cecilpl

This is awful advice.

1. Neither getting married nor getting divorced should be done for financial reasons. Get married because you love someone and want to spend the rest of your life with them, and get divorced because that is no longer true.

2. Children before 35 is good advice. Especially for women, but for men as well. You want to be able to enjoy life with your children, and not be too old to enjoy life with your grandchildren. And sure, be financially stable, but this is not a financial decision at heart.

3. Ugh. Or, you know, choose a few different careers and try them all out. And live within your means at all times.

4. Worst idea. Defined benefit pensions can be reduced or taken away.

5. Learn how to invest on your own (low-cost index funds even). This will be some of the most highly-paid work you will ever do in your entire life. A usual advisor's fee of 1% annually will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime. https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/investingtruths/in...

6. Or, you know, buy the smallest house you can be happy in near where you work. Real estate is a terrible investment that matches pace with inflation in the long run. The stock market returns 7% above inflation annually in the long run, and has never lost money over any 15-year period.

7. Yeah, that's actually good advice.

The key to retiring early is to learn about hedonic adaptation, stop spending money on things that don't make you happy, save a very large percentage of your income (Wife and I earn $100k, save 65%). If you save just half your salary, you can easily retire at 40.

If I'm lucky, when I retire, I'll be having a real-time conversation with my 35-year-old self.

A regular kettle is far more efficient.

Leaded gasoline. Using it allows you to increase the compression of your engine, which improves fuel economy.

The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits, which is why it's banned, yet for each individual person it makes economic sense to use leaded gasoline if you can.

> If this is interesting, and you don't already own kerbal space program, head over to the steam store right now.

And if you like Kerbal Space Program, but you find it isn't quite sadistic enough, go download Orbiter.

To be fair, the Nexus 5 is the only device that is currently running 4.4, and it's only been available for the last week (I'm still waiting for mine to arrive).

Shares trading down 3% in AH.

I'm in the video game industry working on AAA console titles, and the last game I worked on sits right around a million lines for the runtime executable, and maybe another 1-2 million for all the supporting toolchains.

I worked on a game once that was about 4 million lines, and it had continuously evolved for about a decade at that point.

If the 500 million line comment is true, it probably counts all the lines in all the supporting documentation, xml configuration files (which could be huge), etc.

I'd bet my life's savings that it's not actually half a billion lines of executable code.

She doesn't get anything in lieu of benefits, but she gets a full 1/180th of the annual salary per day she works (there are 180 teaching days in the year). On top of that, she still contributes to the pension and can claim unemployment during the summer.

She does occasionally get longer-term assignments for teachers who are away for a couple weeks at a time, so there's a bit of relationship-building and long-term-teaching here and there. She also likes that she has a less authoritative role and can relate to the students on a friendlier level.

My wife is a high school teacher.

She taught full time for 3 years, and burnt herself out with 70 hour weeks of planning, marking, parental communication, and miscellaneous bureaucracy.

Now she's working as an on-call substitute, working 8:30-3 whichever days she wants, and (get this) making more money than she was teaching full time.

Interesting thoughts. As a professional software engineer (~7 years working) I disagree on a few points.

> Nobody cares that you work at a prestigious tech company that gives you ~cool benefits~.

If you're taking a job to impress other people, you're doing it wrong. The only people that really care about where you've worked are future employers.

> These projects were frighteningly representative of what work-life is.

Fairly true, except in the workplace you can count on other people to be marginally competent. In some cases the code is great, and in some cases it's awful. But in the vast majority of cases what counts is not whether it's "good" or not, but whether it works.

> There is little intellectual satisfaction to be had from contorting bytes.

Maybe you're referring to something else, but I find the process of constructing something functional to be immensely satisfying.

> Learning new programming languages is extremely fun at first but exasperating and repetitive after a while.

Never gets old for me. There's always something new and unique in each language.

> but it seems to be having very little impact on my life.

The more money I make, the more I can save, which means the faster I can become financially independent. Although I do enjoy my job, I wouldn't do it for free. I want to spread my time out across all my hobbies rather than tying 40 hours a week to one job in particular.

> If you get into a deep discussion about programming and you're surprised by how many things you know that you don't care about, really consider what that means.

Good point. It probably means you don't really care about programming in general. I love the fact that I know the quirks of python generators, or C++ keywords. I just love understanding systems in their entirely, from top to bottom.

> Find something you're actually passionate about and use programming to do cool things in that area.

Couldn't have said it better.

> Entitlement, lack of compassion, materialism, and (surprisingly) anti-intellectualism is the norm.

I haven't found this to be true at all. Intellectual pursuits are very commonplace in my tech workplace.

This is interesting to me - I had precisely the same reaction.

In fact, I've noticed that throughout my life my initial reaction on reading something that contradicts my previous beliefs is not rejection but extreme interest at the possibility I may have been wrong.

I don't know if that makes me very skeptical or very gullible. I think it's the former.

Did you just learn this from the reddit ELI5 on Rubik's Cubes this morning? :)

This erroneously uses the life expectancy at birth rather than the life expectancy at <current age> - a common mistake.

If my parents are 80, I don't expect them to die in 1 year just because life expectancy at birth is 81. I expect them to live about another 8 years.

Use a table like http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

What pisses me off is having to wait in a kilometer-long line of people merging when what I really want to do is turn right down a side street.

Please keep that line as short as possible by using all the lanes available.

... and then also actually critique it? Fair use involves more than just a declaration.

I've been typing exclusively on Dvorak for 12 years, since I was about 16.

Does colemak offer any significant advantages over dvorak that would make it worthwhile attempting to switch?

No, it's a demonstrator for a full reusable rocket that returns all stages to the launch pad autonomously.

For detailed discussion of this comic, see the following 51000 comment thread on the XKCD fora:

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=101043

We actually placed the story in April 13291 AD via astronomy. There's a section that shows the night sky clearly and the stars have moved slightly from their current positions.

Also interestingly enough Antares has gone supernova in the intervening 11278 years.

See http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...

Context: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130724/15475723929/amash-...

They're similar, yes, but they're aren't one and the same.

GP is pointing out that there are two experiments underway.

Making the user press a button then manually copy/paste the url is okay.

Making the user press a button then automatically copy/paste the url is bad.

Got it.

Yes, many large businesses do some kind of expected value calculation when deciding what course of action to take.

The human brain is not a Ferrari, exquisitely hand-crafted and intelligently tuned.

It's been cobbled together over hundreds of millions of years out of whatever spare parts were lying around. It does its job remarkably well considering, but there are obvious design flaws that could be improved.

In 2002 I made a paypal account with my yahoo email address. I attached my bank account to it, the same one I still use.

I haven't used that paypal account or that email address in years. A while back I realised the folly of this and removed as much information as I could from the account.

But, what if I'd just forgotten about it? Now anyone who registers my (common) yahoo email, attempts a password reset on the popular websites, can drain my bank account.

I can't tell if this is satirical or not. This reads like a Swiftian condemnation of the needless wars we're fighting.

You also have the right not to tell the principal of your high school about all the drugs you're doing.

He generally does that anyway. See http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/01/raising-a-family-o...

Or just google "300mbps in terabytes/month".

Just because you only use the internet to watch cat videos doesn't mean there isn't critical infrastructure that depends on the continued functioning of the internet.