Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon-logistics-prime-air-fedex-ups-package-delivery-more-than-50-percent <comment><USER2> One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones.

In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to meet their quotas.

I think a lot of the same thing happened in the retail as well. I see the salespeople at malls or brick and mortar retail stores. Even though it is stressful, at least they get to be somewhat human in that they talk to people and have some degree of freedom to move around. Compare that with the Amazon warehouse workers whose every second has been planned out with maximally efficiency and who so afraid of losing their jobs that they are afraid to go to the bathroom.

It seems the "decent" jobs are going away, replaced by ones that turn workers into robots to better extract value from their labor.

<comment><USER3> I think we're all guilty of contributing to this problem. We all say we're for livable wages and then don't vote with our dollars as often as we should. I'm definitely guilty of going to Amazon because a book is a few dollars cheaper there and I can get it in two days instead of a week.

If we care about workers and corporate behavior, we need to be willing to pay a little more for products that are made by companies who's ethics we can get behind. Purism and System76 are good examples of this in the laptop space.

When we do vote with our dollars, the results are often impressive, as seen by the surge in availability of organic meat and produce.

<comment><USER4> If we care about workers and corporate behavior we need to change the law (and elect/appoint legislators and political executives and law enforcement agents and judges who will follow/enforce existing laws) to allow workers to unionize, increase the minimum wage, enforce fairer working hours, safer working conditions, better worker protections from fraud and theft, etc.

If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should have to own the trucks, pay the workers a salary, guarantee them basic labor rights, and so on. Foisting all of the legal and financial liability for bad practices onto fragmented and poorly managed subcontractors who only exist to serve Amazon as a single customer is a tremendous abuse.

Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.

Individual consumers can't possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy, and we can't expect consumers to solve this type of problem.

<comment><USER5> This sounds contradictory to me:

If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should [be an even larger monopoly]

...

Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.

<comment><USER4> Amazon is a monopsony with respect to its delivery subcontractors. They are not real independent businesses in a real market, but are wholly reliant on Amazon, using Amazon branding and with most aspects of their business dictated by Amazon. The only reason Amazon has set things up this way is because it (a) allows them to deliberately abuse their subcontractors' workers in ways that would be unlawful if they directly employed them, and (b) shields them from various kinds of legal risks which they should be liable for.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Amazon's delivery network or other business practices. You'd have to ask a labor lawyer for a full account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon is pulling a fast one here, and The Verge is letting them get away with it. Here's the key part:

> it's also been building out a network of its own delivery drivers under the > Amazon Flex platform, which is a kind of on-demand contract network similar > to Uber and food delivery companies like DoorDash.

So, in fact Amazon is _not_ delivering their own packages, they are employing an ad-hoc network of local truckers to deliver their packages. This is in contrast to FedEx and UPS, who employ the men and women who leave boxes on your doorstep.

This matters because:

> (Amazon Flex has been plagued by damning reports that the high demands it > places on Flex drivers have directly contributed to automobile fatalities.)

I'm sure Amazon intends to build out a full shipping network, which is the only way to optimize both quality and cost in shipping. The reality is, they are still a long way from doing so.

<comment><USER7> Some of the most unsafe driving I've seen is from those Amazon Sprinter vans. I blame Amazon more than the driver.

<comment><USER8> The office complex I work at had a major tenant leave a while ago, leaving a building empty and a parking lot empty. This parking lot is now full of these Amazon delivery vans. God help you if you try to make it into or out of the parking lot on foot during their rush to start deliveries, or worse, when they're getting back.

I feel bad for these workers, they're clearly stressed out, but I can only feel so bad after almost getting flattened a few times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just happy because 9 times out of 10 USPS would mark my stuff as delivered and then deliver it the next day. I have yet to have an Amazon delivery go bad besides when they try to deliver to my work after 5pm. I recognize people have huge issues with amazon delivery drivers but my experience has been better than USPS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Last week the USPS driver was clearly running behind on his route (which is fine), but then decided to mark my package as "could not access delivery location". Which is funny because:

1\. USPS is the only carrier that has direct access into my building (because that's where the mailboxes are)

2\. I was home all day and there was definitely no delivery attempt

I'm guessing they have SLAs in place with Amazon that penalizes them for late delivery, so they have to resort to such tactics.

<comment><USER10> This happens to us weekly.

We simply don't get mail at least one day a week, maybe two.

Packages are marked as undeliverable. But then they show up a few days later.

I've asked around and have heard that mailmen (mailpeople?) in my city just don't finish their routes everyday.

If that's because they're understaffed or too busy due to Amazon or just lazy is up for debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We can be mad at Amazon, but so many brands have a chance to ruthlessly focus on customers, but choose not to. Even today, in grocery, you see it happening. There's major players with deep pockets struggling to do an end-to-end grocery customer experience that competes. After a while I don't _want_ companies like this to survive.

If many markets were about two competent players duking it out, I'd be sympathetic. But usually it's Amazon vs some company I've mostly just tolerated my whole life, but seems to care less about the customer. Amazon just often deserves to win.

Now maybe it already is already to the point we need to think about anti trust issues, but that comes with a big cost of potentially protecting a lot of incompetent players out there.

(And there are lots of brand that ruthlessly focus on customers that treat employees very well, ie Starbucks, Trader Joe's, etc)

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazon's last mile delivery is a significantly worse experience than FedEx, DHL, or UPS. I put their service about on-par with USPS, which is to say: full of people lying about attempted deliveries.

With both USPS and Amazon I get notified of successful delivery hours or days before the package actually shows up, or attempted delivery when I was home and nobody used the callbox. They're making a huge mistake by not prioritizing the delivery experience; it is eroding customer confidence and loyalty.

<comment><USER13> In Manhattan, 100% of deliveries from their in-house delivery service to my building (any tenant) are returned as "undeliverable", while 100% of deliveries from USPS and UPS are fine.

It's a 24/7 multiple doorman building with a famous address (even {address}.com works) and the number printed in 10 foot letters.

There are zero moments in years that a package could not be delivered, yet my account shows 50 fails of their in-house delivery, and 450 successes of UPS and USPS.

So ... riddle me this.

What does their vaunted machine learning have to say about such situations?

It's scenarios like that that suggest the best ML still has a long way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty amazing you can go from being a little tiny online bookstore to owning your own fleet of planes, trucks and vans. Very inspiring story.

Also like when they are close to you, it tells you how many stops away they are in the app. So useful if you ordered something and excited to get it. However it seems when they used UPS packages would get here earlier like noon to 2PM, while Amazon own drivers seem to be a little later... but I guess that depends on where they started their day, maybe I'm closer to a UPS hub or something.

<comment><USER15> I am just amazed they determined buying the thousands, if not tens of thousands of trucks, recruiting and training drivers, and the logistics of it all, was better for them than what they could negotiate from the delivery giants and USPS.

I would assume they considered shipping items for others including pickup and delivery from customer homes. I just cannot believe it is only for delivery of their own goods

<comment><USER16> they're not buying the trucks and recruiting the contractors, it is more gig- economy bullshit. You are a 1099 worker who rents your own truck and whatever is left over is what you get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The same happens here, but DHL is the major player being replaced and it makes total sense for both Amazon and its customers. To be honest, since my first delivery made directly by Amazon, until now, I never missed a single package. It was delivered on time, most times on the day after the order. DHL on the other side has horrible drivers that would just drop off the package at the next post station, instead of knocking on your damn door, while you are at home. This is absolutely frustrating and I really hate DHL for that. From what I heard (no hard facts, sorry) the payment of the drivers is not really worse than those of the DHL drivers. Yet they do a lot better job.

Personally, I don't understand the matter of having to pay nothing for the shipping of online orders. Why don't they charge at least 3€, which is then used to pay the drivers more? A regular DHL package costs about 6€, not including the package material itself. I would appreciate paying more for the delivery if I knew that the drivers receive a better salary with that.

<comment><USER18> > _I would appreciate paying more for the delivery if I knew that the drivers > receive a better salary with that._

Unfortunately most people do not think like that, and would just not buy the item (or would buy it from a cheaper competitor) if there were higher shipping fees. Amazon knows this; free shipping is essentially a marketing cost for them. And they know that even if the shipping/delivery experience is sometimes frustrating, people will still come back for more.

<comment><USER17> Yes, sadly. In this times it's more important for people to save 5€ on a new TV, than caring for their fellow humans or even the environment. _shrug_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Delivering" is kind of an overstatement - "shipping" maybe. I've placed at least a dozen orders over the last month. Almost half of them have been subsequently marked as "Get a replacement" (or whatever the text says). The Amazon delivery drivers seem to not be nearly as dedicated as UPS/FedEx drivers, at least in my area.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like "delivering things" is a great night-shift job... There are some infrastructure changes needed, but they seem well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER21> The number of Amazon packages that are prematurely marked as delivered has skyrocketed lately. When I have inquired about it via chat I have been told that this is common and I will probably receive the package later today or tomorrow. Does this happen to there people? I'm going to start fire paying attention to how these are shipped and if it's via Amazon versus USPS/FedEx.

<comment><USER22> You used to be able to get a free month of prime for any shipping error but they stopped that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah and I just got apackage from them where everything was damaged. The book was just thrown in along with a large item. It was all creased and useless as a gift.

The carton for the small appliance they bundled with the book had what looked like a punch mark in it.

The whole shipment was an utter mess.

