What’s the hacker news angle on this article? I was happy to discuss it on other sites this morning, but it seems like a purely political article without any unique appeal to Hackers.
I believe most of the major (and some of the minor) newspapers offer a SecureDrop instance to transfer confidential information.
So I would send the entirety of the information to every newsroom that could receive it, then pray that I: A) was not the only initial recipient of the Epstein drop and B) that the information I received doesn't contain any content that could be uniquely identified to me.
Afterwards I would sit down and have a long think about how my life got to the point where Epstein is communicating with me personally.
It's not clear to me that free software is any more essential to a free society than libraries are. Which is to say, it's a clear public good but that's not a compelling reason to position it as a requirement for a free society. I would very much appreciate if you could expand on why it is childish to believe otherwise.
Look, there's free software that I absolutely love like Vim, but unless things have drastically changed in the past 12 months many open source "alternatives" trail their paid alternatives in features and ease of use. I would choose open source applications if they could demonstrate a superior experience, but I'm unwilling to jump over hurdles for promises of quality that have yet to materialize.
For instance, I agree that Adobe's model is just awful, but Procreate is miles ahead of Gimp so I'd rather give those devs thirty bucks as a one time fee over using free software that is less enjoyable or expedient for my work. That's the crux of it really: for most people computing is a means to an end so it makes sense that users optimize their choices around results rather than ideals about the future of computing.
Also, what you've described doesn't sound like a better economy at all from where I'm sitting. I love not being a sole proprietor or part of a small dev shop. It's great being able to go home on a Friday and know that if anything comes up over the weekend that someone else will handle it. It's equally great knowing that I have the resources of a large company and the combined expertise of a massive pool of employees. I would certainly be less happy as a consultant, independent developer, or entrepreneur.
I’m not the grandparent commenter, but my total compensation this year is roughly the same, so I thought I’d chime in with my savings:
$28.6k - 401k contributions & match
$112k - RSUs after tax
$14k - Monthly emergency fund contributions from paycheck (yearly total)
~$16k - Bonus after tax
My expenses really haven’t increased in line with the compensation. The picture would look different if I had a family, but I’m in my late 20s. I suppose I could eat high quality sushi daily, but I’ll settle for weekly.
You'd also have to go by a pseudonym or a perspective partner might google you and ruin the whole charade. At that point your behavior is fairly duplicitous, which is hardly a solid foundation for one of the most meaningful relationships of your life.
We don't have any indication that the OP took any form of flight to get to the coral. There is not enough detail within that post to shame them for their carbon footprint, and such ire would be better directed at the ~100 companies that are responsible for 70% of emissions.
edit: and for the record, I'm one of those "new grads" making a self-admittedly absurd amount of money for what honestly amounts to a relatively meaningless contribution to society. Yea, I take the salary (and try to donate a good bit of it), but it still makes me feel uneasy that I'm being paid this much in the first place.
I'm sorry, how was I supposed to read that? If someone tells you that they lack experience, it is entirely within the pale to comment on or draw conclusions from their lack of experience.
And no, I do not want to measure your genitalia. That doesn't have any place on Hacker News.
I saw somewhere else in the thread that you yourself are a new grad, so I'll chalk this up to lack of experience but on sufficiently large products it is trivial to make incremental changes that will produce more value then your salary. In my own career I saved a big tech company 250k in reoccurring costs with a 9 month project I completed as a junior. Yes, that number is a rounding error for a large company but the value is clear.
Additionally, perhaps you have never built a team before, but the value of a potential employee extends beyond their year-to-year output. If, for example, I have great confidence that a currently junior hire will output ~$1M of value over a four year period than I am willing to overpay that first year as they grow and develop.
This isn't going anywhere interesting and I am uninterested in continuing the conversation further. Have a nice day :)
(There is a certain irony to me about this back and forth. A large portion of my personal time is spent volunteering in an organization that agitates for unions and other forms of direct action aimed at tackling the gross inequity of this society head-on. You're clearly keyed in to a real and present problem, but rather than suggest any solutions you've decided to whinge ineffectively about... developer salaries?)
22 and 23 year olds making $200k+ a year? For doing what, exactly? Contributing 0.001% of the codebase to an app that sells advertisements?
It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.
You appear to be doubling down on this with your recent comment.
Why so defensive
Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.
