* Mine was discovered super super early, on a scan related for something else
* This was actually so early that it didn’t make sense to operate. The main treatment for testicular cancer is orchiectomy, i.e. total removal of testicle
* If you find a lump, it is by definition much bigger than mine was, and the above doesn’t apply. But if you find a marginal, tiny spot on an incidental ultrasound, ask a doctor about what sizes are risky and consider a second opinion.
* I had something called a frozen section sample. They take the testicle out of the body, but leave it attached. They quickly biopsy part of it. If cancer, remove. If not cancer, put back in. I had this, it was cancer, but I’m nonetheless glad I did. My lesion was so small even then that it plausibly wasn’t cancer
* I had a seminoma. They grow slow, and are benign. It took three years to have a notable changes. If yours is growing faster than that, the odds are much higher it is cancer and a worse kind. Most benign masses are stable and tiny.
* Bank sperm before the operation! You may find fertility significantly impaired. My FSH went through the roof after the operation and my sperm count is like 0.01% of normal. Probably still viable with IVF, but almost zero. I likely had viable sperm before based on the normal fsh
Please don’t be pigheaded about this with your doctor. I did have cancer after all. But I plausibly didn’t, and my urologist recommended waiting + a frozen section sample. This is common in big centers for incidental detection, less common in hospitals that don’t see too many orchiectomies.
Ha! Same here. But don’t stop at 34. I had it at 40. Found it because of that post. They say I could have walked with it for much longer as it was the extremely slow one (there are at least two types). No side effects further; just a tiny lump.
I was once told, “as long as you check regularly you’ll know it when you find it.”
I’ve also been told it’s very hard and dense feeing. Sometimes rough feeling.
I think this helps a lot but it sure feels like insufficient training.
This also gave me an app idea. I have very mole-y skin. Doctor said to keep an eye on new ones of significant size. I have a terrible memory. Maybe I need an app that I can snap photos of my major moles and it will tell me if future photos match or are possibly new, based on my mole constellations as pattern matching.
I don’t think so. Early in this context means “less than 1cm”. Males need to check themselves every 6 months to one year. The standard check is a triplex still the urologist. Additionally, I would add that it’s a good practice to use a bank sperm while young. You never know what is going to happen in the future.
When you are in your thirties, get a colonoscopy. Screen for cancer. The screening isn’t very accurate unfortunately, it’s easy to miss. But it still way better than nothing.
> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends.
His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".
> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.
Great analogy, but analogies can be deceptive, because while the snail can coexist with the tiger, for every two animals that coexist hundreds still have to fail the natural selection process.
We like to view the world through an idealistic narrow lens of an analogy but the truth is often far more complex.
I would go further to say that analogies and quotations are dangerous and deceptive. These quotations don't actually offer any new information. You usually only like analogy because you already agree with it, no new information or insights are being offered other than the comparison that is part of the analogy itself.
I will have to agree with the dead comment by @leafboi, it is not that every animal can live harmoniously, indeed every animal is in competition by the laws of natural selection, and each animal can be seen as the outlier in its species. In the case of humans, there may be multiple paths to success, but it may be that many of them lead to failure while producing certain outliers.
Unrelatedly, does anyone know why certain comments immediately become dead, they don't really seem to break any HN rules but I see often that some comments die quickly.
As human beings, moderators have their own preferences which exist beyond the HN guidelines, and are not meta moderated, except in the aggregate.
When a comment becomes dead, it's because some mods chose to vote it down, and fewer mods choose to revive it. The net effect is an expression of the prevailing culture.
Your question about why this sometimes happens "immediately" is an interesting part of the dynamic.
> Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
>The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
> I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
> The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1].
The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are a community consensus, it's that they're the fastest reactions to feel, and the fastest comments to write—especially when the topic is provocative, when most of us are reacting from cache [2].
> Then a second wave of objections is generated by the first wave. Readers come to the thread, see the comment section dominated by those initial 'triggered' responses, and feel some version of surprised-shocked-dismayed at how the commenters all seem to be reacting in that way. This propels them to write defenses of the article, often carefully expressing more moderate or balanced views than the first wave—but they probably wouldn't have been motivated to post anything if there hadn't been the first wave of comments to object to!
> These second-wave comments tend to get more upvotes, perhaps because more people tend to share the more moderate view, but also because those comments tend to be more reflective [2] and therefore better written.
> This explains why the top comment in a thread so often begins (ironically) with "Wow, I can't believe the comments here"—or from the current thread: "All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old" [3]—followed by a defense of whatever those objections were objecting to. Eventually you get objections to the objections to the objections—which reminds me of the line "My complication had a little complication" from Brazil [4], and also epicycles.
I'm not sure if I'm surprised that dang didn't touch on to mention downvotes as an even more rapid "contrarian dynamic" mechanism; wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction, effort required for the action - like qualitative text from the downvoter as to why a comment is being downvoted to then allow OP the opportunity to clarify or expand on their comment - "to be more reflective and therefore better written"? The downvote-comment doesn't have to be identified as being a downvote-comment, showing up as a regular reply.
That added cost/friction may also act as a filter for lazy readers/skimmers or those misinterpreting what's said at first glance, and therefore if forced to include some critical text response along with their downvote then OP and other readers can begin to get to the bottom/foundation of the distaste, giving OP at least some guidance as to why someone/people are downvoting - arguably a valuable learning/crowdsourcing moderation tool/mechanism.
I feel the added cost of time and mental effort for downvotes would add a great balance.
This has been discussed many times and it's not a good idea - it adds friction to the discussion, more than anything else. The threads would be full of pointless meta.
The fundamental problem is that getting downvoted feels kinda bad - nobody ever asks for explanatory notes on upvotes. It's reasonable to wonder whether getting downvoted feels, say, too bad too soon and if there are UI ways to address that. But it's worth remembering that for downvoting to actually work, it has to feel at least somewhat bad. It's going to feel somewhat bad with or without notes from others about why they thought you ought to feel a little bit bad.
There was an experiment conducted on HN a while back where a AI generated post by GPT-3 was tested on the HN community.
A few people realized that the post was generated by AI and they mentioned this but they were actively voted down.
I think there needs to be friction on the downvote because mob mentality is often wrong. Disliked opinions are still valid opinions that aren't necessarily wrong.
That's the whole point - adding friction. It also sounds like you'd be a fan of a parenting style where a child is punished but not told why. It's odd that you feel downvoting should be seen as punishment and not a mechanism for disagreement.
Perhaps asking users why they are downvoting could help. Maybe not necessary to show their reason to others, but add friction and force someone to think twice.
If there's no witnessing or critique/scrutiny by the community possible then I don't think there will be the pressure necessary for quality comments to be made - and leaving a moderator to privately review them would likely have more comments left toward the spectrum of "this guy's an idiot" then toward side of constructive or useful criticism.
Hmm, what about being able to see a list of downvotes and explanations on a user’s profile? With maybe some minimum karma before you can see that on someone else’s profile?
So there is potential scrutiny by the community, but not in a way that disrupts the original discussion?
> wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction
Upvotes have much less friction. Downvoted posts are not merely downvoted, they are also not upvoted. Why don't people upvote posts that are unfairly downvoted?
What if a downvote cost you dharma- and what if the downvoted person could invest their own dharma to keep the post "buyont". You could even specify min or max points- if your comment was a hill to die upon for..
What about this: to to downvote, you need to also specify a keyword as to why you are downvoting. It's a text field (not a pull down). Whatever you enter, will not be visible to anyone except to the person who wrote the comment you are downvoting.
