Through European lenses this part seems insane. It is work, so pay me for it :) Every oncall rotation I was part of ever was paid, is the "unpaid" part a US thing, or was I just lucky?
This is of course a complicated question. The US has many tax jurisdictions and widely variable cost of living, and jobs vary a lot. But I could compare, say, a Google engineer in Paris vs Seattle.
A Google senior software engineer in Paris earns €168k per year (according to levels.fyi) and takes home €96k after a 43% effective tax rate. A Google senior engineer in Seattle earns €336k and takes home €239k after 29% taxes, a 2.5x increase in take-home pay. According to Numbeo, cost of living in Seattle is 15-25% higher.
Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement. As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.
Anecdotally, I know people who were able to opt out of working altogether after 10-15 years in a large tech company in the US. I don't think this is common in Europe.
What use is earning all that extra cash if you're working yourself to death with no way to enjoy the money? I work in a large international org and despite the people in the US earning a lot more than their EU counterparts, they also pretty much universally seem more miserable, are working all sorts of odd hours, have basically no holidays (the amount of times I've gotten a "Vacation again!?" questions from people in the US is insane to me), have to stress more about doctors visits and stuff like that.
I've had a lot of opportunities to be earning a lot more than I do now by moving to the US, but seeing the state of the US I'm more than happy with my 32 hour contract and 5 weeks of vacations that I get to actually enjoy.
It's a reasonable question, and one that I've debated at length with friends, but which cannot be addressed satisfactorily in a brief exchange of internet comments :)
During the golden years of big tech in the states, when employee retention was king and it was pretty much impossible to fire someone who wasn't completely useless, I think it was a pretty good deal. Although East Coast work culture has always been pretty intense as you describe, a lot of West Coast people I know had good balance between work and everything else. Some people chose to work very hard and chase promotions, and others chose to go home early and spend their time with family or doing hobbies, and both ways were considered acceptable. The better companies offered 5 weeks of vacation, and people would go completely offline during that time, although some people would have to be cajoled by their managers to actually take the time off.
Recently it feels like things in the US have gotten much more intense and stressful, although the pay is as high as ever it does feel less worth it. People compete with their coworkers not just for promotion but for survival. There are still pockets where you can have both high pay and some sense of job security, but they are much scarcer than before.
I've heard of an American senior executive who was assigned to an Australian office and at first thought everyone was lazy but then after actually working there for a while he was sad to have to go back.
>Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement.
Isn't social security a thing? Plus employer funded 401K also?
>As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.
"As long as" is doing a lot of lifting here, and that's enough if you're lucky enough to own your own property and not have to pay market rate rent at your old age.
Social Security alone will, at best, slightly mitigate poverty. 401Ks are generally employee-funded, with some firms providing matching funds, especially during good economic times and where the firm is in a field where the main area of labor relied on relatively scarce so that there is competition for talent.
EDIT: The line about social security is a little inaccurate in the extreme case; its actually technically possible to reach a moderate income ($62k/year) on Social Security, if you have a long enough working career (35 years or more) earning at the maximum taxed wages for Social Security (currently $185k+) and claim at or beyond the age that maximizes the benefit calculation (70 years).
In the US it's common to either negotiate 'differential' pay for the responsibility, or as one might see in this thread, get suckered into it for free.
Laws can change, sure, but probably business practices will change first, since it is easier. In EU, you are entitled to money refund for online purchased goods (with some caveats ofc), but the business can (and most do) require you to send the item back first, on your own expense. That reduces the risk of fraud like this.
hardly - go read up on eBay scams. it's never been easier to scam people online. all shipping the item do is force the scam buyer to make the defects so, which is why many if not most seller just pay the buyer partially to keep as-is
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
I am very happy that we get the advent of code again this year, however I have read the FAQ for the first time, and I must admit I am not sure I understand the reasoning behind this:
> If you're posting a code repository somewhere, please don't include parts of Advent of Code like the puzzle text or your inputs.
The text I get, but the inputs? Well, I will comply, since I am getting a very nice thing for (almost) free, so it is polite to respect the wishes here, but since I commit the inputs (you know, since I want to be able to run tests) into the repository, it is bit of a shame the repo must be private.
If enough inputs are available online, someone can presumably collect them and clone the entire project without having access to the puzzle input generation code, which is the "secret sauce" of the project.
Are you saying that we all have different inputs? I've never actually checked that, but I don't think it's true. My colleagues have gotten stuck in the same places and have mentioned aspects of puzzles and input characteristics and never spoken past each other. I feel like if we had different inputs we'd have noticed by now.
It depends on the individual problem, some have a smaller problem space than others so unique inputs would be tricky for everyone.
But there are enough possible inputs that most people shouldn't come across anyone else with exactly the same input.