</comment><comment><USER22> In my neck of the woods Amazon only uses their in house delivery for Sunday deliveries, otherwise it is UPS. A few months ago I had a 12 year old girl standing at the door with my package. I lightly joked, you look a little young to be driving deliveries around, and she responded that she was working with both her parents. When I asked if they waited in the car she said they were dropping packages at the neighbors. An entire family working on likely one wage. I've only used Amazon a couple times since then and never on Sunday again. If the other days start getting serviced by their in house delivery it will mean total boycott.

</comment><comment><USER24> These days I explicitly order items with a later delivery date (usually an amazon suggested 'amazon delivery day'). The good thing about this that I get to claim/reserve a limited-sale item, but at the same time have the luxury of re-considering my choice on the impulse-buy one or two more days before the item is shipped.

</comment><comment><USER25> UPS and Fedex execs must be absolutely flabbergasted at how fast this happened.

</comment><comment><USER26> The article mentions that Amazon is also on pace to be rivaling FedEx and UPS in total volume as well. It's interesting that Bezos' estimate of 5% of retail equals this much volume of packages.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really hope that Amazon will start its own medical insurance subsidiary.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article only mentions UPS, FedEx, and Amazon. (4.7, 3.0, 2.5 billion)

How many via USPS?

<comment><USER29> In my area, anything small enough to fit in my mailbox or the smallest cardboard box they use comes via USPS. If it's in the local warehouse, Amazon delivers it. Otherwise it's UPS. I can't think of the last time an Amazon package arrived via FedEx.</comment></comment>


Help Send Us To Startup Camp + Foo Camp - <AUTHOR> http://www.publictivity.com/education/2008/05/27/help-send-us-to-startup-camp-foo-camp/

<comment><USER2> Hey,

I'm one of the speakers at startup camp and I think I'm going to help on judging the submissions.

I think your pitch needs a lot of work and I wouldn't vote for it in its current form. I read your blog post and your PDF slides (I didn't watch the video) and didn't get a clear sense for what your product does, why it's different than other similar products, or why you think it will turn into a larger business. Many of your slides talk about the right topics -- for instance, customer pain -- without saying what you specifically know about that topic in your business -- for instance, exactly what customer pain you're trying to address.

The outline on Sequoia's site is great for what your pitch should address:

<http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas/>

I once had the humiliating experience of sending a Sequoia partner a 30-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," sending him a 20-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," sending him a 15-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," and then finally getting it right. Learn from my mistakes! 12 slides, no more than six bullets per slide, no more than one line per bullet. Writing to form makes it easier for people to evaluate you. Make it very easy on your evaluators.

On each of those slides, say why you're different from everyone else. Exactly what makes you better. "We take the sales lead process from 30 minutes to five minutes." Say it succinctly and don't be at all ambiguous. "We allow co- workers to share contact information for their sales leads without data entry by scanning business cards with 99.9% accuracy" or whatever.

Hope this helps and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

Definitely a big help. Like I said, we want the hardcore feedback. That's even a major part of why we want to come to startup camp. We know we've built a great product, and we know it has the tools entrepreneurs need.

Our biggest problem is putting it into words that are simple to understand and to put down onto 12 slides. I've always believed that people spend money (whether as investors or customers) on products/things that they can understand easily and relate to. That's where we need to work on things, a lot.

Thank you once again.

-jlb

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a lot of respect for you (at least, I follow you on Twitter, and I don't follow many people!) so keep that in mind reading this..!

The pitch has a number of problems.

It takes 20 seconds before you mention the problem that your product helps resolve, and then another 12 seconds before you start to define what that problem even is. Show rather than tell. You say it's a painful problem before stating the problem (it's also probably far too early in the pitch for any humorous photos). If it's painful, it will be apparent when you just describe the problem.. if not, you're not describing the problem properly. Second, it takes over two minutes for you to talk specifically about any feature of your product.

Describing your product as a "online social workspace that allows companies to better organize and share information by leveraging the connections around them" is Dilbert-esque, and it doesn't tell us anything concrete about what your product does.

I really want you to get to Startup and Foo Camps and think you are on to something good, but I really hope that when you do come face to face with investors, your pitch is concise, to the point, and really, really tight. I sense that the lack of these qualities can be the nail in the financing coffin unless your idea is extremely revolutionary.

On the plus side, you definitely come across as enthusiastic and knowledgeable in the pitch. Your voice is engaging.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Peter,

Thanks! Read more on your bio, and the same respect goes both ways. We're nowheres near perfect, and what the criticism rather than a simple "oh that's great, definitely send me an invite" response you usually get.

\- This pitch was meant to be longer, but my goal is to really make the problem the first priority. Quicker is definitely better. The one liner needs to be improved significantly.

-Normally we'd sub in the screenshots for an actual demo of the product if it were a live pitch. We're thinking of cutting down on the pictures in the problem part showing the investor, entrepreneurs, support agent,etc. in order to get to the product a lot faster.

-See my response below to TitleWave. I hate the organize + share information line we use, and want to find something that really evokes exactly what we do. There's a few ideas bouncing around. No lies, this part keeps me up at night.

-I sense the same problems, and that's why we make our pitches available publicly. This lets us get the feedback we need. We know we suck in certain areas, and want to get rid of that.

-Glad I came across enthusiastic. I'm passionate about the product we're building, and think it's going to change the way entrepreneurs work. We're product driven for sure. Would love to send you an invite when we're ready.

Thanks!

-jlb

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most important part of your presentation describing your company/product as "Publictivity is the online social workspace that allows companies to better organize and share information by leveraging the connections around them" needs some rework and you need to come up with a better one liner. Your description might fall into what Greg McAdoo from Sequoia refers to it as "This is technically accurate but totally useless"

[http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/greg-mcadoo-partner-at- se...](http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/greg-mcadoo-partner-at-sequoia- capital-talks-at-startup-school-08)

Good luck with getting into Startup and Foo Camp

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Wave,

That's exactly where we're struggling/working on. Greg's talk at Startup Camp was awesome, because it gave no bullshit/ straight forward advice. We know what we're making is useful, but bringing it down to one sentence that makes real world sense is key. That's why I even say in the presentation "to get past the mission statement speak", and then explain the product. Off the cuff, if I could sum it up in other words:

"We Give Entrepreneurs The Tools To Run Their Business".

The organize + share, is really more on the technical side of things when I think about it more.

Thanks for the feedback, it's exactly what we need.

-jlb

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hoping to get some feedback, but also if we end up going, that we can share our experience back with the YC News community.

</comment><comment><USER5> guy is all ambition. good lucks.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm normally a little reluctant to give feedback on these things because I often "don't get it", so I don't think I have anything to offer. Because your video is so well done, I'll make an exception now...

I don't get it.

You talk about the problem, the pain, and your offering, but I can't recall a single thing you say about your customer/user. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I sure would feel a lot more comfortable with a story or two about someone's specific problem and how they solved it with Publicitivity. Maybe I'm a little old school, but I'd really rather hear about them first, not you.

You say all the right things: pain (get rid of the soccer pic, ouch!), problem, product, but I don't "feel" the problem or pain. I just think that a good example or two would paint a much better picture. The more common the example, the more people you'll reach.

The good news: Great start. With your tech and presentation skills, once they understand what it is, you oughta knock 'em dead.

Does this make any sense to you, or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ed,

Getting it, is in the eye of the beholder. The fact you're on Hacker news / have the 2nd highest karma means that you are definitely in tune :-).

I think our biggest flaw is: we're not explaining this in common terms that the everyday person can understand. It's too focused on the technical vision with the organizing and sharing. I think we can solve it in two ways:

a) Get rid of the organize + share mission statement jargon. Put together something people really understand.

b) Show a demo of the software in action. Once you see the software and/or start playing around with it, it's a no brainer that this is going to change the way you work.

Thank you for the feedback and kind words. Feel free to drop me an email jason [at] publictivity dot com if you want to check out the product more in depth (we're beta releasing it soon, but I can send out an invite a bit sooner).

-jlb

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like "web-based groupware for small teams" -- a space crowded with offerings (and littered with startup corpses). To succeed, you need a unique angle -- like 37signals' minimalist "elegant interfaces and thoughtful features". And even then, it might not offer growth warranting investment beyond small angels and bootstrapping.

If it's something different, that needs to pop out so you can't miss it.

Cutesy photos can work for crowd presentations but investors want to cut to the point: team, market, product/tech, competition, plan, ask. Specifics help, euphemisms and hand-waving generalizations hurt (eg "square peg in round hole" "gluing together ad-hoc solutions" "awesome developers... making great things that increase the productivity beyond our imagination").

HTH, good luck!</comment>


Does openstack still have a future? - <AUTHOR> http://scotttactical.com/why-we-quit-openstack/ <comment><AUTHOR> Big supporters left the boat a few months ago.</comment>


Bill would require camera phones to make a sound - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/new-bill-asks-f.html

<comment><USER2> I hope someone amends the bill to also include:

      - a mandatory 'flash', do it after the shot if
        not artistically desired.
      - periodic beeps while shooting video (use specific tones,
        people can then sell software to mask them in the
        resulting works, mostly.)
      - periodic beeps while video chatting, the guy on the other
        end could be recording.
      - ALL cameras make a sound
      - Include professional gear, especially the undercover
        sort. Lots of people have their privacy invaded by
        PIs and television news folks.
      - Require a taser sort of effect on the speaker
        grill while the shutter noise plays to prevent people
        from masking it. (It will probably also need some sharp
        spikes to protrude to keep people from simply putting
        a piece of paper or tape over their finger to avoid the
        shock.)