Adds just enough friction to reduce downvotes a bit, provides information to the person being downvoted (no more "why all the hate?" comments), and doesn't pollute the experience for everyone else, since those are not visible by most users.
I wonder if there's any value in having a post to HN be, in effect, a "Draft", with a timeout of (say) half an hour. You write it up, but you have time to reconsider and edit before it "goes live" and you're (at least psychologically) committed. Perhaps you have to come back after half an hour and officially approve it? This is starting to sound like work :-)
I think this is a great idea, with one issue -- it seems to me (and I haven't looked at this quantitatively, it's just an impression) that later comments sometimes get buried, so there's an incentive to comment sooner rather than later.
A dramatic solution, assuming this phenomena is something to be abated, is to simply remove replies. Why does every internet community by default have a feature that steers us to negativity and confrontation. I often find myself scrolling past the replies on here anyway to find the next comment that may be unique, useful and well-thought - not just an objection or tepid agreement to something that’s already been said.
I found the approach taken by pol.is to be interesting, it is used in various places to develop rough consensus in multi-stakeholder situations. https://pol.is/https://github.com/pol-is/
Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.
Usually people who design interaction spaces know something about human behavior, spectrum of personality types/needs, social psychology, group dynamics etc and then design the space.
But what has happened in the tech world, is obviously the reverse.
All kinds of contrived/arbit spaces have been created and then behavior of the lab rats within are studied.
Are you claiming that pubs and barbershops were designed based on an understanding of human behavior? It seems more like they've evolved over centuries, with everyone copying features that worked. Every time some architect tries to reinvent them based on theoretical principles of human interaction, the result sucks.
"Third Place" is just one example of understanding what spaces people need and using it to drive design. Studying and understanding where people congregate and why, is what inspires and leads to the design of "Third Places" like the Starbucks store.
This is a poor model of Hacker News comment phenomena. It requires all this extra complexity in the theory (comment “waves” and “triggered” reactions, highly generic stereotypes of whether a responder is reflective and thoughtful, and whether this correlates with moderate opinions).
From an Occam’s Razor point of view, this is a very poor theory, and I’d even go further and suggest it indicates unfair bias on the moderators’ part to implicitly subscribe to this judgment about early / quick responders.
A competing, much simpler theory is that Hacker News, like everything else on the planet, is tribal and political. People add comments to support their tribe, and people use upvotes to support their tribe, while they use FAQ & guideline legalese, downvotes, shadow bans and timeout periods to punish opposing viewpoints and tribes they don’t like.
I think the reason people look past this much simpler theory that comports much better with the evidence is that they want to protect a false sense that Hacker News is democratic and tolerant of unusual views, but it so deeply isn’t.
You're making it sound more complicated than it is. The idea is simple: users like to make objections.
Since users like to make objections, the initial comments tend to object to the article/title (because there's nothing else to object to yet), and later comments object to existing comments. Poof, "waves".
One of my favorites is a super-long one by a user named bane, about three solutions to speeding up computing: (1) "high" (more RAM, CPU), (2) "wide" (more machines), and (3) "deep" (refactoring), which is what he recommends first. More than once he has rewritten something that was running slowly even on the latest and greatest architectures (perhaps partially because of that), to running on a single machine, even an old personal computer. He reminds us that a modern computer, with its solid-state drives, gigabytes of memory, and multicore gigahertz processors, can take on many large problems, if you just stoop to give the problem a decent amount of attention first, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739
Interesting it also involves graph processing, which Bane's comment did. The point is that distributed graph processing frameworks were mostly parallelizing their own overhead, not solving the problem, which could be done on a single machine!
Reminds me of this recent comment on Chuck Moore, of Forth fame, building his own technology stack right down the hardware and squeezing it for performance.
He does not claim to introduce the concepts of horizontal and vertical scaling. He mentions them only to immediately discourage them: "Lots of people make the mistake of thinking there's only two vectors you can go to improve performance, high or wide. [...] There's a third direction you can go, I call it 'going deep'." Like I said, it's a long post, so I tried my best to summarize it and then linked to it.
My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.
For things that take a long time, timing is essentially random. The world is chaotic. Had I known everyone and their dog would be locked down in their houses for months on end, I would have built something to cater to them. But of course, there is no way to know. I find it amusing that just before the pandemic there was a thread on HN talking about overvalued unicorns and Zoom was up near the top of the list. What would need to happen to make Zoom a household name, people asked?
To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.
It can be fun to think of "new" ideas, and then search the Internet for them.
This week, I wanted a handheld device to push buttons and open doors without touching them; found several for sale (though the models without covers seem useless.)
Later I wanted a 3D support structure to fit under a mask and increase its usable surface area; found several for sale.
I use the end of my key to push buttons. A shoulder shove works for pushing doors. If I have to pull occasionally I use my T-shirt to get a grip. If it were a major problem I’d use a glove.
I think I'm fairly creative, but I've only had one or two ideas that weren't reinventions of something someone else had already done. Doesn't matter what it is: software, electrical circuit, some clever mechanical thing, it's almost always already been done. Even if you look at patent grants, almost none of them are truly novel.
One of them costs too much for me to pursue. The other I'm working on as a hobby, but don't expect it to bear any fruit for a couple of years.
My main takeaway though is that an idea doesn't have to be novel for it to be a good idea. Lots of things that were tried and failed could succeed with a new approach. And lots of things that're currently successfully could be redone in a better way.
Isn't this a bit useless? Surgical masks aren't meant to fit well, they're meant to keep your spittle from leaving your face. N95 masks are meant to filter incoming air, and those are made to fit well.
Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.
I think the best way to evaluate an idea is to ask if you'd use it yourself. If it solves a problem for you, there will be others that want it - nobody is unique. It's when you think you know how to solve someone else's problems that things go wrong - collaboration is important in that case.
Yes. If my friend had pitched Airbnb or Uber many years ago, I’m sure I would have dismissed them as impossibly risky. Or Snapchat as only useful in niches. Or Peloton as way overpriced compared to exercise videos on YouTube.
> Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good.
My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.
For those that don't get the reference, it is to this joke about 2 economists:
Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
All the times I have seen $100 on the road, it has turned out to be an advertisement i.e. fake. 50% of the time I have found money on the road, it has been my own.
I put coins on the road for people to find, because I remember the joy of discovering a coin as a child.
Overall it works as a joke, but fails as a metaphor for me!
Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.
The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?
FWIW, the quote about money on the ground initially comes from a critique on the efficient market hypothesis, not commentary on the nature of ideas. So it's expected for there to be analogical disconnect here.
For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."
Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.
Furthermore, I've seen it used in the context of hidden transaction costs in the markets. For example, you see security A trading at $100 on exchange X but $105 on exchange Y. You think "free money!" but on closer examination exchange Y charges $5.01 to transact. These are totally nonsensical numbers, but they do extend to the analogy on ideas.
IMO a good idea is not only one that can be successful, but also one that can be accomplished.
For example, I had the idea of mobile payments almost 20 years ago, way before smartphones. This is extremely popular today, but even if I had had the technical skill to pull it off (I didn't) this is only the kind of idea a giant company could have considered.
This one struck me for its tongue-in-cheek levity, credit to haroldgibbons:
My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it.
For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.
For me, it's this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.
One of the things I look for when getting into a new venture, investment, etc is that most people don’t understand how it would succeed. If I have a deep, realistic understanding of how it will work, that’s all I need. Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does, but you know they will all see your reality as the truth with time.
> Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does
Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.
Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.
So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.