Part of the reason why AoC is so time consuming for Eric is that not only does he design the puzzles, he also generates the inputs programmatically, which he then feeds through his own solver(s) to ensure correctness. There is a team of beta testers that work for months ahead of the contest to ensure things go smoothly.
(The adventofcode subreddit has a lot more info on this.)
He puts together multiple inputs for each day, but they do repeat over users. There's a chance you and your colleagues have the same inputs.
He's also described, over the years, his process of making the inputs. Related to your comment, he tries to make sure that there are no features of some inputs that make the problem especially hard or easy compared to the other inputs. Look at some of the math ones, a few tricks work most of the time (but not every time). Let's say after some processing you get three numbers and the solution is their LCM, that will probably be true of every input, not just coincidental, even if it's not an inherent property of the problem itself.
I don't know how much they "stand out" because their frequency makes it so that the optimal global leaderboard strat is often to just try something dumb and see if you win input roulette.
if we just look at the last three puzzles: day 23 last year, for example, admitted the greedy solution but only for some inputs. greedy clearly shouldn't work (shuffling the vertices in a file that admits it causes it to fail).
I have a solve group that calls it "Advent of Input Roulette" because (back when there was a global leaderboard) you can definitely get a better expected score by just assuming your input is weak in structural ways.
I don't push my solutions publicly, but I made an input downloader so you can input your cookie from your browser and load (and cache) the inputs rather than commit them.
This is not surprising at all, to me. Just commit the example input and write your test cases against that. In a nicely structured solution, this works beautifully with example style tests, like python or rust doctests, or even running jsdoc @example stanzas as tests with e.g. the @linus/testy module.
The example input(s) is part of the "text", and so committing it is also not allowed. I guess I could craft my own example inputs and commit those, but that exceed the level of effort I am willing to expend trying to publish repository no one will likely ever read. :)
> Pricing model for a terminal. What a time to be alive.
As soon as they raised like 50M+ (why you'd ever need 50 million dollars to build a terminal—which have been essentially "solved" since the 1970s—is a pretty good question), this was bound to happen. Same nonsense will happen to Zed, etc.
To be fair, for those of us who live in a terminal, the terminal is/was not solved.
Old terminals are slow and have a bunch of weird Unicode issues.
Now, Warp is a terrible product, and I have nothing nice to say about them.
But look at modern terminals like Kitty or Ghostty. There are so many very nice improvements. Like mouse support that works well (as opposed to "kind of works, but who needs a mouse?!, won't fix"), fast keyboard response (you'd think it wouldn't be noticeable, but it's very noticeable), copy-and-paste that makes sense and isn't different from everything else on the system, etc.
I’m on ghostty but warp is a lot more than a terminal. I used to consider their product to be a shitty AI powered terminal until I saw a demo of it. Now I consider it as a fair AI agent application that has a good CLI integration and some notebook features.
The growing popularity of ghostty has made me realize a lot of people don’t use scroll back history search. I use it frequently to save time and avoid having to rerun time intensive tasks to pipe them through grep or tee everything to a file.
I like Ghostty, but it's still missing a few features I need. Warp was interesting, but it was honestly overwhelming when I was simply reaching for a terminal. For now, I'm back on Terminal.app until Ghostty catches up feature wise.
You meant "iTerm2 with no scrollbars and no scrollback history search" was spelled wrong.
(yes I know they are working on it; but I also know iTerm2 and Konsole have had them since about forever, and I use that feature a lot, so it's kinda major impediment)
Just started using this - it's pretty nice. Very customizable but it makes my oh-my-zsh setup look like crap with it's fonts.
I started using it since it's cross platform and I use chezmoi, but the config quickly gets complicated if you want things like folders in your tab titles, etc
If you pay for Claude Code, couldn't you then say you're paying for Visual Studio Code? Or if you use CC in the CLI, you're also paying for that terminal? Warp is just packaging AI with their terminal product.
The difference is the point of sale. With VS Code, you purchase your AI compute elsewhere (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.), and then use it through the free VS Code interface.
With Warp, you purchase your AI compute through Warp (who then pays Anthropic, Open AI, etc. based on the model you choose).
It's not "a terminal", it's a terminal with AI features that cost money to run. I understand you may not be interested in them, but let's not pretend that burning GPU power comes for free.
I think you’re right, but I also suspect that doesn’t clear up anything for most people as in my experience they generally don’t grok the difference unless they’ve already spent a significant amount of time in something like smalltalk or Objective-C
Last time I was looking into this, is there not up to an hour of delay for the billing alerts? It did not seem possible to ensure you do not run over your budget.
It's worth noting that you'd have to pay for the book only once. Every new edition you'd get for free. Mickey keeps the book updated and relevant for every new release of Emacs.
Through European lenses this part seems insane. It is work, so pay me for it :) Every oncall rotation I was part of ever was paid, is the "unpaid" part a US thing, or was I just lucky?