As long as we are at it, expand the bill to make ALL devices be incapable of illegal use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great. Those wanting to break the law simply need to break their phone's speaker while the rest of us have to live with annoying phones that beep uncontrollably when we want to take pictures.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Prior to discovering the configuration option buried deep in my phone's menus I was looking for a place to embed a compact slider switch. I have a feeling if something like this were to ever pass that we'd see hacked firmware for common phones ASAP.

<comment><USER5> Which brings up an interesting point: would open source firmware/software on camera phones be illegal, since you can trivially modify it to disable the noise?

<comment><USER6> I'm sure there are people who would want to ban open source if they understood the idea. Fortunately, they are mostly too stupid to get it. Just as there are vested interests who would love to go back in time and kill the Internet (e.g. the music industry), but fortunately 15 years ago when the Internet was small enough to kill these vested interests didn't understand its importance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> By the time you've heard the click, it's too late.

<comment><USER8> It might be too late to stop the pervert from taking the picture, but it is not too late to summon the authorities and prevent him from fleeing. (This is the Japanese use case for this law. I have to assume the American one is similar, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It won't go anywhere, don't worry too much.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe just make the quality of camera phone pictures so crappy that no one will want to look at them. Oh wait.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article says that a mandatory "click" is already in place in Japan and I am almost certain that its the same in the EU. I cannot turn off the loud click or turn down its volume on my phone and many of my acquaintances have also tried with no success.

While not very nice from a philosophical viewpoint it is actually a good measure. Those phone cameras can get pretty annoying and very disturbing. Now with the clicking sound I can identify the offender and become aware that I had my picture taken.

There is a downside, too - when I am in the library or during lectures taking dozens of pictures of some paperwork can be very unpleasant for others.

I think the privacy of the individual is a lot more valuable than the "freedom to not make a clicking sound" ;-).

<comment><USER11> _I think the privacy of the individual is a lot more valuable_

Individuals have, or _can_ have, privacy in public?

<comment><USER10> Is there a reason there are "you are monitored by CCTV" signs?

Do people only take pictures in public?

<comment><USER11> _Is there a reason there are "you are monitored by CCTV" signs?_

CCTV signage is in place to discourage shoplifting. [http://www.google.com/search?q=discourage+shoplifting+cctv+s...](http://www.google.com/search?q=discourage+shoplifting+cctv+signs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good. As a photographer I am in two minds about camera phones. On the one hand, putting the tools in the hands of the masses is great. On the other hand, camera phone users are such twats. I do a bit of wedding photography, you scout out the church, sort out your shots (say the bride entering the church with her father) then you come to take the shot and some moron is leaning out into the aisle with his stupid little phone. What, he's not even composing, the shot is going to be shit, and where's it going, onto Facebook or into an album that the bride will show her granddaughter one day? Or you're shooting the formals and in every shot at least one member of the two families is actually looking at some fool trying a camera phone shot instead of into the camera.

If every camera phone gave the user a small electric shock with every picture, or would lock up completely for 30 minutes after every shot, that would go a long way.

</rant>

</comment><comment><USER13> Overly broad and probably ineffective. Although I can't imagine a time when this would be harmful any effective click would prove annoying.

</comment><comment><USER14> actually some manufacturers (like Siemens - R.I.P.) already comply with that 'rule' for a while, for that exact reason..

<comment><USER15> I own a Motorola U9 for a month. I've been unable to find out how to disable the click. Next thing is flashing it. I can't stand the very loud noise.</comment></comment>


SpaceX's Unnerving Silence on an Explosive Incident - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/spacex-anomaly-dragon-nasa/588277/ <comment><USER2> Compare to the NTSB's "unnerving" silence on every investigation.</comment>


Online Collaboration tools for college students - <AUTHOR>

What are some online collaboration tools for college level students that are in use? I know of OpenStudy. Any others in this space? <comment><USER2> I used doodle.com for scheduling times to meet for group projects. It worked out great.</comment>


How can I hack the gassiness of beans? - <AUTHOR>

Red kidney beans are awesomely balanced food, and I find them really tasty.
But I don't know if it's age, or what, but lately, I just can't handle them any more. The gas collects inside my body, and causes sever aches, etc. until I finally manage to expel it (usually while taking a dump).
There are plenty of websites offering thoughts and suggestions on how to combat the gas.
Does the hacker community have advice to share on this matter? <comment><USER2> There are over the counter drugs you can buy that solve this problem. This post doesn't belong on HN. Also, such a wrong use of the word "hack".

</comment><comment><USER3> If by hacking you mean removing the offending gene from the beans then yes. You must have a strong background in biology, chemistry and genetic engineering to proceed. An access to a lab would also be useful.

If that is not what you meant, then please remove your post.

</comment><comment><USER4> My mother's trick was to put the pre-soaked beans in a steam-cooker, add hot water, cook for 5 minutes, drain off the water, then cook the beans with fresh water. It does seem to remove a lot of the gas, not sure why though.</comment>


Ravel's Boléro in Rock n' Roll Music Thoughout the Decades - <AUTHOR> http://www.boleroinrock.com/

<comment><USER2> The author only cites songs from 1967 through 1975. A larger sample size would be nice for such a title.</comment>


Baltic Dry Index Falls Below 500 for First Time - <AUTHOR> https://gcaptain.com/baltic-dry-falls-below-500-for-first-time-ever/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't worry too much about this. The Baltic Dry Index hasn't really been a usable indicator for many years now.

Originally it was a brilliant insight. Most numbers can be fudged, but it was super expensive to have ships sitting around empty so the index was hard to game.

What made it even more useful was that it is one of the very few leading indicators of the global macro economy. Most indicators that work are lagging, which means they tell you that something has already happened.

Since hte index measures both demand for shipping and supply it can be pushed down by either. The general consensus is that the current lows is actually due to over supply by the shipping giants like maersk.

More reading:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2015/03/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2015/03/economist-explains-7)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/02/05/why- you-s...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/02/05/why-you-shouldnt- worry-about-the-baltic-dry-index-hitting-a-29-year-low/)

<comment><USER3> That is not the consensus. The consensus is a massive decline in commodity prices (oil, metals, etc) and a decline in demand for exportable finished goods is crushing global trade. Indicators are everywhere:

Rail Traffic Data: [https://www.aar.org/Pages/Freight-Rail-Traffic- Data.aspx](https://www.aar.org/Pages/Freight-Rail-Traffic-Data.aspx)

US Capacity Utilization: [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU/](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU/)

US Exports: [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IQ](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IQ)

US Industrial Production: [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- states/industrial-pro...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- states/industrial-production)

WPI, PPI, CPI and oil prices have all fallen significantly.

I don't want to get political but a deflationary spiral is something governments globally should be working to correct, yet priorities seem to be elsewhere.

<comment><USER2> > That is not the consensus.

That's fair as far as I guess there is no consensus. You posted alot of links that don't really point to any definitive conclusion.

Look at your data. It doesn't correlate with the Index in any way. The Index had a very pronounce peak in 2008.

This link > [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU/](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU/)

was on a huge downward trend staring in 2007

I agree there is alot of room for interpretation, but I'm very happy to stand behind and put my money behind my assertion that the Baltic Index isn't a useful indicator anymore.

But I do appreciate the opposing view point!

<comment><USER3> The BDI's indication is supported by the decline in rail traffic, the decline in imports/exports in/out of China, and corresponding declines for the BRIC nations. Its supported by the recent (and growing) closures of mines and mills globally. From Janet Yellen, Michael Pettis, Zhou Xiaochaun... all acknowledge this decline. You're in a very, very small minority.

<comment><USER4> What's your take on the Fed raising rates next month? I've seen a lot of consensus that rates _are_ going up next month, but I don't see how they can with various economic indicators showing that the global economy isn't on solid footing.

Perhaps we'll be stuck with ZIRP for a bit longer :/

<comment><USER5> I'm starting to wonder if "a bit longer" means "forever." There seems to be a real lack of global growth engines.

<comment><USER4> If you want to chat over coffee about it, I have a long thesis that agrees with this. Global growth is, for lack of a better way to put it, over.

Central planning interest rates will probably never be over 3-4% again (and that's a bullish outlook).

<comment><USER3> Totally agree for four reasons:

1\. Wealth demography. Wealth is held by older people seeking safety not growth/risk.

2\. Capital stagnation. Capital is being stockpiled by central banks and large corporations. The former seeks to rectify structural problems in spending and banking sectors. The latter seeks to avoid tax liability.

3\. Small businesses abandoned. Developed nations, the US in particular, have focused resources on the largest institutions and institutions serving the poorest. By comparison small businesses are ignored creating more risk for large institutions, and incrasing the ranks of the poor.

4\. Global instability. Declines are almost always preceded by alarming world events causing capital flights that expose imbalances in economies. Yes, the solution is to not have imbalances, but aside from that utopian ideal, restoration of a stable world order opens the door to economic risk taking and then prosperity.

<comment><USER4> We're in violent agreement!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two things to know about this:

BDI goes up when bulk shipping capacity is tight. That's interesting, but the reason BDI was an obscure index until the 2008 crisis is that it isn't a good indicator of the health of the world economy.

Except for that one time: The BDI crashed super-hard because nobody could get a letter of credit. It was the canary in the coal mine for the subsequent general seizing-up of credit due to the derivatives-driven crash.