Another way to think about it is that no product is ubiquitously liked by the entire population. One important part of developing a new product is figuring out who your target audience is. Their feedback is likely relevant to you, but the feedback from someone who'd never use it anyway can probably be taken with a grain of salt. It's very common for people to think that, for something to be successful, everyone must appreciate it. However, that's not true. For instance, there are lots of things I don't see the point of (like tiktok or instagram); yet, they're very successful products. I'm just not the target audience.
That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.
Predates HN, but the famous Slashdot review of the first iPod is one of those “moments in history” events when nobody really had any inkling of the coming change
Like "640k is enough for everybody", the iPod review isn't as bad as it seems in retrospect. It's a review of the first version of the iPod, which was Mac only and actually wasn't a great product yet. It was a few years and 2 versions later that they had a design breakthrough and started selling a lot of units. I don't think a reviewer should get dragged for not knowing that a product would be vastly improved a few versions later.
In defense of the commenter, there’s a follow up the next day acknowledging Drew’s points and wishing him the best luck. I had always read the first comment only.
The comment is interesting because it's such an exception. This community is almost fatally optimistic and has blind spots where skepticism and criticism could be. Our website should have the X-files "I want to believe" poster as the HTML background.
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.
I think there's some comments from me here or on reddit (can't recall) where I'm telling the founders of github that their idea is stupid. I underestimated the needs of the open source community, but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
> I still don't understand why it's such a successful business
From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.
- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).
- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.
- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do
-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.
- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.
>but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.
I get the idea of SaaS version control I just didn't see how they would be competitive. It wasn't virgin territory. I also thought got would lose to Mercurial.
There are a confluence of factors behind Mercurial's and svn's losses for git to emerge as the dominant SCM tool.
I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
It's very short and not at all in-depth, but this was my favorite comment. It was one of the greatest troll shutdowns I've ever seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
In that thread the pg - cperciva exchange is exemplary. cperciva is concise and blunt, someone else suggests softening his delivery, and pg replies "actually, if someone is wrong about math you probably should tell him so."
The best part is, he ended up being justified in his self confidence. He was talking about his company Tarsnap, which still seems to be going strong 13 years later, and now has Stripe as a customer.
This reply to a comment about how taking an action on moral grounds might be bad for business:
> Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
> The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
I'll probably remember this quote for years to come.
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
Thanks for sharing this. Right now I'm burnt out beyond words, having delivered a phase of a huge project, followed by upper management actions that make me feel extremely devalued and dehumanized.
I've already written a list of personal development tasks for the three weeks' leave ahead - I need to up-skill, then find a new employer - which I'll restructure into little wins.
> Right now I'm burnt out beyond words, having delivered a phase of a huge project, followed by upper management actions that make me feel extremely devalued and dehumanized
I quit over something like this. Best decision of my life. I was the lowest paid engineer, I won/led/only person that worked on a major contract (20% of revenue) and they said I was bold for asking for a promotion that would put me equal pay with people that brought in no contracts. Don't work for toxic management. It just isn't worth it. It takes a huge toll on your mental health and honestly no money is worth that. I was burnt out for over a year after that experience. I learned that when applying for positions you should also be interviewing your manager. That's become one of my top criteria.
For a second I thought I wrote this comment, then I realized I didn't, but it's just so familiar.
The burnt out feeling is coming mainly from the feeling of how much prep is required to switch jobs even. I'm just hoping the promotion actually comes through and I don't need to but at the same time I'm preparing now so that 6 months from now I can leave on a dime if I want.
You should prob just completely take a break during the 3 weeks. Go hiking, biking, etc and let your brain rewire so that you're not in a flight or fight mode. Something like "just walking hard for 5 hours gets me to the top of the mountain" and then you'll be so fresh after 3 weeks of that. Work won't seem as stressful or important in life.
It's amazing what a bit of exercise and a head clear of problems to solve can do for you. In my experience, it's unfortunately the case(for me at least) that the harder and longer you push before you burnout scales linearly with the length of the break you'll need to take in order to recover.
I learned this lesson the hard way and ended having to take a multiple year hiatus from even looking at a text editor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in a way a form of PTSD; for a long while, even thinking about programming elevated my heart rate. I ended up working as a bike mechanic during that time away, and the combination of a low stakes environment and working with my hands did my mental health a lot of good.
Damn crazy. Why did that happen? Moderate burnout situation that went on for way too long? Or intense burnout in a few months?
Yeah I mean going off of the great burnout comment before, it's that the negative mental pathways are being carved super deep every day by your continued effort -> failure (or perceived failure by you or manager).
I wonder if mushrooms/acid/mdma can help cure professional burnout faster?
How's being a bike mechanic money-wise? If you have a solid amount of capital built up from grinding as a soft engr, that could be a nice segway for a time.
> Damn crazy. Why did that happen? Moderate burnout situation that went on for way too long? Or intense burnout in a few months?
Basically a combination of both. I was at a medium sized startup fresh out of college, and I was the only one working on a completely new project using a language nobody else at the company used (I was doing NLP stuff in python). There was no code review and next to no mentorship, and every other developer was working in Java/Scala, so they had almost no clue what exactly I was working on. Early on I was actually able to deliver on pretty much everything asked of me, and had one of the models I had trained being used in production within six months. It was this terrible combination of me feeling completely out of my depth, yet everyone else only sees that I'm delivering, so thinks I have everything under control.
I knew very little python or machine learning when I started, but was able to get fairly competent in the problem domain quickly. But as things progressed, my severe lack of experience in developing a large project started to slow progress down and take a toll on me. I felt like I had to keep up the pace I had set expectations with early on, so I just started working longer and longer hours trying to meet deadlines that probably didn't matter anyways. Near the end I was secretly working nights and weekends because I had this mentality that If I didn't someone was eventually going to find out that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty classic imposter syndrome fueled by perfectionism.
> How's being a bike mechanic money-wise?
Haha, not good. At a shop that pays well, it's around $20/hour after base pay plus commission. It was a nice change of pace though. It made me enough where I didn't have to use too much of my savings. I quit soon after Covid started and have been doing some portfolio projects and brushing up on my interview skills.
Take a break, you must. I know it always feels like you can’t, but you can’t keep working, you will snap.
Programmers are hard to replace, it hard to find a good one, and it takes time to ramp up a new one with a codebase. You have more negotiating power than you think.
Your comment struck me because I have been in that position before, and I know it really really hurts. But you gotta look out for yourself. Please take a week or two off
This makes a lot of sense, and chimes with my gut feel based approach of following up a long and difficult bit of work with some quick wins or bug fixes before thinking about starting anything else big.
Yeah, I read the bestcomments on the weekend, to see what I may have missed in the last week. But I've no idea what the time frame those are under. Having a selectable time frame would be nice. Like, not just: past week, past month, past year, etc. But more like oct/2013-dec/2013, though that would not be as 'clean'.
I've referred to this comment a couple of times in discussions with people I've worked with. It is a great example for many problems of old code bases.
I was going to share this myself. It's really great knowing that it stuck a chord with others.
So much to takeaway from that post. For me it is
1. Its important how you structure your code (flags and global state can wreak havoc on a program)
2. No matter how bad your code base is - it can at least be functional if you have good testing
That comment still gives me nightmares. But also makes me really glad I don't work on such a codebase. Ours has some history to it, and a few areas that are a bit gnarly, but even they sound idilic in comparison.
To avoid network congestion, the TCP stack implements a mechanism that waits for the data up to 0.2 seconds so it won’t send a packet that would be too small. This mechanism is ensured by Nagle’s algorithm, and 200ms is the value of the UNIX implementation.
> Sigh. If you're doing bulk file transfers, you never hit that problem. If you're sending enough data to fill up outgoing buffers, there's no delay. If you send all the data and close the TCP connection, there's no delay after the last packet. If you do send, reply, send, reply, there's no delay. If you do bulk sends, there's no delay. If you do send, send, reply, there's a delay.