These salaries don't come from thin air, they're constrained by the market rate at which engineers can be hired and retained. It's unfairly reductive to say that the engineers aren't contributing value since they work in ads. We work in all sorts of fields from the frivolous, like consumer electronics, to the decidedly less so like self-driving.
If the discrepancy between engineering salaries and research/teaching/nursing salaries is bothersome then perhaps the blame should be placed on the economic environment that has produced this result, not the twenty-somethings that are accepting great compensation.
I love this question. The information density and longevity of old forums is hard to replicate on Reddit, Discord, or Facebook groups.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/index.php recently. It’s THE forum for modular synthesis in all forms and for me it really scratches the hacker/musician/tinkerer itch.
This isn't representative of my personal experience nor my peer/friend groups' in tech. Anecdata: of the ~5 senior engineer friends I have at large tech companies only one of them consistently works much more than 35 hours a week.
I was actually really heartened to see this article on HN because slow mornings have been life changing for me. Spending 3 quiet hours in the morning on my own pursuits has been wildly mood elevating. Plus, I usually use one of those hours to read about tech (although HN is banned from my morning hours). Five hours of study a week is easily ~240 hours of spaced repetition even if you miss a few weeks, and I would bet good money that it's more studying than the vast majority of my coworkers.
It's a shame when the crowd noise overwhelms the system at Shiru. I've found that the sweet spot for dropping in to be around 2pm Sunday. Happy bartenders, quiet patrons, good music.
You’ve gotten some pretty solid advice already, and echoing other comments it’s not a dumb question at all.
From a software perspective I’d also recommend Ableton, it strikes a fantastic balance between providing an intuitive workspace and letting the user shape the environment to their preferences.
That said if you want to make music, software/hardware is the smallest part of the process.
For a beginner I’d recommend learning the basics of music theory and synthesis, and then spending a lot of time starting and finishing tracks in a limited environment.
If you enjoy your iPad, I really recommend Auxy. The app gives you just enough freedom to explore your ideas, while being streamlined enough that you won’t waste hours twiddling knobs on effects chains. Plus it can export to Ableton if you want to flesh out your tracks at a later date.
Ableton actually has a great resource for beginners[1], as well as a good resource for the basics of synthesis[2]. If you find you enjoy learning about synths then I’d also recommend the Syntorial iPad app. It’s an exhaustively comprehensive, interactive course on subtractive synthesis. It’s worth it for the ear training alone, imo.
Most importantly, start making bad music. I believe we all have a certain number of bad beats/tracks in us, and the best way to learn is to get them out. You’ll improve way more from churning through your first hundred songs than from setting up the perfect DAW.
Here's another anecdote to help satiate your curiosity: I'm a 27 year old software developer, lifelong nerd and all around hacker, and I love FaceTime to the point where it's inclusion in the iPhone is a defining feature of my experience with the product.
After relocating for college and again for work, I have family across four timezones and friends even farther abroad. In my experience, nothing short of a flight bridges that distance better than video calling. I can see my mother's eyes light up when we haven't spoken in a while, my younger brother can hold up his latest pair of sneakers to the camera while he geeks out about them, and watching my best friend's new puppy bounce around his apartment is much more interesting than hearing it bark in the background.
I'll probably make a FaceTime call 3-4 times a week, which from observation and casual conversation appears to be a similar frequency to the rest of my friend group (mostly coastal millennials, largely Bay Area + NYC, ages 24-31).
With regards to the eye repositioning I agree with the grandparent poster. All captured images are reproductions of reality, and if I were to place this one on a spectrum between corrective glass elements for lens distortion and cat-person filters I would say it's much closer to the former. In my opinion the correction captures the intent of the user, and I feel that's truthful enough.
Memphis Meats is one company I'm aware of that's working to commercialize cell cultured meats. I haven't really checked up on them since their demo day, but a cursory glance suggests that they seem to be going strong.
I'm not trying to muddy the waters on this issue or take a consequentialist perspective, but how is this materially different from someone rejecting oxygen?
The moral response seems to be to intervene rather than let someone commit suicide, regardless of how long it takes.
Perhaps the show is more of a hit with soviet geeks than Chernobyl geeks. I was thoroughly impressed with the level of detail in set dressing and by the costume department. This individual does a much better job articulating the period accuracy than I could[1].