</comment><comment><USER7> Commodities are cyclical. There's been a long boom. The party is over for oil and metals. The inefficient will fold up; the strong or smart will hunker down and wait for the inevitable upturn.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the 'how it works' section of the Wikipedia page...

 _" Every working day, a panel of international shipbrokers submits their view of current freight cost on various routes to the Baltic Exchange. The routes are meant to be representative, i.e. large enough in volume to matter for the overall market."_

So three [chaps|chapesses] in London think of a number presumably based on some kind of average volume figure and price.

I'll have to find a list of obscure indices and do some visualisations. Might make Maths lessons a bit more interesting...

<comment><USER9> The big-mac index [1] is another unorthodox one that has gained a lot of attention for actually being a very rigorously updated price-level guide between different nations.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac- index](http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index)

<comment><USER8> Now _that_ will get them talking. We could do a 'teenager price index' as well and compare it to the retail price index (UK).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This may be relevant: The Great Fall Of China Started At Least 4 Years Ago [http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/11/the-great-fall- of-c...](http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/11/the-great-fall-of-china- started-at-least-4-years-ago/)

</comment><comment> c-slice I'd predict that we're going to see a depressed Baltic Dry for the foreseeable future, and it will likely never reach the 2007/8 era highs again. As we continue to see slowing global demand for coal/oil and growing demand for renewable energy, bulk shipping volumes will continue to stay low.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like we should expect the real economy to slow in many (but not all) ways as sustainability becomes a more primary goal for many individuals and companies. I believe this may be a big part of the global recession.

Mining and shipping large quantities of coal and iron large distances is just an inherently unsustainable practice.

Economic indicators as well as other fundamental aspects of the economic era may need to be replaced with more up-to-date concepts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Low oil prices, no need of new eficient ships.

</comment><comment><USER12> I get that this is an interesting datapoint in the global economy, but how is this at all related to Hackernews?

<comment><USER3> Most HN partipants rely on brick and mortar businesses, directly or indirectly, as first or second order revenue sources. The Baltic Dry Index is telling us that an unprecedented slowdown in global trade is occuring, the impact of which will be felt by tech firms building and selling logistics solutions, payment platforms, inventory systems, accounting applications, financial modeling software and so much more. The VC community is paying close attention to the global economy, which will impact their willingness to invest. I enjoy reading about undocumented Python regular expression libraries as much as the next guy, but a deflationary spiral spinning unabated is going to impact all our lives far more and very soon.

<comment><USER13> It's not unprecedented, the previous time this happened a global crisis was about to get underway. This is what makes (or rather, maybe made) this particular index so interesting, the fact that it doesn't lag but gave a warning ahead of time. Of course once that happens everybody will adjust their models so this won't repeat. But the previous recorded drop in this particular shipping index was a harbinger of some pretty bad news.

<comment><USER4> What was the lag time between the last time happened and financial crisis began?

<comment><USER13> 95% drop or so between May and Dec 2008.

<comment><USER4> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Four Ways to Slice Obama's 2013 Budget Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html

<comment><USER2> This is awesome.

<comment><USER2> Also, can anyone figure out what Javascript library is being used here? The visualization seems to be SVG, but I'm not sure what's being used...

<comment><USER3> They're using D3.js. The script is present inline on the page.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I looked for include script tag, and assumed there was something going on in common.js. My bad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Writing Microservices in Go – Nordic APIs | - <AUTHOR> http://nordicapis.com/writing-microservices-in-go/ <comment><USER2> Go is especially awesome for writing microservices.

500px.com have a lot of these, "Breaking the Monolith" presentation: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/500px- services](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/500px-services)</comment>


6 Extra Skills Every PHP Developer Should Have - <AUTHOR> http://phpmaster.com/6-extra-skills-every-php-developer-should-have/

<comment><USER2> I'd add one more "focusing on your core".

With PHP it is really easy to hack little things together so it's tempting to build everything yourself when faced with new small challenges. Depending on third party services can save a lot of time/effort to help you deliver what matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) is any web developer. 2-6 is any developer.</comment>


Get Started with 6502 Assembly Programming on Atari Lynx - <AUTHOR> https://atarigamer.com/articles/get-started-with-6502-assembly-programming-on-atari-lynx <comment><USER2> Learning to write 6502 was a formative experience for me as a programmer and I strongly recommend it as a pedagogical exercise if nothing else. The instruction set is tiny, and easy to grapple with, but after learning it you'll get an intuitive grasp of, for instance, "why the C programming language is the way it is."

So all that remains is to pick a platform! And there's no shortage of them. Glad to see Lynx is yet another participant in the vibrant 6502 homebrew community.

<comment><USER3> >The instruction set is tiny, and easy to grapple with, but after learning it you'll get an intuitive grasp of, for instance, "why the C programming language is the way it is."

If you want that, you should learn the PDP-11 instruction set, which is actually why the C language is the way it is. In particular, C is rather uniquely unsuited for segmented memory models, which many 6502 systems have, whereas other languages with lower-level features or accommodations can easily function under such a memory model, because they were designed with it in mind instead of solely for the PDP-11.

On that note, C isn't actually a low-level language and I'm aware the 6502 is an example of an instruction set it maps very poorly to, compared to how a machine code programmer would approach it, so I'm curious why you made this relationship, since it's rather tenuous.

<comment><USER4> > In particular, C is rather uniquely unsuited for segmented memory models

C was often used to program 16-bit x86 systems, and it handled that well enough.

A more relevant limitation of the 6502, however, is its stack. The 6502 stack is limited to a single page of 256 bytes, and there is no stack-relative addressing mode. This makes a C-style stack difficult to implement -- most C implementations for the 6502 implement a secondary data stack in main memory.

<comment><USER5> A good compiler would focus optimization efforts on removing variables from the stack. It would probably just reject programs that get silly with deep recursion.

For example, if the compiler can prove that a function never gets more than one active stack frame (no recursion) then the local variables don't need to be on a stack. They can be in the data section. If the compiler can prove this for two functions together, such that they will never both have active stack frames, then the variables can reside in the same memory. Going beyond this, partial sharing is possible. If function X calls function Y, the variables of function Y can reside in the locations of many of the variables of function X. It is only the variables of function X that must survive the call to Y that would need distinct memory locations.

Inlining can help too. That gets rid of the need to push a return address and so on.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that's a valid set of optimizations. It's certainly incompatible with a compile-then-link workflow involving multiple object files, as there's no way to safely allocate local variables across modules. Nor is this approach compatible with function pointers!

<comment><USER5> I know that moving stack variables to the data section is in fact an optimization that is in use by commercial compilers. It works fine with function pointers. There are two possible answers to the problem of a compile- then-link workflow involving multiple object files.

The first is that the optimization can be limited to within one file. Calls going between source files can sometimes limit the optimization opportunity because it may become impossible to prove that there is no mutual recursion. Functions that may be involved in recursion can not be optimized in this way. One might add a #pragma to override the compiler's determination of safety.

The second possible answer is to have the link phase do the real compiling. The supposed compile phase just preprocesses and verifies syntax.

Function pointers certainly liven things up. Suppose the function pointer of type *X is used to call a function of type X, which then exclusively calls functions of type Y. If we know that none of those type Y functions end up calling any type X functions, then that first-mentioned function of type X will not get more than one stack frame. It is thus safe to optimize with that assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an in-browser 6502 tutorial with simulator: [https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/](https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/)

Of course, you can pick the system/context you want to learn in: many 8-bit computers used 6502 chips. For example, this book is well-regarded for those with Apple II nostalgia: [https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner](https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner)

I'm sure there are tons of NES-targeted tutorials too.

<comment><USER7> Anybody have good NES tutorials and also a link for a way to put it on a cart (sd or whatever)?

Also, are their free or paid-for asset libraries?

Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER8> nesdev.com is a treasure trove of information.

To put it on a cart, you'll use RetroUSB PowerPak or Everdrive N8.

Don't know about assets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Atari 2600 programming is 6502 too, you can play with it right in the browser: [http://8bitworkshop.com/v3.3.0/?=&file=examples%2Fcomplexsce...](http://8bitworkshop.com/v3.3.0/?=&file=examples%2Fcomplexscene2&platform=vcs)

<comment><USER10> My suggestion: anybody thinking of getting started with 6502 will probably have more fun with the Atari Lynx.

<comment><USER11> Or the C64 might be a good choice too.

Jumping into "no-framebuffer/racing-the-beam" 6502 programming on the Atari 2600 for the uninitiated is just ... cruel.

<comment><USER12> I'd recommend the BBC Micro, since we're not talking about the 1980s and geographical limitations of the market, the BBC has a nice basic that includes a built-in assembler, has a text UI that is more pleasant on the eyes than most 8bits, has the sideways rom system to make it possible to add a debugger and other niceties, and has a simple easy-to-understand disk filing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The closest modern equivalent to those old 8-bit computers is the TI-84 Plus CE calculator. It has a legit (no hacks) way to load binary executables. It goes for about $100. Like many old 8-bit computers, it comes with BASIC and an almost-ASCII character set. The screen is 320x240, just a tad bigger than those old 8-bit home computers usually had, though with 16-bit color. There is a USB port. You get a bit more RAM, with about 64 KiB of about 256 KiB available for your program. The screen is at a fixed address you can write to.