> The real problem is ACK delays. The 200ms "ACK delay" timer is a bad idea that someone at Berkeley stuck into BSD around 1985 because they didn't really understand the problem. A delayed ACK is a bet that there will be a reply from the application level within 200ms. TCP continues to use delayed ACKs even if it's losing that bet every time.
> If I'd still been working on networking at the time, that never would have happened. But I was off doing stuff for a startup called Autodesk.
Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
The parent to my comment pointed to a most remarkable piece of internet lore, but it was really about your argument against taking VC. A very quick look showed that you did exactly what you said you were going to do, with probably the exact result you indicated. I pointed to TarSnap because that was the result, and it seemed important to the story. Success? Sure, exactly as planned, but what about the audience of your original argument, those that said to go for big venture investment? Surely they still exist here. What do they think? However, if the story is to be a guidepost for others, it's really about what you think about your story, and so I think anybody following can be grateful that you've closed the loop on this. I realize that you could have interpreted this as some kind of personal slight, and a few did on your behalf, but it's obvious that you think differently, and your lack of offense is very telling of your satisfaction. So really you've answered in two ways. For my part, I don't think that gifted people necessarily owe 'us' their highest altruistic purpose. Maybe that is between them and whatever higher power they believe in, or not. But we at least hope that others also respond to aspirational attention with some kind of honesty, even if we can't possibly understand. Thank you.
The most useful idea I've found so far for thinking about work and career comes from Dawkins. He points out that money is just an abstract mechanism for managing reciprocal altruism. As a knock on to that idea, we're programmed to crave those relationships and to build a deep and rich network of friends through them.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's a trap if it's not for you, not what you want to do, not your interests. Whose business is it to solve millennium problems? Certainly not yours to decide for others. I think he does with his life what he chooses, and you do with yours what you choose. What are you doing with your life? I don't think you intended to be arrogant here, but the premise is that someone who has talent is required or expected to solve the world's problems. Not so. I think it's none of your business what someone else does with their life, anymore than it's mine to judge what you've done with yours or expect you to fulfill society's or the world's expectations. And the dude is still a genius, not was.
Yes, you could view it as a trap VC lays for bright young minds since success is likely for the VC with a hundred investments and unlikely for the individual. But then, not everyone is wired to work for others. And sometimes you personally need to scratch that entrepreneur itch before you can fathom joining staff meetings. Glad we live in a world where cperciva could decide their own path.
I'm pretty sure he also made a ton of money on it, since lots of YC startups like Stripe were early customers. I don't think any of them had time to migrate off tarsnap (not to mention they don't need to). They probably just accumulated a bunch of data and tarsnap grew as Stripe did, which I imagine was very lucrative.
Seeing someone else bravely telling their story and account how the biggest tech company mistreated them during an interview too...going as far as trying to steal/patent their work without their consent they demoed during their interview.
I had been telling my very similar story here of my experience for a few years, then to see another say same thing with email evidence was vindicating.
Around that time and maybe before more and more negative posts about said company started and have continued to appear on Hacker News. So her story along many other things going on I believe helped highlight they do evil/aren't to be trusted per the image they once sold.
Overall I'm glad she had the courage to post her experience and in turn help other dreamers/innovators (what my aim was) to not trust this tech company and highlight they are the opposite of the mantra they sold to the public.
Dammit, now feel like a complete idiot for my mess of a bash script that creates symlinks all over the place. I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning.
Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips.
1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It's about people and it's about solving problems.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occassionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. I say in every talk I give: "all things being equal people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends."
6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.
There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in. Good luck.
I got a lot out of some posts made by a user named arkades about why the nature of medical reimbursement in the US contributes to physician burnout: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057249
Nowhere near as profound as many other comments listed here already, but here's a 2015 comment by haberman that stuck with me for some reason, on how modern operating systems have learnt that 'grand abstractions' don't belong in the OS.
"I predict that Libra will work for a while, but will eventually be overshadowed either by competitors or by the new markets that it enables.
There's this pattern I've noticed where every major tech company, once initial traction has been established, gets three pivots. You can think of them as adolescence, mid-life, and rebirth.
The first pivot happens when the company is 5-8 years old (since the 1970s at least; older before then), and serves to define the company. The System 360 for IBM, defining it as the provider of mainframes for enterprises. MS-DOS for Microsoft, defining it as the dominant PC OS. The Macintosh for Apple, defining it as the most user-friendly consumer brand out there. GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are.
The second pivot happens when the company is 10-15, at the height of its dominance, and usually results from it entering the hottest new technology wave with a vengeance. It looks like it succeeds for a while, crushes early entrants, serves to legitimize that technology wave, but ultimately peters out as the company can't keep up with the changes that it introduces. The IBM PC for IBM, which legitimized the PC market but ultimately fell to clones. Internet Explorer for Microsoft, which legitimized the Internet but ultimately was eclipsed by Google's many products. The Newton for Apple, which legitimized the PDA market but ultimately was too early. Google+ for Google, which legitimized social networking but ultimately failed to gain traction.
The third pivot is when the company realizes that they basically incapable of innovating, and returns to the roots they established with the first pivot to live out their old age. Open-source consulting for IBM, leveraging their massive installed base of enterprise customers. VS Code, XBox, and Azure for Microsoft, recognizing that they are fundamentally a platforms company. The iPhone and iPad for Apple, refocusing on their strengths in UX and delivering top-quality consumer electronics products. Alphabet for Google, realizing that they're fundamentally a conglomerate that lets a thousand flowers bloom (and cancels 990 of them).
Libra is Facebook's second pivot. It'll look like it succeeds for a while, it'll legitimize cryptocurrency, but it'll ultimately end up eclipsed by what it creates. "
> GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are.
That's an interesting thought. Is it Google or Amazon or Facebook?
Amazon: AWS + retail + Alexa + Kindle + Prime.
Everything about Amazon (going even further back than Google), for the most part, has been Internet based. They're clearly an Internet conglomerate. AWS is a drastically bigger deal for the Internet than Gmail, YouTube or GMaps; AWS is a present or future $600-$800 billion company by itself. Alexa owns the smart speaker market. Amazon is close to being an online retail monopoly. Prime is the world's largest loyalty lock-in program, which none of the other tech giants have (they have various leveraged network moats instead).
I think FB's combination is at least as potent today as GSearch + YouTube + Gmail + GMaps. How quickly FB's sales have grown rather speaks to that as well. I think GSearch has a plausibly more enduring position than Instagram though. And if you remove Instagram then FB's upside drops off dramatically, it's a shaky position that can be threatened. WhatsApp isn't worth much commercially (relatively speaking) and probably never will be, that acquisition was a competition removing action by FB. As Instagram ages, it'll face an endless line of cooler TikToks vying to rip its userbase away (young people not wanting to be where the old people are or where the last thing was), that process will never stop because social networks are almost always built on trend / fashion / cool and as they age they shed the cool factor. What threats have GSearch and YouTube faced? Not much, it's far harder to compete with them than it is to build the next small social homerun and scale it if it hits. Today, and for this decade, FB is probably as great of a conglomerate as Google, however I would rather own Google's properties than Instagram and WhatsApp (if FB had shown an ability to rapidly spin up new products to catch each cool wave, that would be different; but the exact opposite has happened, FB is risking turning Instagram into Frankenstein's monster, contorting it to keep up with each upcomer like Snapchat and then TikTok).
