Talking about the general population, sure. But we're talking about software engineers, the most highly paid while at the same time the most accessible profession of all time.
There are high school dropouts making 5 times the national average wage in SWE, and that's not unusual at all - you have the ones making 10 times for the "unusual" category. A person that knows nothing can get a job that pays the national average wage in this industry.
I personally helped 7 people get from 0 to a job within a year. All of them are now (after 1-3 years of experience) making at least 5 times more than they did before they switched careers.
You never know what someone is dealing with unless they tell you. A bad business decision as a sole trader, an ex-marriage with kids and a SAH parent that they're supporting, difficult/societal pressures around family (care is _very_ expensive), a gambling problem.
> 5 times the national average wage in SWEE, and that's not unusual at all
In the US. Everywhere else, that's incredibly unusual. 5x the average wage in the UK is 150k plus - that's _very_ unusual.
Also, the average wage in the US is $75k. The "average case" engineer isn't making $375k with 10 years experience, nevermind with 1-3 years experience.
> A person that knows nothing can get a job that pays the national average wage in this industry.
I didn't say average, I said it's not unusual. Obviously you need to be good to get to that level. But you can do it without any schools, just by sitting down at home and learning, and then replying to few LinkedIn messages.
In my experience, this would be the case for cca 20-25% of the people I work with. So yeah, definitely not average - but definitely not something you never see. Every team has few devs like that.
> In the US. Everywhere else, that's incredibly unusual. 5x the average wage in the UK is 150k plus - that's _very_ unusual.
I am in Europe and it's normal here. Maybe not the UK, I'm in continental. Looking at it in detail, high taxes seem to mess with this a lot. I'm in a very low taxed region (my full income tax + health and social insurance combined was 9% of my income last year).
> This is nonsense.
No, it's not. I've just helped a junior friend get a job that pays 1.5x the average wage, the only thing they know is the very basics of HTML.
I helped other friends too, those knew a little more (basic programming skills - variables, conditions, cycles) and immediately got 2x the average wage.
In the US that's true, but not necessarily everywhere. My wife was out of work for 15 years after a burnout and while raising kids with their own difficulties, and it was definitely financially stressful where I am (Netherlands). Besides being very stressful in general, of course.
Software engineers, too, will have financial struggles.
Expensive illness in the family, divorce, triplets, cost of living crisis, natural disasters, accidents, unexpected salary cuts.
People's expenses typically track income, if your income for whatever reason suddenly decreases, a lot of folks, even "rich" software engineers can easily be in financial trouble.
I live in Canada and make a few thousand more than the median income in my current city. It's certainly not 2x as much less 5x what others are making here.
I'f I wanted to buy a house here I'd have to make a minimum of 3x my current salary despite being "well paid".
Where I live it's normal to live in apartments. Entire houses are pretty much inaccessible to anyone except the richest - and they are all split into apartments anyways. This is normal, I don't know why this would be an indicator of anything.
Because not all countries are the same. In Canada owning a home is the historical norm and until a few years ago someone making the median income could have afforded one in most places.
Very few Canadians actually want to live in an apartment, home ownership is the goal.
Canada's home ownership rate is currently 66.5%[1] which is higher than many countries, but it used to be higher.
Few decades ago it didn't matter much whether you live in the capital, in a small town or in a village, today the capital is much more desirable than either of the other places. Now there are also many foreign people moving in who can't even go to the other places because people don't speak English there. And frankly, we have big issues with new construction - it takes 8 years to obtain the necessary government approvals!
Houses used to be cheap here (in the capital) as well and even I still remember that time, but we had to adapt to the new situation. My grandmother had a 200m^2 flat and that was normal; I have 100m^2 and am considered very rich, people in my age and family situation (2 people) usually live in 35-45m^2.
Of course everybody would love to own a whole house in the capital! It's like asking "who wants to be rich?" and being surprised that everybody does.
> home ownership is the goal.
We own the apartments, though (home ownership rate over 75%). You can't buy an apartment in Canada? Perhaps that'd be the first thing to fix...
There's lots of people out there who are at higher than national average in places that have a cost of living 3x+ the national average, who have exceptional expenses like caring for a special needs child or a sick relative, and/or have childcare costs that folks in lower COLA places often have covered by parents or by a stay-at-home parent.