The C compiler is fascinating. There is a uint24_t which maps to an unsigned int. This is because the EZ80 CPU is capable of ganging three 8-bit registers together to handle 24-bit data. Pointers are also 24-bit. The "short" and "long" types are of normal size, 16-bit and 32-bit. There is no alignment or padding. Serious stuff needs to be in assembly. The C compiler doesn't optimize very well.

So that is 3 programming languages on a $100 device that happens to be useful for all sorts of normal school classes. The calculator is fine for the SAT, ACT, AP Statistics, AP Calculus, and now even the AP sciences.

<comment><USER13> I remember having a printout of the tasm tables for x80 so I could type hex machine-code into my TI-83 (it could load hex programs as binaries). I don't recommend that approach, but I certainly learned a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand the font choice, but you might want to reconsider. It's not easy to read.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a typo in the chapter "Important commands that don't exist!".

NEG is described as:

      EOR #255 (XOR/Flip bits)
      SEC (Clear carry)
      ADD #1  (add 1)

Of course, it's:

      EOR #255 (XOR/Flip bits)
      CLC (Clear carry)
      ADC #1  (add 1 with carry 0)

or:

      EOR #255 (XOR/Flip bits)
      SEC (Set carry)
      ADC #0  (add 0 with carry 1)

<comment><USER16> There is an INC A instruction on the 65C02 and 65816, so this is better if you have anything newer than the NMOS 6502:

      EOR #255   ; Invert
      INC A      ; Add 1

It looks like the Lynx has a 65SC02 which is a 65C02 without the bit manipulation instructions, so it should have the INC A instruction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why people say it's a 16-bit console if it's based on the 65SC02. The 65816 and 802 were 16 bit, but the SC02, AFAIK, was not.

<comment><USER18> It had a 16-bit graphics processor, which arguably was a lot more important for its software than whether the CPU was 16-bit.

See also the TurboGrafx-16 console, which had a similar arrangement: an 8-bit 6502-descendent and a 16-bit graphics chip. It got a lot of flak for being "fake 16-bit". I think the Lynx was better able to get away with it because it was on such a different level than other handhelds of the time (besides maybe the expensive portable version of the TG-16!), whereas the TG-16 had to go up against the 68000-based Sega Genesis.

<comment><USER17> So I guess I'll say my Chromebook has 2 + 160 + 20 + 2 or about 184 cores. I'm counting the integrated GPU, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow. I bought a Lynx with my first paycheck from my first "real" job when I was 15. I played California Games _a lot._

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice!

Another good resource is forum.6502.org as there are plenty of 6502 experts there that have built their own 6502 machines for a hobby

<comment><USER21> Including one made out of discrete components. [https://monster6502.com/](https://monster6502.com/)</comment></comment>


The troubling rise of 'deep fakes': How AI is making it hard to know what's real - <AUTHOR> https://nam-auth-dev-cdn.awspreprod.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/27/troubling-rise-deep-fakes-ai-making-hard-know-real/ <comment><AUTHOR> Great to see our aphrodite.ai being referenced there.</comment>


Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence? - <AUTHOR> https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/is-neuroscience-a-bigger-threat-than-artificial-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> The article's logic is a soup sandwich of two huge misunderstandings:

First, "Theory of Mind" is something experienced at a high level directly. We do reason about our own and other's actions, (both successfully and unsuccessfully of course). We still have much to learn about how this works and is implemented, but I don't think it is controversial that each of us do develop theories about our own minds and others and use that along with other information.

Second, "Theory of Mind" does not mean "a scientific theory of the mind" it means that each of us develops internal theories of our own and other's minds. In one case "Theory" means something in our heads, in the other "theory" means a scientific body of knowledge.

This seems to have confused the author greatly.

So "Theory of Mind" has nothing to say about how neural circuits record information about locations in a maze and whether that recorded information can be considered "meaning" or not.

"Of course you could argue that what Nobel Prize winning research shows about rats is irrelevant to humans."

Wow! This really underlines that second confusion. Of course rat's brains can tell us something about <<theories of minds>>, but since we already know rat's don't model each other's internal actions with the detail we do, it would be problematic to view them as reliable sources for investigating the particular theory of human minds called "Theory of Mind".

Sigh.

<comment><USER3> Rats brains are used to study mechanisms presumed to be conserved by humans eg aspects of molecular biology. That doesn't mean that rat social behavior couldn't be used to model some aspect of human social behavior.

<comment><USER2> No doubt rat behavior is worth using to model a lot of human behavior and brain organization, but the article talks specifically about Theory of Mind which is something few animals show strong signs of.

Some aspects of our species are different from most other animals, this seems to be one of them. Maybe dolphins or whales have comparable Theory of Mind capabilities?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From a skim read this article is pretty sloppy. It argues that the human OEM theory of mind is in some way unique or unreproducible. This conclusion is completely unsupported by the text, which is just a sophisticated word salad.

<comment><USER5> Well you gotta love and respect the site's mission statement: _Whatever it is, we 're against it_

<comment><USER4> Lol yeah. Including themselves, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > What does all this mean? Watson may beat us at Jeopardy, but we are > convinced we have something AI will always lack: We are agents in the world, > whose decisions, choices, actions are made meaningful by the content of the > belief/desire pairings that bring them about. But what if the theory of mind > that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another > useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes that got us here? > Then it will turn out that neuroscience is a far greater threat to human > distinctiveness than AI will ever be.

I'm not sure how someone could believe that AI would always lack these things without also believing in some form of essentialism, basically believing that major parts of the human experience are "magic" somehow rather than derived from physical processes.

Anyway the author's major concern seems to be that neuroscience has demonstrated that desires and beliefs are not directly real in the same way that, say, your brain is a particular collection of atoms restricted to the physical confines of your skull. I suppose this could be very disturbing if you have the sense that your life is significantly more meaningful if all of your desires and beliefs are as real as the ground you walk on rather than being some illusory projection of the brain.

The problem actually arises from the associations that we have with the word "illusion". As soon as we start to think of our beliefs and desires as "illusions", it's natural to leap to terms like "fake", "false", "worthless", "deceit", and so on. In other words, there are all kinds of negative connotations that we associate with the word "illusion", so when we use that to describe core parts of what we think of as the human experience, it makes us feel bad.

But this is simply a limit of our language: what _are_ the illusions of "beliefs" and "desires" anyway? Desires correspond to our experiences; if we want food, that corresponds to a very real physical state of our physical bodies. Beliefs are a lot shakier because they tend to be be built on complex layers of ideas, but they correspond to physical reality as well, whether or not they're particularly accurate. So these things are very useful and important despite being "illusions". And there's a huge difference between these "illusions" and direct falsehoods. So I think the real limitation here is that we don't have language that's particularly well adapted to discussing and thinking about these things.

<comment><USER7> I think it largely comes from uninterrogated/unrevised dualisms applied to the scientistic world. I think of Rosenberg's eliminativism as follows:

a) Platonic realism is the only way our semantic categories/abstractions could be meaningful.

b) The world is physical (platonism is not true).

c) All our categories are meaningless! Our abstractions are unreal!

You can see it all follows from a), and there are serious questions about whether this is actually a physicalist philosophy...

<comment><USER8> If instead of requiring various concepts of philosophy to be real, one simply requires them to be _irreducible_ \- not explanable as an ensemble effect of a larger system - then one winds-up with nearly the same thing. And I don't know how this requirement of irreducibility isn't a part of many philosophical views of the mind - specifically, isn't that what's important about "qualia", that they are irreducible?

<comment><USER7> Why would you require this? Concepts can either be a part meaningfully differentiated from the whole (neocortex, hypothalamus -> the whole brain) or an aggregate that while reducible to more basic parts is meaningfully differentiated from other similarly reduced aggregates (neocortex vs. hypothalamus). What seems to define the demand for the "real" or "irreducible" is wanting the nature of reality to in some sense "do" this differentiation "for us".

And yes I would say that "qualia" insists on dualism.

<comment><USER2> I agree but would fine tune your last statement to:

"Assuming the experience of "qualia" is irreducible is to insist on dualism."

The Qualia does exist. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the The Qualia is. You have to see it for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article seems to take the position that Intelligent life on earth is zero sum and there is no victor. I'm not sure that is the case.

Then the rest of the article details the concept of theory of mind in philosophy and how that is not congruent with how neuroscience understands the brain. I don't see where the conflict is here unless you want to believe in the theory of mind.

<comment><USER10> So far, intelligence on Earth has been zero sum. We've wiped out multiple other intelligent species until we were the only ones.

<comment><USER11> I think that was more a result of shared environmental niche more than anything since it happens with non-intelligent species as well. Predators fight over same prey niche even in the same species. Stable multipredator shared prey arrangements have a clear power differential - the stronger one can chase the weaker ones away from kills and if they are slow enough that may be their main strategy.

If there were say merpeople from a similar time table it would take a long time for conflicts to start because they have a totally different environmental niche.

Anyway early bands of hominids were nomadic by necessity due to localized depletion of food supplies. Given that scarcity it is no wonder that they would come into conflict and managed to drive megafauna to extinction. And their numbers weren't exactly high - humanity bears genetic scars of near extinction.

Said scarcity is such a thing of the past that we have food distribution problems instead of production ones.

Granted there is also a long history of zero sum thinking holding humanity back.

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't intelligences engineered to be a component of our society, by definition, be sharing an environmental niche with us. Going back to your merpeople analogy, we wouldn't put in the effort to build AI, just to drop them in the ocean and have them live their lives separately from us and providing no use to us unless they become so economical that they're just literally everywhere on Earth.