I agree, but I still think the idea of looking at a company through its pivots is an interesting analysis. There is a lot of survivor's bias in this comment, but that's generally the case when talking about companies
This one about whether designers are crazy because the OP didn't understand why designers would care about minute details in their work. It is because attention to detail creates superlative work. It is similar to why premature optimization isn't necessarily bad for engineers.
No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do.
But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.
In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI
This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.
But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.
You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.
But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.
If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.
> fiaz MANY days ago | parent | favorite | on: Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?
> APOLOGIES for making this post so annoyingly long, but I really hope you find value in the words below.
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I'm going to first share a personal experience from my early trading days to illustrate where I'm coming from. I used to wake up at 4:30 am everyday in the Chicago suburbs to beat rush hour traffic and make it into downtown Chicago at 6:30 am. In order to wake up so early, I fell into a habit of sleeping at 9:00 pm and like a robot waking up at 4:30 am. This simple routine was indirectly helpful when things seemed darkest.
For the first six months, I lost money and was ridiculed constantly by other traders who were more successful than me (which was about 20 other guys CONSTANTLY using me as a punching/whipping bag). The only thing that kept me going was the fact that some of the very same traders that would be making wise cracks at me for losing money were some of the most successful people I knew at the time. For better or worse, if I needed a trader to model myself after, it was the same people that were telling me how bad a trader I was - and although I was not open to really hear what they were saying, they were right about my skills in every way (but their feedback was always packaged in some sort of insult).
After racking up some rather hefty losses, I was determined to quit at one point during month four, but because I had a habit of waking up at 4:30 am I simply "forgot" that the night before I told myself I would quit and spare myself further humiliation...by then I was warned that I was now on the red list of traders ready to be cut. Also, my personal savings were starting to approach zero (the base "draw" for house traders was enough to pay for food; you usually make your money on a percentage of your profits, and I was deep in the red at the time).
To say the least, there were many excellent reasons to be "reasonable", forget about my dreams, and quit.
After 4 consecutive "failures to quit", I realized that I didn't quit because somewhere deep down I was hanging on to a dream, however remote at that point: that I could somehow be as successful as the other traders that I knew. At the same time I realized that I had hit rock bottom in that I couldn't even succeed in failing! Very tough times indeed...
An interesting point to note here is that although my losses were starting to get very large, the people who were funding me as a trader kept me because I had one redeeming quality: EFFORT, and this helped build tenacity. Other traders who barely traded but had a fraction of my losses were cut much faster because they didn't put forth much effort. They were not willing to take losses and be bold/brave and fight it out; I was willing to take risks, and this saved me from getting cut faster than others.
Slowly I began to reinterpret the constant humiliation I was suffering: perhaps the other traders were right about their "jokes" and there might be something in what they are saying that will help me get out of the red. I also realized that since I had failed at quitting (which was now the ULTIMATE failure), there was no further failure for me and that if I took baby steps they were surely to succeed (this translated into taking smaller trades/profits).
Only after improving upon my abilities as a trader and channeling my energies appropriately did I succeed and earn everybody's respect as a trader (and you have no idea how this made me feel!). I quickly made enough in commissions to be trading my own account, and be successful as an independent trader onward. When I look back at those final months of 1999 (yeah that's right, I was losing huge cash at the end of 1999 when the entire market was going crazy UP!), there was more good than bad even when I was getting my ass handed to me. It's just that I was intentionally creating my own feedback (I'm right everybody else is wrong) instead of seeing the results I was getting (losses/insults) as feedback and information that would help me be successful.
I kind of snicker every time I see somebody ask for feedback on their startup on YC.News only to end up justifying themselves by telling everybody why they did what they did when they get negative feedback, which is the feedback of greatest value. If somebody tells you how crappy your idea is, thank them that they even spent a few brain cycles considering your idea.
The lessons I learned from this that are perhaps relevant to your questions:
- Determine if you believe in yourself to succeed as an individual (I know this sounds odd, but for a moment just examine your thought patterns and your actions and see what message you are sending to yourself; do you listen to the voice that says you can't or are you paying attention to the feedback from your efforts and the results you are getting?)
- Search deep down inside and see if the project you are working on is something you believe in or not. If you can't sell yourself, then you shouldn't bother trying any further...
- ANY attention you get for your efforts is good attention. If you get LOTS of negative feedback, then be grateful - you've jumped the first hurdle of getting people to give a damn about what you are doing! :)
- There is responsibility and accountability that goes with both success and failure. You need to be ready for both because they can be equally painful in equal ways. The amount of accountability that comes with success can be more unbearable than the accountability that accompanies failure. I personally know of some very talented people who enjoyed phenomenal initial success only to find just as fast that they were in over their heads.
- The more you resist the possibility of failure then you are less likely to recognize possibilities that will help you succeed. If you are afraid to fail, then most certainly you are afraid to succeed. This sounds counterintuitive but it's based upon the fact that fear makes your mind less supple and less responsive to the changes that will push you out of the game - or conversely it will lessen the impulse to jump on the opportunities you need to succeed.
- The results you get has everything to do with your users/market and less to do with you as an individual; it's sometimes hard to separate these two. See the other side of the equation and what side you are on before trying to solve it. Don't ever think you are above the feedback of your users...EVER!
- Don't have expectations (this is just setting yourself up for failure). Because you are starting out you may not know what is best to help you succeed - ESPECIALLY if you're lacking motivation. Keep in mind that whatever results you get from your efforts will lead to more possibilities (in the form of additional information).
- Have some behavioral "context" within which to exercise discipline and structure. Seek to grow your efforts within this context. My context was my sleep schedule. It was a routine that was so ingrained that my drive had a laser focus. This might not work for some, but it worked for me.
Finally, I will add that in my opinion failing hard and fast is MUCH better than failing slowly. The faster you know for certain something isn't going to work out, the sooner you can cut your losses and move on to your next idea. When you eventually succeed, you will look back at all the times you were quick to cut your losses and get to where you are...
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Please do NOT contact me asking for advice in trading/investing. This is a VERY personal thing, and it has everything to do with who you are, NOT with how much information you have, or which tools you use, or who you know.
> From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
> It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
> At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone).
> Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached.
Originally posted by OrdaGarb on April 26th, 2015...
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
I'm sad I can't find my favorite comment, and have actually searched for it on multiple occasions.
It wasn't a good comment, it was a bad comment — I am only sharing it on the off chance that somebody else will remember and post the link.
The discussion had veered to bicycle helmets: should they be required, is there innovation to be realized in their design, something like that.
Somebody posted some comment about definitely wanting people to have a helmet when they crash their bike and hit their head on the curb, and some other person became incensed at their evidence-free assertion that wearing a helmet would be helpful when crashing one's bike and having one's head hit the curb. The incensed party demanded links to scientifically rigorous studies, rather than some layperson's hunch, that helmet wearing would be beneficial in this particular circumstance.
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it so pithily and absurdly epitomized what is often _wrong_ with this website.
Was this on the article that was about the complicated nature of do helmets make people safe? For hints to people searching I remember it was something about drivers acting differently around people with helmets and non-helmeted cyclists (I don't think the article made hard assertions of what was safer, but boy did the comments. It definitely suggested you should wear one). What I do remember is that the comment section was a complete and utter shit show with people saying cyclists deserve to get hit by cars (but isn't that always true for comment sections including cyclists?)
No, although I remember that thread, too, since I am an e-bike enthusiast and evangelist (not for work or anything, I just love e-bikes and am always advocating that people try them).
I think the funny comment I am trying to find occurred in a thread that wasn't even about bikes or helmets though, it was just off on some little tangent.
That kind of thing just proves how important intuition is in framing an argument. People have a baseline and expect evidence when something goes against that baseline. But different people have completely different baselines.