Collectively we can stop acting like every SSE in America is sipping champagne and eating caviar every day, because they really aren't.
Schizophrenia is directly linked to dopamine. So is ADHD, but in the opposite way (not enough dopamine). Both were demonstrated on fMRI.
Psychosis is a physical issue in the brain (too much dopamine making the brain fire when it shouldn't) that's solved by administering dopamine antagonists (= antipsychotics).
There is little surprise that if a brain is behaving differently, that we can see differences in neurotransmitters. Like the Serotonin Hypothesis, that doesn't mean the neurotransmitters themselves are part of the physical cause and not just a consequence.
It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.
A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).
There are dozens, but this is one of the most clear and to the point, and is found in one of the most mainstream, orthodox, and hard-to-get-published-by journals in mental health:
Weinberger DR, Radulescu E. Finding the elusive psychiatric “lesion” with 21st-century neuroanatomy: a note of caution. Am J Psychiatry. 2016;173(1):27-33.
The situation is about as bad as it can be: there are so many potential sources of confounding in MRI studies that they simply cannot be trusted to say anything about the basic cellular elements of brain tissue in either healthy or diseased patients. All they can validly talk about is themselves; in other words "rather than referring to differences as evidence of brain structural abnormalities, they should be called differences on MRI measurements."
This is without getting into other hugely problematic aspects of MRI studies in mental health: tiny samples; failure to replicate; and most interesting to me, the fact that experimental subjects (i.e. the people in the study "with ADHD" or schizophrenia or whatever) are not screened for psychiatric medication use, which, because medications can shrink brain tissue, can make it look like the condition is affecting brain structure when in fact the drug is. (So another source of confounding, then.)
That is React Native isn’t it? A lot of people end up making custom components (using pure JS), but it’s completely possible to wrap native components and use them. The downside is someone needs to make the native component wrapper as React Native doesn’t really provide much in terms of that out of the box besides maybe a button component.
Expo has a new system that’s in beta that should make doing this much, much simpler (check out expo-modules).
As a user, I suppose it is disappointing there aren't bindings for _everything_ offered on the native platforms. However, there are a ton of packages provided by the community, especially since the "slim core" initiative from Facebook is pretty much done. They removed almost everything not essential from the core or React Native to make it much more focused and I suppose easy to maintain.
I've been evaluating some self-hosted/open source company management systems this weekend.
Most of them are classic multi-page PHP apps. It's terrible. I can't stand how it always reloads each time I click on something. I remember it didn't bother me much in the past when everything was like that, but today we have much better options.
I went for a SaaS built as a SPA. When I click on something, for example to create a new entity, I get a modal/side-panel immediately. When I want details, I get them much quicker and can return back to the listing immediately.
> It's particularly visible in banking applications, where modules are almost completely independent and built by non-overlapping teams, so they take forever to load due to the limitation on concurrent requests in browsers.
They just can't code SPAs well. It's perfectly possible to have both quick loading times and very separate modules.
> I can't stand how it always reloads each time I click on something.
And yet here you are, using HackerNews just about every day, which works exactly the same way. No SPA. No 'forever loading', just a classic, fast SSR webapp that treats individual pieces of content as documents, just like how the web was designed to work.
This is a forum, not a management system where I need to open dozens of listings and hundreds of different detail pages and make modifications there.
It also doesn't bother me much on here because HN is much faster than these systems - no wonder, since it's just a forum. But try updating the details of 50 employees, each separated into 5 subpages, when you need to wait 750ms to have each page load. And you need to load that page multiple times - first to get into the detail, then to put it into "edit" mode, then to save it - and then you can switch to a different subpage of the detail.
Amdhal's Law would suggest that much of the 750ms latency is likely attributed to I/O operations (mainly DB ops) and not CPU. Also, without knowing anything about your setup: upgrading to PHP 8 and/or enabling opcode cache may help. All that said, my original quibble was with development time, not run time overheads.
Beauty of that though is that you can CMD+click on each one and open all 50 into separate tabs, then work on each one whilst the others load in the background. Want to cross-reference? Easy, just shift a tab to a new window. All likely not possible in an SPA, either because links don’t work like links, or because it’ll muck up state.