Edit: and going back to you merpeople example, the onset of humans represents a mass extinction level event for the closest thing to merpeople: ceteceans. [http://www.iucn-csg.org/index.php/status-of-the-worlds- cetac...](http://www.iucn-csg.org/index.php/status-of-the-worlds-cetaceans/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" Besides its economic threat, the advance of AI seems to pose a cultural threat: if physical systems can do what we do without thought to give meaning to their achievements, the conscious human mind will be displaced from its unique role in the universe as a creative, responsible, rational agent."_

That's a bit of an aggrandizing characterization for the gang of monkeys that climbed down the trees a couple of ice ages ago, that almost nuked itself over a disagreement on the best way of distributing bananas, roughly speaking.

 _" We are agents in the world, whose decisions, choices, actions are made meaningful by the content of the belief/desire pairings that bring them about. But what if the theory of mind that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes that got us here? Then it will turn out that neuroscience is a far greater threat to human distinctiveness than AI will ever be."_

Oh my, a threat to our _distinctiveness_! Next thing those scientists will tell us that the earth is not the center of the universe, that the stars in the sky aren't fixed and that indeed Santa Claus himself is not a real person running a sweatshop at the north pole.

<comment><USER2> OMG, your last paragraph brought tears to my eyes. Did your parents not tell you? (Can someone else, ... I cannot do it!)

Seriously though, human's have been replaced every few years since we showed up. As long as AI's don't annihilate each other I think we should just be proud parents and stop worrying that they are going to grow up and want the car keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I posted about fusing Neanderthal brains to spiking neural networks here once. A HN poster threatened to get the Pope to stop me.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425194)

You have no idea how much more powerful neurology is over machine learning.

<comment><USER14> As we start to understand neurology sufficiently to simulate it, the two fields are converging. Eventually (soon?) they'll be seen as sub-fields of the study of intelligence.

(As for your fusing neural organoids to computers, there was a sci-fi story I read years ago that used this theme. There were human-level AIs that needed some integrated organic grey matter to perform some of their higher level functions. Wish I could remember what it was - although that description probably covers half a dozen stories by now.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Duke University."

Not a neuroscientist. Not a cognitive psychologist. He gives short shrift to the utility of different levels of description to inform each other.

<comment><USER16> Are we to dismiss philosophers of science for talking about the philosophical implications of science?

<comment><USER15> No. But does he understand the neuroscience?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A more informative title would be "Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat to Human Distinctiveness than AI?"

<comment><USER16> The title was very misleading, especially since AI's "threat" usually means a paperclip maximiser or something. I ended up skimming through the whole article to try and figure out what was being threatened. Until the very end I assumed it was our ability to function, knowing how meaningless consciousness is.

<comment><USER18> I think the threat implied would be that if all of our beliefs are essentially meaningless then nihilism might appear to be the logical outcome.

That is largely what I believe (about beliefs) - they are cute but meaningless.

<comment><USER19> well that's cute... but meaningless :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't mean to be snarky, I think Prof Rosenberg has just discovered the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)

</comment><comment><USER21> Just a developer, but is this author subtly arguing that in the end, behaviorism has some sort of validity?

<comment><USER22> The weird part is that he specifically mentions behaviorism:

> Except for a brief period when psychologists embraced a wrongheaded > behaviorism, the theory of mind everyone shares drove the 20th century > research programs of child psychology and psychiatry, cognitive science, > evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience.

But then by the end goes ahead and suggests the premises of behaviorism as a conclusion...?

> By colonizing consciousness spoken language turned it into a monologue of > silent speech, tricking us that the meaning of spoken words is given by > thoughts' content when its just silent sounds passing through consciousness. > Neuroscience shows that that in our brains the neural circuits neither have > nor need content to do their jobs.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something somewhere? Is this guy really the one in charge of the philosophy department at Duke?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Combine the two and then you get those rat brained robot things. Gives you a nice little shortcut to true awareness in AI, by cheating and using meat to tell the silicon what to do. [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat- brained-robot/](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Neuroscience is the most powerful science, because the human brain is what does science in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that 'artificial intelligence' being used as a curtain for the Ozs of the world to hide behind is a much greater threat than either of these things.

</comment><comment><USER26> No.

<comment><USER27> I read once that the answer to any article whose title is a question is always "no."

In my own anecdotal experience over the past couple years, this no hypothesis has been right about 90% of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can someone drop a TLDR for the at-work crowd? would be V grateful

<comment><USER29> Humans have this seemingly innate or nearly innate theory of mind, where the beliefs and desires of other people can be reasoned about in an effort to understand or predict their behavior.

A few key neuroscience results suggest that the brain does not really work how the "theory of mind" has us think it should. The concepts of belief and desire that we use in our theory of mind, may actually just be crude heuristics that were useful at some point in our evolutionary past, but don't actually have explanatory power in the way most humans naturally try to apply them today.

I don't really know how strong this idea is. I think it is fairly speculative in these early days of research.

My summary l may have a bit of extra color. I listened to Sean Carroll's podcast with the article author, where this same topic was a big part of the conversation.

<comment><USER2> That is a pretty good TLDR, in fact I think its better than the whole article.

But heuristics are real things and I have never heard any claims that "Theory of Mind" assumed some particular neural circuit implementation.

So there is a false dichotomy if the article is to be interpreted as pitting "Theory of Mind" against evidence that it isn't a simple circuit.

I don't think the article can be reduced to anything that actually makes sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Potentially Moving to SF / SV with a Family - <AUTHOR> Hi folks,
I could use some advice.  A few weeks ago, I did the Triplebyte quiz on a whim, later did their interview, and now I'm talking to companies in Silicon Valley / San Francisco about potentially interviewing with them.  If you're unfamiliar with Triplebyte, they do their own candidate vetting, with the promise that if you pass their process, you can go directly to a final interview at their client companies (typically early- to mid-stage startups, many YC graduates) who are located almost entirely in California or NYC.  (Triplebyte has been great, by the way, and I highly advise trying them out if you're looking for a new position.[1])
I currently live in Ohio with my wife and infant daughter.  She has a fairly low income job (non-profit), and if we moved to California, she would be a stay-at-home mom.  We own a three bedroom house here.  I make roughly $85K as a full stack developer for a startup here for whom I've worked for a few years.
I'm going to be at the point soon where I need to pick the companies with whom I'll interview.  The expenses of living in a SF / SV suburb are scaring me.  Renting seems in the $3K+ range for a two bedroom (which would be the minimum since we have a daughter... may try for another child later). By comparison, my mortgage is ~$850 / mo.
We're relatively frugal and ideally want to get to a point where we can be financially independent, so savings rate is important.  We would also want to find a decent school district for when my daughter starts school.  Also, we would be moving away from my wife's family, which would require her to fly up fairly frequently so our daughter could see her grandparents.
Basically I'm trying to figure out if I'm crazy for even considering this, and if there is a way to make it work.  Triplebyte has said I'm probably mid- to senior-level and could expect around $130k - $150k.
What are your thoughts?
1. Triplebyte referral link: https://triplebyte.com/iv/afyYdFu/cp ($1500 for both if you get a job through them.) <comment><USER2> School district homes in SV (3b 2b 1300sqft+) are in the 1.5M range or higher near the top employers in the Peninsula. If you're ok accepting a 40min+ commute, the cost reduces to about 900K Townhome + HOA in a good school district.

A family of 4 in the bay area with household income at $105350 is low income ([http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/22/in-costly-bay-area- eve...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/22/in-costly-bay-area-even-six- figure-salaries-are-considered-low-income/)). At 150K you'll be living in rented accommodations with $3K - $3500 in rent per month.

If you consider that your wife will start working, please be aware that daycare starts at about $1.5K++ per month (it might be advantageous for your wife to be a stay at home mom below a certain salary level).

I would recommend targeting a 200K+ total household income for this to work for you.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure you'll find a 3/2 even at that sqft in a decent school district. Redwood City has not great schools and the decent parts of it are around $1.6+ for a starter home from the 50's. Areas with good schools are probably closer to $1.6 or $1.7+. But I'd love to see some recently sold listing links proving me wrong

Source: recent comps from redfin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You will be accepting a decline in quality of life to move to SF for work (increase in salary is not congruent with your increased expenses), and must decide if its worth it.

I'd suggest looking for full stack remote jobs where you'll make $100k-130k/year while remaining in Ohio (if thats where you want to live). Leaving a support system/family behind if you have a child (and considering another child) is not trivial.

Work remote, live better, visit SF once or twice a year for conferences to network and mingle.

<comment><USER5> I think this is a myth. I went from making $55,000 per year as a software engineer in Virgina to making over $100,000 per year in the Bay Area (I'm not anonymous on here so keeping exact amount secret). My rent went from $1500 per month to $2100 per month. My salary increase has more than covered the increased cost of rent.

<comment><USER6> That works for a single person. Not so much for a family looking for a good school district.

<comment><USER5> I didn't grow up in a "good school district." In fact, we were frequently at, or near the bottom in local rankings. However I think I've managed to do all right in life -- the experiences a child learns from outside of school, from libraries to good parenting, to just being allowed to roam -- are way more important than what you learn in the classroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > could expect around $130k - $150k

I make that working remotely from Michigan for a company on the east coast. Costs and stress in SF will likely be substantial. I know, I went to college in the bay area.

> Renting seems in the $3K+ range for a two bedroom

Thats like half your monthly paycheck, no? Doesnt sound safe.

Unless your wife also got an offer making a comparable amount there is no way it would be worth it. I say this as someone that loves visiting Northern CA.

You should switch to remote and leverage your skills to make at least 120k. Enjoy the good life in the Midwest and travel.

</comment><comment><USER8> Holy crap you're gonna be broke. Don't do it.

Expect to pay $3k-ish in the cheapest areas in the peninsula for an older 2 bedroom apartment. Now take all your expenses (eating out, gym, etc) and multiply by 2-3. Oh, and food is at least twice as expensive as in the Midwest (reference: when I fly home to see parents, I occasionally grocery shop for them.) My grocery bill is $700-$800/mo for 2 adults, plus $300/mo of munchery. (That said, I lift hard so I eat a lot of food. Still.)

I really need to emphasize that $3k is for a _crappy_ apartment thrown up in the 80s for bottom dollar.

For comparison, friends rent a (small, crappy) detached 2 bedroom house with a 20x20 ft yard in Mountain View for $4700/mo.

If you want to be in eg Palo Alto Unified, expect to pay $5k-ish for a 3 bedroom. Also, a friend who moved here with a freshman daughter said she hates the school and hates how competitive all the students are.

Sales tax is 9% btw. And don't forget our high state income taxes.

And if you ever managed to buy a home (which you won't be able to do), you'll spend near $1m and pay roughly $1-$1.2k/mo in property taxes. For forever. That makes saving enough money to retire extremely hard.

btw I help manage apartments here; leave your email below if you have questions and I'm happy to answer anything directly.

<comment><USER9> That sounds cool, how did you get into managing apartments on the side?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a family (spouse and two kids), work in SF, and live in the peninsula. Quite honestly, I don't know if I can make it work in the long term. The cost of housing is astronomical - any family home in the peninsula is a million at least, and more likely in the $1.3-1.5 million range. Things are cheaper in the east bay, but I still have to go to the near-end of the BART lines to find a townhome in the $800k range. If I go out there, I probably can't ever take a job in the peninsula because the commute will be too hellish.

Even with a developer salary I'm not able to save anything. Housing + childcare/preschool eats everything up. In a few years when the kids are in public k it's possible that I'll have some financial leeway again.

Spending few years here is worth it because this was a career change and I'm able to learn a ton in the bay area. But unless my salary increases dramatically in a few years, I'll likely move to another area.

For you, I'd wait until you have a few offers in hand, then calculate out how much it would cost for you to live here.

</comment><comment><USER11> I also have an infant daughter, and don't even imagine moving to SV. Other comments have talked enough about the finances, but the main factor for me would be the work-life balance.

From what I hear in online communities, SV sounds extremely anti-family. Companies that can hire new grads that will conveniently work overtime for pizza and beer will not really value a 9-5 family man like yourself. Add to that the stress and time-sink of long commutes, and that's all time that you could be spending with your young family.

<comment><USER10> It depends on the company. Mine is very family friendly. Don't believe everything you read online (including me, haha) - remember that people who are unhappy with their situation is more likely to post stuff online than people who are content.

That said, commute is a killer.

<comment><USER9> I've been in interviews were afterwards the group consensus was to actively not hire the newly engaged woman because people were nervous she'd get pregnant and then take maternity leave. Blatantly illegal, but nobody wrote it down, just said it out loud. She was well qualified and smart, but didn't get an offer. "Culture fit."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I interviewed with Facebook a few years ago. Even before going I had already done the math and decided that based on everything I knew about their compensation, there was no way I could move my family out there without a severe reduction in quality of life.

No matter how I sliced it, I was looking at least a few of the following:

       * Quadrupling our mortgage
       * Picking up a 30-60 minute commute
       * Sending my kids to either expensive private schools or terrible public ones

In the end, we ended up moving from the Midwest to Charleston, SC. It's obviously not SV, but it has a pretty vibrant tech scene. But more importantly, it's just a great place to raise a family. Reasonable cost of living, excellent career opportunities, and the recreational opportunities are endless.

Good luck, pal! I hope you make the right choice.

</comment><comment><USER13> This subject could be easier to address than you might imagine. Moving away from your wife's family is a big sacrifice for her. Is there any advantage to this move besides money?

<comment><USER14> I totally agree with ytNumbers, family and support systems make a huge difference in quality of life. If your wife needs to run out to do an errand without your daughter, she can call family today. That won't be available in the Bay Area, and you'll wind up paying someone (not to mention finding said someone).

Also, you should look into Cost of Living calculators. They will take into account your new salary, cost of living (rent, food, gas, etc.) compared to your current salary. [http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of- living/](http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/)

Smaller living space and more traffic are two downsides to the Bay Area. The weather is probably nicer, though, so any outdoor living space can be more utilized.

Personally, I have allergies. That would also be a consideration when moving. Can you take a few weeks trip out with everyone to see if there are any problems (or if existing problems go away)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would interview at Facebook as well. You can live across the bridge in the East Bay where it is cheaper and some have good schools. But with such a big population boom and concerned parents, schools in general will get better even in bad areas since everything is gentrifying. Interview at Google as well but if you do you should try to live in Mountain View since that commute really sucks.

And since your daughter is young you can afford to spend a few years finding the right place. Like I said, commuting sucks. If you pick an SF startup but you are in San Jose, expect a 1hr minimum train ride each way that will be very crowded. Traffic is also bad. Some places have rent control which is nice.

Really think hard on startups you think will be acquired or IPO. You really need the lottery ticket of options to be able to fund a downpayment in the housing lottery. It's almost impossible to pick the right early stage startup.. YC is a good filter but also go find the ones with the super smart people. The type that succeed no matter what. Or find a startup with veteran or ex-industry types. This is where networking in crucial.

It will be a shock. Then again the Bay area is beautiful with great things to do but my guess is you'll be working all the time!!! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> You should be able to make $120k+ as a senior engineer in any of the top 5-10 markets. For example, look at Chicago if you'd like to stay near where you currently live and still have a reasonable cost of living.

There's no way I would stay in SF if I had children. Maybe south bay, but even then you're still looking at spending $4k / month on a 3 bedroom house.

</comment><comment><USER17> If savings is your goal I wouldn't do it...

Just the difference in your housing costs (about 30k after taxes) wipe out your salary increase. On top of that it sounds like you'd be losing a 2nd income as well by moving so it looks like a net loss. On top of that other things in the area are going to be some what more costly.

</comment><comment><USER18> Single income with a kid in the Bay is not going to be luxurious, you'll want to prep for some cuts in lifestyle if you were used to nice things. That 150k gets decimated by taxes real quick, + the 4k for a 2 bedroom which will have to be further away from most of the "sexier" spots where it will cost a lot more, hence more commuting.

E.g. you're taking home 90k after taxes, minus 50k for housing, that leaves 40k for you + wife + kid. Yes, you're not going to be starving, but you won't be living large either.

Can you consider a remote gig with a SV company? You would stay in Ohio, get a big bump to your current income stream, the wife and kids would not have to move anywhere etc. You'll just have to fly into to the Bay once in a while to spend time with the team, otherwise you'll be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love a remote gig, assuming it was as an FTE with benefits (healthcare being important for family and all). My wife's company cannot afford to provide any benefits whatsoever.

It just seems like recently, the move is toward in-office employment with little to no work from home. I've talked to a handful of companies I'd love to work with, but I'd be willing to bet that they would all balk at remote employment.

<comment><USER3> What does your wife do for the non profit? Is it something transferable to the corporate world where the pay would be a lot better? Or is one of your goals for her to be a stay at home mom?

<comment><AUTHOR> She manages an after school drop-in center in a rural area, part time. I want her to be happy, working or not; I think at the moment she likes staying at home with our daughter, at least for now. I'm not sure how transferable it is. This sort of thing tends to pay absolute bottom dollar unless you have a Masters in Social Work or Masters in Education which she does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Moving to SF/SV sounds fun, until you look at the quality of life. If you're hellbent on going this route, IMO you should possibly consider the NYC route and live in NJ. Your prices will be high as well, but the quality of life is much better. You can easily commute into NYC via train and then get back to NJ and have some ability to have a "normal life" without being in the city.

That said, there are other options. Look at WeWorkRemotely.com and RemoteOk.io for remote jobs. Get a good job, work remotely and have a good quality of life.

I almost went down the SF/SV route many times. Each time I ran the pros/cons and SF/SV has the worse return on life value for a family, IMO than almost anywhere. I've worked remotely for nearly 9 years and love this life. No commuting. Just my .02.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's definitely possible to live a middle-class lifestyle with a $150k/year salary in SV, although you'll likely have to give up some comforts you may be used to (and also remember taxes are much higher in CA). Would your wife consider working once you move? $180-200k of household income is much more livable.

The biggest thing you might want to consider that you may not be thinking about is the lifestyle difference. The weather is mild year-long here, which means not having to deal with Ohio winters. If you like outdoorsey stuff, hiking/camping/etc are huge here, and it's a day's drive to ski resorts. You'll need to own a car here, but depending on where you live you may be able to take public transport to work, and towns are very biking-accessible.

<comment><AUTHOR> My wife doesn't have much in the way of skills, and I fully acknowledge that childcare would consume most / all of her income if she was working (that was in my post originally but I had to cut it down to get under the 2K character limit).