The other common area for this is nuclear power (is it easy?) and climate change (is it fragile?). At the heart of those debates are deeper philosophical questions that have little to do with science. But it is always easier to throw around stats than grapple with that.
FWIW I usually do appreciate citations/links to scientific research. Online discussions can devolve quickly and a culture that demands quality information to back up statements is more resilient to a lot of common issues with online discussions. Even if the result seems obvious, there can be a lot of interesting material in the primary source.
Wait, could that be me ? I had that exact conversation on HN.
I was the one asking for studies (and my previous comment was sthg like "helmets should be mandatory" then I was told "do you realize it increases injuries ?" then I ask for proof) and the reasoning in the studies was that making helmets mandatory decreased car drivers' attention to cyclists making them less cautious around them, resulting in more serious injuries.
Strangely neither can I find those comments at the time.
I have the fuzzy memory that it was about a bikes around Sydney or Australia but HN comments tend to derail from the initial submission so I can't be sure.
Hmm I am not sure! To be honest, I have spent the time since posting my comment above googling for the post... but no luck yet.
The problem is, I think I myself might not have even commented in the thread, so it is hard to search for... anyway, I think it is unlikely to be you, because I wouldn't have laughed at a demand for evidence if it was about legislating a helmet mandate (sure better have real evidence in that case!) but it was more like "I crashed and hit my head on the curb, thank god I was wearing a helmet!").
(I myself mainly get around Tokyo on my VanMoof X2 ebike and almost never wear a helmet...)
You've motivated me to keep searching for the comment now, though... ;-)
That is not the comment I was referring to — sounds reasonable to me!
(The comment I am looking for also started rather emotionally, something like "Ugh I hate — HATE — when people... (make assumptions like this without evidence, something something)". And then possibly invoked the names of a couple of logical fallacies.
(T_T) I thought I'd be able to find it with the double "hate", but I can't... it was some years ago too, at least 4-5, so I am probably mis-remembering.
> I am always annoyed with articles promoting safe cycling when illustrating pictures show cyclists without helmets or any other form of protective gears.
> In Belgium there is a small movement promoting bikes and there are all kind of hipsters, bobo and 50 years old grey hair vegan on fake vintage bikes riding without helmets and without any sense of road conduct. Good bikers wearing yellow jackets and helmets are really rare ; I am beginning to think the formers are ruining the latters's image.
It might be increasing injuries the same way helmets did when they were introduced during the first world war. All those head injuries would have been fatalities. Instead their wearers survived and their head injuries were recorded.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing. Sometimes the numbers make a very convincing case.
Take motorcycle helmets. In over 40% of motorcycle accidents, you hit the chin bar, or what's under it. It's an undeniable argument in favour of a full face helmet.
I’m going to hit you in the head with a bat, do you a) wear a helmet b) don’t ware a helmet c) there’s no scientific evidence so I’ll toss a coin.
Btw. Here’s a vaguely related discussion on a seemingly paradoxical feature of helmets which I find interesting cause this yes might go against our intuitions in some cases.
There is ~250 cycling related traffic deaths per year in the Netherlands. Some 60 of those are e-bike related.
Normalized per capita that is well above the EU average, but you shouldn't forget that we cycle a lot in the Netherlands, which means that per cycled kilometer, cycling in the Netherlands is still ridiculously safe even without helmets. It has been argued that forcing people to wear a helmet in law will reduce trips taken by bicycle and increase air pollution due to an increased number of trips taken by car (25% of ALL trips in NL are taken by bicycle, versus about 16% in Denmark, to give some comparison). And this is not even counting the psychological effect it has on car drivers and their behavior around people wearing helmets. Besides: cycling injuries and deaths are skewed heavily towards the elderly population (65+), if you're a 20-something person, statistically speaking you're more than fine not wearing a helmet in the Netherlands.
Let's not jump to conclusions here about helmets and think this stuff through before shouting 'You should wear a helmet'. It's not quite that black and white. Forcing everybody to wear helmets might very well cause more death and injury than not to. We have taken other precautions to ensure cyclist safety, such as designing our roads to protect them, and those measures make a lot more sense. You shouldn't forget that a helmet only helps a little if you are already in a bad situation (e.g. an accident), so it's much better to prevent that situation from occuring in the first place. The Youtube-channel Not Just Bikes has great explanations about how we approach those problems over here.
I think our point of view is very different. Coming from a country where almost no-one cycles as a mode of transport, I view it entirely individualistically. I understand that the imperative 'should', has a far wider (even political) connotation in the context of the Netherlands.
To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest forcing people to wear helmets, by law. My thinking is simple: it is safer to wear a helmet when cycling. Therefore one _should_ wear a helmet when cycling. It’s about as easy to wear a bike helmet as it it to wear a surgical mask.
On the subject of helmets, I don’t think deaths per year is the right statistic. I’d be more interested in head injuries per year. Not all serious head injuries cause death, and not all deaths are caused by head injuries.
I do understand your point. That in a safe cycling space like The Netherlands, the risk is low enough that The safety provided by a helmet is very rarely used.
There’s a good chance that I will be living in the Netherlands in a year or so. I wonder if I’ll wear a helmet or not? (probably not). I’ve cycled a lot in my life, both on and off-road. As a child I never wore a helmet, cycling around the neighbourhood; but as an adult I always have.
Fair point, you’re entirely right in that in other countries wearing a helmet can be much more important and indeed much more of that burden is placed on the individual.
I looked into head injury statistics, but it seems like this isn’t publicly available. Multiple sources (cyclist safety advocate groups!) claim these to be low numbers though.
The problem with wearing a helmet is not that is inconvenient to wear it though. It is a storage problem at your destination. Dutch high schools often only offer small locker spaces, I doubt full size biking helmets would fit. Considering >90% of middle and high schoolers are coming to school by bicycle, that would involve carrying around a helmet all day. Ofcourse it’s not an unfixable problem for schools, but this goes for every little trip: going to a bar? Leave your helmet at your table I guess? Going to the bookstore downtown? Walk around the store awkwardly with your helmet in your hands I guess? The friction for these trips would be a lot higher with a helmet, and these are the type of trips people tend to use their bicycles for. I live about 2km from the city center of a 150 000k city. Parking is 3 euros an hour, and it takes pretty much the exact same time to get to the city center by bike as by car. I’ll take the bike any day for all trips that don’t involve my carrying a bunch of stuff back, and this is a common sentiment. We’ve got free supervised underground bicycle parking lots. It’s a no-brainer :)
If you do end up moving I’d love to hear about your experience a few months in. Maybe we’re all indoctrinated into believing cycling here is super safe when it actually isn’t, but so far my experiences cycling in other countries have been terrifying (I really wish I had a helmet using the bike-sharing system in Belfast). An outsider perspective would be very interesting.
Head injuries are more common in cars than bicycles. Before someone tells me I "must" wear a helmet when cycling, I want to see them strap on a helmet when entering a car.
I’ve been hit by a car three times when cycling (only when cycling on an e-bike, car-drivers seem to have difficulty assessing the different speeds involved). The last time, and the time that persuaded me to give up the e-bike resulted in [this](https://0x0000ff.uk/imgs/hit-by-car.png).
That top impact is my head, smashing the windscreen. The lower impact is my arm (broken in two places). The side of the car was my knee, breaking the my thigh in the process.
I was cycling along, in my cycle lane, with the right of way on a main road. A woman turning left across my path into a side road either didn’t look or didn’t see me. I had time for “Oh Shi” before the impact and the pain.
