Comment by walletdrainer
4 hours ago
> but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
It depends on how much you earn. I don’t mind spending tens of thousands on Loro Piana cashmere because it’s really nice, but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial.
Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.
A few years ago I too would’ve considered $500 for pants to be absurd, at this point I just go to a tailor and pay slightly more than that but save tons of time in the long term and always have perfect fitting pants. The time savings alone are tremendous, after getting a pair fitted properly I can just order new ones whenever I need without having to spend hours going through shops looking for the right pair of pants.
> Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.
Is it really packed with those people? I know there's some, but I imagined that the average user here is probably some senior engineer in his 40s making six figures - not an executive or some industry-leading employee, and not the top <1% entrepreneur who manages to walk away with multimillion dollar profits. If that really is the common audience here, then I'm living in a whole different universe from what the average would work out to.
Not that those people aren't here, but I don't think they are the average. I think the average person here is an un/under-employed tech enthusiast who dreams of startups but spends his time here instead of actually working to make it happen. I'm not in that group by the way, I stopped dreaming about startups 10 years ago.
Bored developers are probably another large fraction.
You don’t have to be “industry leading” to reach that kind of comp working for big tech.
I could be totally wrong, but in a world where plumbers and the likes can walk away with multimillion dollar profits you probably don’t have to be top <1% to pull that off either. Not taking shots at plumbers, but the point is that even something boring can and will pay off if you work hard at it.
My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.
> My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.
Are you talking like one-off niche utilities/services that another busy person would happily pay a small amount to solve an immediate problem with and don't necessarily require a ton of backend scaling/maintenance, or subscription type stuff? When you say "many", is that >100?
$1M/year in big tech is like director level? That's not "industry leading" but there aren't that many of them.
Most people don't work for big tech. Most people who work for big tech don't make so much. And not most plumbers.
Many people under estimate their skills and luck.
> Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.
Are you sure about that?
I would be surprised if it was much above the US salary average, considering the global audience of HN.
In this job market, in this political environment, with Luigi Mangione a Bonnie-and-Clyde-tier folk hero, the bit you quoted was perhaps a clue to the lack of wisdom in humblebragging that you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin.
I imagine that I will be the bad guy for pointing this out. (Perhaps even to myself, considering that there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.)
I don’t make nearly that kind of money, but I don’t think people who do should keep it a secret like you’re trying to enforce some norm of secrecy on him
> you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin
Maybe they're obscenely rich, or perhaps they're just living up to their username?
Thankfully this username was related to a post I created this account to comment on, not me personally :)
Luigi wouldn't have been famous if he offed a guy for wearing tailored pants and a rolex, he's famous because the CEO was a scapegoat of everything wrong with health insurance.
This feels like Reddit leaking over a little bit.
Let me remind you that this is a forum operated by a VC fund looking for people to give lots of money to so they can build billion dollar businesses. Those who succeed are routinely celebrated here, but actually discussing that money being spent rapidly becomes judgmental.
Hard to reconcile it being super cool to build an unicorn (a cute term we’ve come up with to describe billion dollar startups which have made their founders tremendously wealthy), but somewhat disgusting to actually have or spend that money.
News.ycombinator.com seems like the wrong place to complain about capitalism.
FWIW I don’t even get a Silicon Valley salary, am not in any way extraordinary, but have spent 10+ years building 100+ small online businesses out of which none have been particularly successful (but in total the little streams add up)
Sorry for jumping on this off-topic but I'm a junior engineer hoping to build out some of those small online businesses but I've been a bit unsure of how to go about it. When you say small online businesses do you mean like micro-SaaS kind of things? Or like tangible items? Sorry, just curious :)
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It's not reddit leaking, it's normal people leaking into your weird millionaire world. I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants. I'm not going to sit here and preach and make you bored, but consider what good you could do with that money, if only your ass and thighs were slightly more uncomfortable than they are today. Especially now when people around the world are dealing with 2x the food costs of a year or a few ago.
Also, HN is a fine place to complain about capitalism, maybe a few of you capitalists will have it click in your brains that other people are struggling and you can do something about it other than sitting on a cloud.
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He wasn't 'humblebragging'. He was answering a question on an anonymous forum honestly.
The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.
The world is a very confusing place these days.
> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial
this is probably just regular bragging, right?
now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!
thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!
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There's some weird online effect where people assume everyone they talk to on the internet makes essentially the same exact amount of money they do.
I've noticed this most in a forum for a country I used to live in where foreigners would come in and post "What's an affordable hotel/restaurant/bar/travel experience".
Uh, I have no idea what "affordable" means to you!?
What is your NW?
Less than $10M with the mortgage, my income will hit $5M this year pre-tax for the first time (almost half of that goes to the government)
Valuing my vast and eclectic empire of small websites earning between $1k and $300k per year is tricky because it’d presumably be tremendously hard to sell them all at once. Of course some reasonable multiple would arrive at some much higher number than my bank account+physical assets.