The weather does sound really nice, and we own our two Priuses outright. It's sounding really unaffordable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> SV / SF is no place for a family. Most of it is high crime and quite seedy. You'll pay significantly more for housing. Only the 80% of SF which is rent controlled is affordable (as an outsider, you'll never get this). At market rate, For 6K/month you might be able to rent a tiny 2 bedroom apartment with no parking. You'll never be able to save up for a condo and you can forget about a house. Most of us, are trying to get out of SV/SF. I wouldn't recommend you come here unless you'r facing homelessness or absolute destitute.

If you do come, I recommend, you ask for 170K minimum. Even then, you should make plans to leave within a few years.

<comment><USER22> I have been living in SV for many years. There is very little crime, not sure what you are talking about. Even areas that were historically high crime (EPA and Oakland) are rapidly gentrifying that there will be no crime in the next 5 years.

<comment><USER21> Not SV, but SF is quite high in crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As you can see, everyone is telling you not to move here under these circumstances. I'm a long timer here and I can confirm, $150K is great for a single person who's looking to rent and eventually share a place with a roommate. You'd be able to enjoy what the Bay Area has to offer.

Under your circumstances, it's a No-Go for sure. Plus you'll end up dealing with all the rudeness and competitiveness in Bay Area. That alone should keep you away from the Bay. Then traffic, prices, etc. Long timers are actually looking to get out of the Bay, snapping larger homes and a better quality of life somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm fuzzy on why your wife would become a stay-at-home mom when your cost of living would at least double. Not like there aren't plenty of nonprofits that underpay in the bay (every little bit helps). If you can't keep your wife happy without her not working, don't do the move, period.

There are families of 6 that live in illegal 1-car garage units on the peninsula who pay >$1k a month for the privilege. If you think that's crazy (I do) then you have to come up with less-crazy alternatives.

If you want to try hacking it in the bay, recommend you go for an extreme commute from a place like Antioch or Manteca. You can get otherwise-sane deals on housing if you're willing to sacrifice an extra hour's drive each way. Your little ones can have a yard and their own rooms while you slog it out on some of America's most miserable interstates.

Also kinda crazy, but totally worth considering, move to Las Vegas and commute via air. Cheap one hour flight each way, low cost of living.

As you "season" in the bay, you may be offered more and more money as you take on new positions. Eventually even buying a $1+ million house that checks all the usual boxes will become possible. It takes years for this to happen, but you may find as your career grows, uprooting the family every year to move 10 minutes closer to work can make things better.

</comment><comment><USER25> The additional money would not buy you an equivalent quality of life. It's that simple

In addition to the increase in money not being enough to buy you an equivalent quality of life you will be living in a completely different culture. This will wear on not only you but your wife. You really don't want to be turning your life upside down and ditching your connections/support network at this point in your life.

SV, NYC, and similar are places where you go to make money. They are not places you go to settle down.

</comment><comment><USER26> Since TripleByte also has companies in NYC, I'll provide a datapoint if you are considering NYC instead of the bay area. Our (my spouse and mine) goals around financial independence are similar to yours. We left the NYC area.

Before I say anything else, one of the major benefits of both NYC and the Bay Area is that you have a lot of opportunites to climb the career ladder. If that's what you want, you'll have a lot of opportunity to increase your salary beyond the range you've stated.

For that salary range I wouldn't recommend the greater NYC area unless there is a significant bonus and you know you'll get it. Housing becomes cheaper once you get away from NYC. But home prices are still high and property taxes are shocking in New Jersey, varying widely from town to town. At one point I was evaluating NYC/NJ vs the Bay Area, and concluded the property taxes and various fees (e.g. HOA) made NJ almost as unappealing as the Bay Area. The housing stock isn't great either.

Everybody says NJ has decent public transit to NYC. That's only if you can afford a home near a NJ Transit or PATH stop and your office is near a train station on the same line. Otherwise you might be driving to an NJ Transit station (and pay $100/month+ for parking), NJ Transit to Path Train/NYC MTA, then walk. Plus, all those are very crowded at peak times. Somebody I worked with had car->bus->train->train to get to work.

In NYC it's easy to get trapped in cycle of climbing the job ladder (maybe taking jobs you hate) just so you can feel like you can accumulate savings and an emergency fund. I was amazed by how many tech people I met who worked in banking who hated their jobs and worked way more than they wanted to because of the pay and a desire to stay in the NYC area.

<comment><USER10> So did you end up leaving the NYC area? Where did you go, roughly speaking.

<comment><USER26> I moved South, somewhere in the Carolinas/Georgia area.

Where I am now there are far fewer tech jobs than NYC, and a lot of the jobs are in companies that aren't as fancy sounding as what you'd see in NYC. I moved to a job with a bit of travel, so I didn't take too much of a pay cut. Some days I wonder if I made the right choice, but I don't worry about my savings getting destroyed by rent/mortgage+taxes during a job loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am someone who lives with a wife and a kid in the Bay Area. I lived in single income for a year (was making around 150K as well). I had a small single family home in East Bay, which I bought at around 600K. Had a tough commute to the peninsula. It is doable, if you are ready to live in East Bay - Fremont, Union City, Dublin, Livermore etc. A job in the City proper is actually better as you can take the BART.

No one mentions the upside of living in the Bay Area: 1\. My pay doubled as the stock market reached new highs in 3 years 2\. My wife got a job in the 120K range 3\. We sold our home and made 200K profit from it

In 3 years, we secured an extremely comfortable life, with money in the bank, great experience, in a booming job market, a large house and with all the amenities of living in the Bay Area.

If I am in your position, I would think where I would be in 3-5 years time.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wouldn't do it if I were you. Working at these companies is nowhere near as cool as it is marketed to sound. They're just jobs. Your cost of living will probably go up 3-4x and your salary won't even double.

</comment><comment><USER9> Only do it if your wife will work and you guys can be dual income. Also, realize a lot of apartments will actively discriminate against renting to couples with kids, mainly because the buildings here are built terribly with just wood frames, so if you get downstairs neighbors they will complain about your kids running around. They won't tell you they're not renting to you because of your kids, you just won't get selected to rent any units.

</comment><comment><USER28> One important thing: just because you work in SF (or Oakland) it doesn't mean you need to live there. Check out all the cities with BART access. I've known some developers to live as far away as Concord and even Livermore for the cost of living. Of course, the catch is that the commute is guaranteed to be terrible. But really unless you live and work in the same city (which is a luxury here), that's the case for everyone here.

</comment><comment><USER29> Did this calculation a few years back, and living in the Bay Area on one salary (possibly plus a non-engineer salary) looked financially impossible. I'd definitely recommend taking a trip out there and looking carefully at what your life would be like there. Among other things, note that living in a house there is impossible until/unless you win the IPO lottery.

</comment><comment><USER30> Also: removing wife and kids from extended family and work is a sure way to the family troubles.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want a divorce, this is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER32> or....

You could consider living somewhere like Berkeley, which is a short (and direct) 20 minute BART ride into S.F. (if you don't have a remote or local job).

I'd push hard to get your salary up to ~$165k/year as a senior-level (totally doable).

After taxes and whatever you throw down for partial Health Care payments through your job, you can target around $9k/month in your pocket.

1) About 1/3 of your income can go to housing. You can rent a small home in Berkeley (very nice areas) for $3k to $3.5k/month [1][2] The market is just now starting to open back up, so it'll only get better.

2) About 1/3 of your income can go to bill's, groceries, car payments, BART tickets, etc... (~2.5k to 3k)

3) Last 1/3 of your income (~3k) can go directly into your savings account.

It's doable, in very nice areas, with a high quality of life.

That said...

...it all depends on what your personal definition of "high quality of life" is.

Top rated public schools (9/10 & 10/10 rated), great weather year around, hiking, biking, sailing, surfing, beaches, skiing, fishing, local farmers markets (supplied by actual local farms from the central valley), amazing & unique local Grocery markets [3], stellar independent eateries [4], etc... all out your back door, most of it walkable [5], most of it bike friendly [6], and/or very close by.

Big, spacious, modern house with lot's of acreage. Nope.

[1] [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eby/hhh?nh=49&min_price=...](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eby/hhh?nh=49&min_price=3000&max_price=3500&availabilityMode=0)

[2] [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/sub/d/beautiful-and- serene-...](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/sub/d/beautiful-and- serene-2-bdrm/6260430341.html)

[3] [https://www.yelp.com/biz/monterey-market- berkeley](https://www.yelp.com/biz/monterey-market-berkeley)

[4] [https://www.yelp.com/biz/gourmet-ghetto- berkeley](https://www.yelp.com/biz/gourmet-ghetto-berkeley)

[5] [https://www.cityofberkeley.info/bicyclingandwalkingguides/](https://www.cityofberkeley.info/bicyclingandwalkingguides/)

[6] [http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/07/11/berkeley-gets- first-b...](http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/07/11/berkeley-gets-first-bike- share-stations/)

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, I'm completely fine with a commute. I thought that was obvious when I said suburbs. Hell, my current commute is ~35 minutes. How is it that Berkeley is apparently so cheap while being that close?</comment></comment>


Don't break the chain – 6 months later - <AUTHOR> http://mariusandra.com/blog/2014/03/dont-break-the-chain-6-months-later/

<comment><USER2> _Many praised the changes in their life after starting to consistently wake up early in the morning._

But I like to sleep as late as possible. I feel like my life would be worse if I had to wake up earlier every day.</comment>