I was wearing a cycle helmet, actually one issued by my work, which is what saved my life that day. The ER nurse said a young woman had also been admitted because of a car accident that evening, but she’d only been wearing a climbing helmet. She died.
My body was broken, but I didn’t even get a bruise on my head. I remain a fan of cycle helmets.
I understand your situation, but please also understand that per cycled kilometer, the Netherlands is a lot safer than any other country. There exists no country with as big of a modal share with bicycles, and our accident rates involving bicycles are still super low. I'd love to get my hands on statistics on accidents per million kilometers or so, but it doesn't seem to be tracked anywhere for bicycles.
Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do.
I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA
It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'll be in the same ballpark. The estimations are that forcing people to wear a helmet will save about 5-20 lives a year on the Dutch roads. That'd be impressive, but the reduction in people opting for bicycles would yield a much bigger negative for the health of the people. Feel free to read through a Google Translated version of this webpage: https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/wat-vindt-de-fietsersbond...
That sounds like an awful experience. From the picture, it looks like the crumple zones on the car yielded very kindly to your momentum as well, which is incredibly fortunate. I'm glad you got out of it alive, if with some serious scratches and dings.
I'm convinced anyone who would be wearing a helmet when driving a car, and narrowly escaping death in a similar way (e.g. a racing driver who is kept alive by their helmet?) would argue much the same way in favour of helmets when driving cars. It's just more rare because we don't wear helmets when driving cars.
My uninformed guess would be that many head injuries in cars would not be helped by wearing a helmet. G-force related injuries, like whiplash, and being hit by the airbag.
It’s a hard line to draw. I remember reading a comment on HN a while ago. In it the commenter said that whenever he left the house he wore earplugs, and protective glasses. Earplugs because he got a bit of tinnitus once, and the glasses, because once he almost walked into a tree branch and almost lost an eye. He’d probably say that we should wear a helmet no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
No, no, I like HN, and have derived a great deal of value from it over the past 15 years or so (even made meatspace friends from it; the HN Tokyo meetup basically became my entire social life after I had kids).
That comment is one of my favorites because it was funny... it was "soooooo Hacker News". It might only have been so funny because I've spent so much time on HN over the years.
I don't really use any other websites like this (reddit or whatever). HN is a kind of unique thing for me.
tkiley
If I could go back five years and give myself some advice, I would say that "enough" is not durably satisfying. Purpose is durably satisfying. Purpose arises from constraints. Having "enough" means you lack a particular type of constraint. Thus, enough" can get in the way of developing purpose, particularly if you are somewhat undisciplined like me.
I find almost everyone intensely boring. How am I supposed to get along with people without feeling like a complete fraud?
Small talk, feigning interest in kids, in sports, in wine, in whatever useless dull, pedestrian thing a coworker is into.
I find that anyone who isn't a PhD (or could easily have been if they hadn't gone into industry) might as well be a paper shell. I can put on a mask of civility and charm when needed, but all I really want is to talk to deeply self-aware people struggling with the boundaries of human knowledge.
It's like you try to peel back a single layer of why people believe what they believe and there's nothing there. No reflection, no relevant context, no mirror provided by an intimate knowledge of history or literature ... just nothing.
Nearly every time I work up the motivation to try to really get to know someone who I think I may have judged too quickly I find religiosity, passive consumerism, an unexamined life, something so distasteful that it takes ages before I can do it again.
How do people put up with it?
I used to like the writings of a user called something like Marin Country until they were banned! I liked the anecdotes, flow of words, way of speaking. He was a retired programmer with lots of stories and fell across the lines of policial correctness (which moves every year) and got banned.
So I did, found a lump, and because I found it early it was removed with no further issue. So that's definitely one of my favorite comments!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120102
* Mine was discovered super super early, on a scan related for something else
* This was actually so early that it didn’t make sense to operate. The main treatment for testicular cancer is orchiectomy, i.e. total removal of testicle
* If you find a lump, it is by definition much bigger than mine was, and the above doesn’t apply. But if you find a marginal, tiny spot on an incidental ultrasound, ask a doctor about what sizes are risky and consider a second opinion.
* I had something called a frozen section sample. They take the testicle out of the body, but leave it attached. They quickly biopsy part of it. If cancer, remove. If not cancer, put back in. I had this, it was cancer, but I’m nonetheless glad I did. My lesion was so small even then that it plausibly wasn’t cancer
* I had a seminoma. They grow slow, and are benign. It took three years to have a notable changes. If yours is growing faster than that, the odds are much higher it is cancer and a worse kind. Most benign masses are stable and tiny.
* Bank sperm before the operation! You may find fertility significantly impaired. My FSH went through the roof after the operation and my sperm count is like 0.01% of normal. Probably still viable with IVF, but almost zero. I likely had viable sperm before based on the normal fsh
Please don’t be pigheaded about this with your doctor. I did have cancer after all. But I plausibly didn’t, and my urologist recommended waiting + a frozen section sample. This is common in big centers for incidental detection, less common in hospitals that don’t see too many orchiectomies.
I’ve also been told it’s very hard and dense feeing. Sometimes rough feeling.
I think this helps a lot but it sure feels like insufficient training.
This also gave me an app idea. I have very mole-y skin. Doctor said to keep an eye on new ones of significant size. I have a terrible memory. Maybe I need an app that I can snap photos of my major moles and it will tell me if future photos match or are possibly new, based on my mole constellations as pattern matching.
> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".
> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831#up_469940
We like to view the world through an idealistic narrow lens of an analogy but the truth is often far more complex.
I would go further to say that analogies and quotations are dangerous and deceptive. These quotations don't actually offer any new information. You usually only like analogy because you already agree with it, no new information or insights are being offered other than the comparison that is part of the analogy itself.
Unrelatedly, does anyone know why certain comments immediately become dead, they don't really seem to break any HN rules but I see often that some comments die quickly.
When a comment becomes dead, it's because some mods chose to vote it down, and fewer mods choose to revive it. The net effect is an expression of the prevailing culture.
Your question about why this sometimes happens "immediately" is an interesting part of the dynamic.
> Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
>The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
> I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=jakelazaroff&comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
> The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are a community consensus, it's that they're the fastest reactions to feel, and the fastest comments to write—especially when the topic is provocative, when most of us are reacting from cache [2].
> Then a second wave of objections is generated by the first wave. Readers come to the thread, see the comment section dominated by those initial 'triggered' responses, and feel some version of surprised-shocked-dismayed at how the commenters all seem to be reacting in that way. This propels them to write defenses of the article, often carefully expressing more moderate or balanced views than the first wave—but they probably wouldn't have been motivated to post anything if there hadn't been the first wave of comments to object to!
> These second-wave comments tend to get more upvotes, perhaps because more people tend to share the more moderate view, but also because those comments tend to be more reflective [2] and therefore better written.
> This explains why the top comment in a thread so often begins (ironically) with "Wow, I can't believe the comments here"—or from the current thread: "All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old" [3]—followed by a defense of whatever those objections were objecting to. Eventually you get objections to the objections to the objections—which reminds me of the line "My complication had a little complication" from Brazil [4], and also epicycles.
That added cost/friction may also act as a filter for lazy readers/skimmers or those misinterpreting what's said at first glance, and therefore if forced to include some critical text response along with their downvote then OP and other readers can begin to get to the bottom/foundation of the distaste, giving OP at least some guidance as to why someone/people are downvoting - arguably a valuable learning/crowdsourcing moderation tool/mechanism.
I feel the added cost of time and mental effort for downvotes would add a great balance.