There's no AJAX call in a SPA if all I did was close a detail side-pane to get back to the listing. The AJAX call goes on in background if I saved a modification and I can continue to use the app as it runs. And when I open a detail, at least I'm not watching the whole damn app reload and reconstruct itself from scratch for the 1000th time, and need to download just the data and not the whole bloated HTML mess.
To play Devil's advocate, while I agree with you, in reality it happened multiple times (last one, 2 minutes ago while writing a comment in other HN entry) where I am writing the response but then would like to have a peek at the chain of comments I'm responding to.
Using the phone that's very annoying. I have to long press on the entry's link on the header, open in a new tab, recheck the message trail, and go back to the first tab to end writing.
So simoly as that, I could think of lots of times where a SPA-style dropdown editor box inserted in the conversation view, would be more useful than the current HN's reply page.
If the reply page contained the whole discussion, though, the problem would be equally solved too. So I'm not saying that an SPA would be 100% better, just mentioning an example that occurred to me.
Agreed on all points, it's just that a large part of why they got a foothold is that you can fire one of your three frontend developers on a moment's notice, whereas a single so-called web developer doing their work and more will have leverage.
They're visibly snappier than server-rendered frontends, or even frontends with JS sprinkled on top when done correctly, but large organisations generally don't do them correctly.
You really don't need an spa for this. You can do the same ux with Turbo from Hotwire (and before it Turbolinks) and traditional server side rendering.
There's a massive difference in how I use a forum and how I use a company management system. MPA is fine for a forum, not for a company management system. This is the web indeed, and the company management app is just using the web browser as an app platform. No reason to conflate the two.
> All of humanities memories somehow encoded in DNA
Why not? The Dune universe is in a very far future, the books are happening 10 thousand years after humanity has been practically completely replaced by AIs and mind-uploaded humans for another 10 thousand years. The factions in Dune perform extensive bioengineering, and that is after the anti-computer revolution.
Why couldn't the computers/people with computers/people-computers before the revolution bioengineer the genetic memory? Or the people who performed the transition back to biological life, perhaps as a way to ensure nobody ever forgets the 10 thousand years of slavery?
> interstellar space travel from taking too many drugs
Interstellar travel in Dune is done using the Holtzmann effect, basically a warp technology. The spice gives them precognition abilities that are necessary to not crash into something while warping.
A robot with an advanced electromagnetic mind-control device... Or just a hacker hooked to Picard's Borg implants/bio-receivers. Or mental illness.
> DS9's first episode has a space alien organism living inside a permanent wormhole and it speaks to you through mind visions, exists at all points in time and can read your mind, put you in your own memories, etc.
They might be lying, or just think it's true. Or again, mental illness. Perhaps we're just seeing Sisko tripping balls.
> Most authors don't even bother building in reasons why that can't happen, its just that no-one thinks of doing it.
Is it really necessary to spell out that a civilization capable of building a FTL starship is also capable of building a sufficient defensive technology?
> I daresay such a civ is not doing it for conquest, but to discover and explore. If the urge is militaristic, then such a civ would turn on itself long before the project succeeds.
I think this is much more complex. Consider a civilization so advanced that this is children's toys for them - and then that civilization falls. Then, on the scraps of it, a new imperialistic faction is built and they go for the conquest; they don't even need to understand the magic that powers their warships. I recommend you to read the full Foundation series in chronological order.
"Is it really necessary to spell out that a civilization capable of building a FTL starship is also capable of building a sufficient defensive technology?"
We have had ICBMs for a long time, yet no sufficient defensive technology as of yet.
Beyond the fact that using them would lead to MAD, that is.
I've read everything. I probably read the Foundation series before you were born (assuming you're 20-something). In fact, Asimov certainly knew that FTL was fraught - but he was writing for a living, and FTL was in vogue and he used the hyperspace version of it. It's unfortunate - I would have liked to see more grounded SF from him
Well the issue remains the same with Bussard ramjets. It's just simpler to make so the whole scenario is more likely (though still very unlikely, ofc).
Or are we talking just about their CDN synchronization, and not about the user traffic?