Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | imajoredinecon's commentslogin

If I’m understanding right, he has a side hustle as a public speaker. So the website is an ad for him.


I agree it does a pretty good job of communicating that. I think the other commenters are pointing out that doesn’t show how to efficiently get all the smaller items left of the partition and larger ones to the right. While that’s probably second nature to most people who’ve taken an algorithms class or done a decent amount of programming, I guess it’s up for interpretation how obvious it would be to the “intended audience” of the ikea manual


It’s a class/geographical thing. In my early childhood in a fancy suburb of a big city, my parents and people in their social circle used mixes 0% of the time, but when we moved to a smaller town it was way more common.


You're talking about USA, I'm not.


When you’re too busy to spend the money you make, the observable effect of a pay raise is mostly the number in the account going up faster


Agreed. I work at a highly successful small company with a reputation for being grindy, and what that looks like in reality is probably 55 hours a week of largely focused productive work: typical core hours are 9-6:45ish, and you work longer a day or two a week and put in the odd evening or weekend hour. It’s hard to imagine working 9-9 every day


55 hours is still insane. I could only do it in a highly growing startup as an early engineer, with the expectation I'm out in few years.


Really? Ive yet to encounter a job that expected less than 55hr as general minimum.


I don't really like the comment I'm about to write but get a life and set foot outside that bubble.

It's also cringe how this kind of comments on "how long one works" come from north americans. It's not cool.


Yeah your comment says a lot about what kind of person you are. Not a good one.

I've not had much choice in life as to what kind of work I can get. I was not born with rich parents and could only afford a non prestigious Uni. I absolutely hate that this kind of exploitation is common (in USA).

Its nice that some people like you have a spoiled life and can dump on the less fortunate though.


If it's 3% + $0.30, that can easily be 5-7% for smaller transactions, which are the ones where I most often get asked to pay cash.


Counterpoint: I’m in the US and my effective income tax rate is in the mid-40s, with my marginal rate over 50%. And I’m not in one of the few states with the highest state income taxes.


The highest federal bracket is 37%, the highest state bracket in the US is California at 13.3%, Medicare at 2.9% if you're self employed, NIIT caps out at 3.8% - so even earning well into seven plus figures, with punitive NIIT, only puts you at a max of 47% marginal. Social security taxes stop long before the brackets kick in.

NYC has combined local and state top marginal rates of 14.776%, to go up to 48.476%.

I call BS on marginal rates exceeding 50%

Edit: even the new 2024 California payroll tax cap lift and mental health tax on seven figure incomes put it at 49.1%. Marginal rates that high don't exist in the US. Even then that requires paying payroll taxes and NIIT on the same income, which I'm pretty sure is impossible.


Thanks for the correction- I did some math and my marginal rate is something like 46%, which, while it’s indeed not over 50%, still is pretty discouraging when weighing whether it’s worth putting in enough effort to get another raise.


A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that an income of $1 million gets you an effective tax rate in the mid 40s in California.

AGI: $1000k Federal Income Tax: $322k California State Income Tax: $102k FICA Taxes: $32k Total tax: $456k

Compared to say Germany, where for the same income you would be paying over 50% in taxes. So I think you're doing very well.


Admittedly I live in Texas (no state income tax) but where do you pay 40%? California?


25(federal)+8(social security)+5(state) is a common combination. That's 38%.

God forbid you live in NYC and it can gonna to 42%


A single W-2 earner making $1 million has a 33.49% effective federal tax rate (OASDI, Medicare, Income) taking only the standard deductible and doing nothing else to lower their taxable income (no tax advantaged accounts, not spending enough in categories that allow itemization, etc.). A single non-W-2 earner (has to pay the employer part of payroll taxes) has an effective rate of 34.84%.

If they're married the rates are 29.62% (W-2) and 30.97% (non-W-2), under the same assumption that they do not do anything to qualify for either reduced taxable income or any kind of rebate or credit.

Most people don't make $1 million, and those that do have ways to reduce their tax burden quite a bit without much trouble.

EDIT: Small modifications to the numbers above, they were off by about 0.4% to 0.5%.


Social security is 6.2% and is capped (you only pay social security taxes on a max income of $168,600). So if your income is 168,600 you pay $10,453 in social security taxes.

And if your income is $1,000,000 you still only pay $10,453 in social security tax.


$176,100 this year, and you should also include Medicare which is 1.45% and has the same cap. That does mean a base 7.65% federal tax rate for most W-2 earners. But when you work out the math on the effective tax rates for income tax (not payroll) it takes a lot to hit 25% as your effective federal income tax rate.

Around $350,000 gets you to a 24.8% effective federal income tax rate if you're single and only take the standard deductible, $700k if married. That puts you in the top 3% and 1%, respectively, of incomes in the US these days.

But that gets reduced when you include things like tax advantaged retirement accounts, various tax credits, dependents, paying for health insurance, possibly being able to itemize (more likely at those incomes than the US median income). So really you have to be making something like $400k-500 as a single person to hit 25%, and $800k+ for a married person.


Google turned up this Harper’s feature which is pretty good: https://courses.washington.edu/psy315/pdf/HarpersMagazine_Lu...


Long article but the likeliest scenario in the article is that the has studied the printing sheet location and sales time distribution of winning tickets to work out when they will appear on the market, then buys up all the newly issued scratchies from compliant shop owners.


For what it’s worth, this seems like the fatal flaw in the OP to me. If you need input on whether something is good to do, it’s very easy for someone to reply “yes” or “sounds good,” so just ask for input. If you don’t need input, just send an FYI instead of the weird asymmetric asking-for-objections-but-not-approval.


As someone else pointed out, this is intention-based communication — in the style of Turn This Ship Around.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158601-turn-the-ship-a...

We’re informing the manager of our intention, but we already decided it was a good idea at the engineering level. We’re not really soliciting input, eg, whether that’s a good idea or not. However, there might be conflicts we’re not aware of, eg, “Wednesday is bad, since there’s a demo that day.”

Asking if there are concerns is soliciting that information — but being clear about what you’re asking.


It’s really about (a) the wording (b) the level of risk.

For something that isn’t risky, I trust my reports to make reasonable decisions and wouldn’t benefit from the “I’m going to do this tomorrow unless you say no” approach. Instead, they can just tell me they’re doing it (or let me know after the fact, or add/FYI me on the code review, or not even mention it, depending on what it is).

For a decision that is more important/higher risk, they should get affirmative agreement rather than just hoping that I see the ultimatum and silently approve.

That’s why I’m with the GP that the ultimatum-with-deadline doesn’t seem like the best choice in any situation.


Thanks for the feedback. I guess I'd put the 'ultimatum-with-deadline' in between the two risk profiles you outline--something just on the edge of risk.

> Just hoping that I see the ultimatum and silently approve.

I never would have thought of this as an ultimatum--to me it's more like a 'default decision' that makes my manager's life easier while still looping them in and giving them control should they choose to exercise it.

But now I can definitely see how it might be seen as one, depending on the type of decision and the relationship between employee and manager. I should probably update the post to say that you need a degree of trust and alignment for this technique to work; you shouldn't roll this out on the first day.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: