximum out of pocket, but are you certain that the hospital is in network with your insurance? Are you sure that every provider you will see and every test or scan you have done will be treated as in network?

I once had a doctor order a test at a hospital that he assured me was in network. The hospital got pre-authorization from my insurance company for me to have the test done. I had the test done. My insurance company then denied me any benefit because they said afterward that I went out of network … and there are millions of stories like mine.

Not to mention that even if you manage to stay in network, lots of people cannot afford even the max out of pocket that creeps up faster than inflation every year.

I have had some family members decide that they will just accept that they are going to die in an emergency situation because “if it’s my time, it’s my time” and they don’t want their life savings to get vacuumed up by some hospital administrators. This is not merely theoretical… one person in my life is dead now who probably would have lived if he had felt comfortable seeking medical care.

Children kind of are scarce, though? Most countries aren’t reproducing at replacement levels. Were that to continue forever, the human population would go to zero.

School districts around me are closing schools because there aren’t enough kids to fill them.

The disability part of Social Security is very much like insurance…

I agree that the video I shared should have included those words. But the words do not change the meaning of the gesture, which is very uniquely recognizable and important historically. Doing this gesture during WW2 in the U.S. would’ve led to Elon getting arrested at a minimum, or maybe just shot on the spot based on what I know of this time period. (I would love to hear the opinions of actual historians though.)

Then Elon did not apologize or make any attempt to explain it away, and in fact made jokes about it.

Imagine that you were a neo-Nazi. Would you take this gesture and his lack of apology as a sign that Elon is on your side?

This is also not the first time that Elon has done something like this. His Twitter history is not something I would be proud of.

Anybody who thinks it was accidental seems extremely gullible to me. Nobody does a Nazi salute by accident. A “my heart goes out to you” gesture looks absolutely nothing like this gesture for normal folks.

I think yostrovs was talking about Musk, not Trump. And calling someone who did two Nazi salutes in front of a crowd “Hitler” is maybe not as unfair as you are making it out to be. My guess is that Musk did it for outrage purposes rather than because he is an actual Nazi, but it’s hard to know really.

Video in case you somehow have not seen the incident I am referring to: https://youtu.be/gDkuwRx14hQ

Wow. Every request is AI related! I thought maybe the systems programming one wasn’t… but alas, I was mistaken.

No? I see under 10% of the HN front page stories being related to U.S. national politics at the moment, which feels very low compared to Reddit and Facebook for me (which are well over 50%, but I realize that each person sees something different potentially).

I have wondered why there is so little discussion of these things on HN compared to other social media.

Perfectly willing, yes. I believe in making decisions for the right reasons regardless of the eventual outcome.

I wouldn’t support her putting her retirement savings all on black either, even though she might win plenty.

Same. I own a mix of ETFs, some from Vanguard and some not. I will be even more inclined to buy Vanguard ETFs going forward.

I am so, so tired of trying to explain to my retired mother why she should not buy any more bitcoin … with money that she really cannot afford to lose.

There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process.

I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually).

On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.