Not spending time on HN.
Readit Newsjakeway commented on Tech workers who are engineering a mid-30s retirement story.californiasunday.co... · Posted by u/kawera
I'd never heard of FIRE, or MMM, until a couple of years ago. I'm 58 & unemployed but have discovered (honestly, to my surprise) that my wife & I are almost there already.
> $1M in 401K money
> three pensions lined up. go figure.
> zero debt & a modest, paid-off house. with a view.
> health insurance thanks to my wife's by-choice 2nd career
> a preference for state parks, my dogs, and homemade avocado toast. :-)
I know this is humblebragging. But all this financial uber-engineering seems a little over the top. Just staying out of San Francisco is one helluva head start.
You are almost 60 - you should be close to retirement. It would be way more impressive if you were 35.
3 is probably too few. People don't really pay that much attention to what you wear, I promise.
I usually wear my shirts twice and take them to the dry-cleaner after. I'll only go once if it's been a hot day or if the shirt has dirt/stains. Maybe 3 times if I didn't wear it all day.
Plus I have about 7 pairs of high-quality pants that work well in an office and are comfortable for weekends. Most shirts go with most pants. So I have like 70 outfits so it really doesn't feel limiting, especially if you add in a few sweaters, jackets, and shoes to bring the combinations way up.
I did the math on this once to figure out cost-per-wear of my shirts. I kept rough track of how many times I wore a favorite shirt of mine before tossing it. Roughly 100 times. The shirt was like $120. I paid about $0.75 per wear in drycleaning. So like $1.75/wear.
(I could wash and iron for myself to bring this way down to like $1/wear but I hate ironing so I just pay the drycleaner - I also could have gone another 50 or so wears but I spilled coffee on it and I could always see the stain even though nobody else could I'm sure.)
Compare that with a cheap H&M shirt I bought a few years ago for like $40 - I've worn it twice and don't look forward to wearing it again since it doesn't fit as well and is a bit too trendy in its style for me. Cost is like $20/wear. Save your money and buy higher-quality clothes :)
Your H&M example isn't great. The reason you didn't wear it a lot isn't because of the quality, but because you bought a shirt you didn't like. Save your money and only buy clothing you like.
I agree with the recommendation. Automate the Boring Stuff is a great premise and a decent execution. But I'm really concerned by the OP's comment about not knowing math. As in, how much math don't you know? You don't need to be able to solve ODEs or multiply matrices to write Python, or in general unless your field of endeavor calls for it. But I've found that people who have a hard time with basic algebra have a hard time with life. Basic algebra at least, but ideally trigonometry, transcendental functions, and conic sections. People who don't know math think, "when would I ever use that?" The answer is "way more often than you would expect." When you don't know what you're missing, you have to invent bad answers to solved problems, or do without.
Would you mind giving some examples of how not knowing about transcendental functions and conic sections would make someone have a hard time with life?
I don't just want any right swipe. I want a right swipe from the type of person I want to meet. The image tinder claimed was best is IMO not representative of me. I have it in my set of images to show I "clean up well" but if someone chooses me for that picture I feel like they'll be disappointed and most likely not my type therefore I don't have it as my first picture.
Then perhaps you shouldn't have that picture in your profile at all and you won't run into that problem.
Scala.
I did the two functional programming in Scala courses on Coursera. I'm currently going through Martin Odersky's book and am in the middle of my first small project. I'm just starting to turn the corner on feeling productive and actually understanding what the hell I'm doing. If I am half as productive in Scala as I am in my main language (JS) by the end of the year, I'll be quite happy.
If you picked up Scala, I'm going to assume you're interested in functional programming. In which case you should check out the book Functional Programming in Scala. Describes a bit more advanced functional programming ideas using Scala
Deleted Comment
jakeway commented on Why I'm Not a React Native Developer arielelkin.github.io/arti... · Posted by u/nootopian
I image the entire soundscape (what I'm possible of hearing) as a long, thin line which is warbling a bit, as I'm hearing things right now -- like the line in an oscilloscope. The present tinnitus represents itself as a sharp spike in this visualization, the location dependent upon its texture (sharp pings, or a low muffled warble).
I then imagine a giant hand (my hand) on top of that spike, pushing it down, slowly, and as I push it down, the tinnitus subsides (since I know what that subsiding sensation feels like). Sometimes I have to do this pushing motion a few times before the spike slowly attenuates by itself and it joins the surrounding levels.
The entire process takes about 30 seconds, and doesn't work every time. If after a few attempts it fails, I abandon the visualization exercise (lest my brain somehow learns the pushing motion to be ineffective).
It's not entirely clear to me how / why this works: mapping a physical phenomenon onto an abstract mental visualization / picture, and then manipulating that mental picture and thus the physical phenomenon.
I'm also very musical, so these sorts of visualizations tend to come very naturally to me.