The fundamental problem is that getting downvoted feels kinda bad - nobody ever asks for explanatory notes on upvotes. It's reasonable to wonder whether getting downvoted feels, say, too bad too soon and if there are UI ways to address that. But it's worth remembering that for downvoting to actually work, it has to feel at least somewhat bad. It's going to feel somewhat bad with or without notes from others about why they thought you ought to feel a little bit bad.
A few people realized that the post was generated by AI and they mentioned this but they were actively voted down.
I think there needs to be friction on the downvote because mob mentality is often wrong. Disliked opinions are still valid opinions that aren't necessarily wrong.
Perhaps asking users why they are downvoting could help. Maybe not necessary to show their reason to others, but add friction and force someone to think twice.
So there is potential scrutiny by the community, but not in a way that disrupts the original discussion?
Upvotes have much less friction. Downvoted posts are not merely downvoted, they are also not upvoted. Why don't people upvote posts that are unfairly downvoted?
Adds just enough friction to reduce downvotes a bit, provides information to the person being downvoted (no more "why all the hate?" comments), and doesn't pollute the experience for everyone else, since those are not visible by most users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
EDIT: suddenly aware of the irony
Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.
https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min... https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5 https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
But what has happened in the tech world, is obviously the reverse.
All kinds of contrived/arbit spaces have been created and then behavior of the lab rats within are studied.
EDIT: Also check out and explore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
"Third Place" is just one example of understanding what spaces people need and using it to drive design. Studying and understanding where people congregate and why, is what inspires and leads to the design of "Third Places" like the Starbucks store.
From an Occam’s Razor point of view, this is a very poor theory, and I’d even go further and suggest it indicates unfair bias on the moderators’ part to implicitly subscribe to this judgment about early / quick responders.
A competing, much simpler theory is that Hacker News, like everything else on the planet, is tribal and political. People add comments to support their tribe, and people use upvotes to support their tribe, while they use FAQ & guideline legalese, downvotes, shadow bans and timeout periods to punish opposing viewpoints and tribes they don’t like.
I think the reason people look past this much simpler theory that comports much better with the evidence is that they want to protect a false sense that Hacker News is democratic and tolerant of unusual views, but it so deeply isn’t.
Since users like to make objections, the initial comments tend to object to the article/title (because there's nothing else to object to yet), and later comments object to existing comments. Poof, "waves".
You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.
–Paul Barham
Scalability! But at what COST?
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...
http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/02/...
Interesting it also involves graph processing, which Bane's comment did. The point is that distributed graph processing frameworks were mostly parallelizing their own overhead, not solving the problem, which could be done on a single machine!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469625
My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.
For things that take a long time, timing is essentially random. The world is chaotic. Had I known everyone and their dog would be locked down in their houses for months on end, I would have built something to cater to them. But of course, there is no way to know. I find it amusing that just before the pandemic there was a thread on HN talking about overvalued unicorns and Zoom was up near the top of the list. What would need to happen to make Zoom a household name, people asked?
To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.
This week, I wanted a handheld device to push buttons and open doors without touching them; found several for sale (though the models without covers seem useless.)
Later I wanted a 3D support structure to fit under a mask and increase its usable surface area; found several for sale.
My main takeaway though is that an idea doesn't have to be novel for it to be a good idea. Lots of things that were tried and failed could succeed with a new approach. And lots of things that're currently successfully could be redone in a better way.
Wow, I also thought about this idea.
For those who are interested in something like this, you can search for "frame for face mask" on Amazon...
*I have no affiliation to the site or map, just remembered a colleague showed me
Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.
My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.
Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
I put coins on the road for people to find, because I remember the joy of discovering a coin as a child.
Overall it works as a joke, but fails as a metaphor for me!
The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?
For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."
For example, I had the idea of mobile payments almost 20 years ago, way before smartphones. This is extremely popular today, but even if I had had the technical skill to pull it off (I didn't) this is only the kind of idea a giant company could have considered.
Good ideas are not universally good.
https://www.businessinsider.com/peloton-founder-ceo-john-fol...
My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it.
For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397272
Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.
Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.
So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.
That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
https://www.lifewire.com/number-of-ipods-sold-all-time-19995...
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.
From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.
- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).
- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.
- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do
-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.
- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.
It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.
I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
Thanks for your interest!
> Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
> The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
I'll probably remember this quote for years to come.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534277
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618
I quit over something like this. Best decision of my life. I was the lowest paid engineer, I won/led/only person that worked on a major contract (20% of revenue) and they said I was bold for asking for a promotion that would put me equal pay with people that brought in no contracts. Don't work for toxic management. It just isn't worth it. It takes a huge toll on your mental health and honestly no money is worth that. I was burnt out for over a year after that experience. I learned that when applying for positions you should also be interviewing your manager. That's become one of my top criteria.
The burnt out feeling is coming mainly from the feeling of how much prep is required to switch jobs even. I'm just hoping the promotion actually comes through and I don't need to but at the same time I'm preparing now so that 6 months from now I can leave on a dime if I want.
I learned this lesson the hard way and ended having to take a multiple year hiatus from even looking at a text editor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in a way a form of PTSD; for a long while, even thinking about programming elevated my heart rate. I ended up working as a bike mechanic during that time away, and the combination of a low stakes environment and working with my hands did my mental health a lot of good.
Yeah I mean going off of the great burnout comment before, it's that the negative mental pathways are being carved super deep every day by your continued effort -> failure (or perceived failure by you or manager).
I wonder if mushrooms/acid/mdma can help cure professional burnout faster?
How's being a bike mechanic money-wise? If you have a solid amount of capital built up from grinding as a soft engr, that could be a nice segway for a time.
Basically a combination of both. I was at a medium sized startup fresh out of college, and I was the only one working on a completely new project using a language nobody else at the company used (I was doing NLP stuff in python). There was no code review and next to no mentorship, and every other developer was working in Java/Scala, so they had almost no clue what exactly I was working on. Early on I was actually able to deliver on pretty much everything asked of me, and had one of the models I had trained being used in production within six months. It was this terrible combination of me feeling completely out of my depth, yet everyone else only sees that I'm delivering, so thinks I have everything under control.
I knew very little python or machine learning when I started, but was able to get fairly competent in the problem domain quickly. But as things progressed, my severe lack of experience in developing a large project started to slow progress down and take a toll on me. I felt like I had to keep up the pace I had set expectations with early on, so I just started working longer and longer hours trying to meet deadlines that probably didn't matter anyways. Near the end I was secretly working nights and weekends because I had this mentality that If I didn't someone was eventually going to find out that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty classic imposter syndrome fueled by perfectionism.
> How's being a bike mechanic money-wise?
Haha, not good. At a shop that pays well, it's around $20/hour after base pay plus commission. It was a nice change of pace though. It made me enough where I didn't have to use too much of my savings. I quit soon after Covid started and have been doing some portfolio projects and brushing up on my interview skills.
Programmers are hard to replace, it hard to find a good one, and it takes time to ramp up a new one with a codebase. You have more negotiating power than you think.
Your comment struck me because I have been in that position before, and I know it really really hurts. But you gotta look out for yourself. Please take a week or two off
That assumes that their manager (1) is aware of how hard it is to find a good programmer, and (2) is rational.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449
Edit: anybody want to suggest any other lists for the lists list?
I've referred to this comment a couple of times in discussions with people I've worked with. It is a great example for many problems of old code bases.
So much to takeaway from that post. For me it is 1. Its important how you structure your code (flags and global state can wreak havoc on a program) 2. No matter how bad your code base is - it can at least be functional if you have good testing
On Catering to the privacy crowd- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123463
Users of peanut butter shouldn't have to think about whether it contains glass and razors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20634128
On Telegram seven years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949814
Indian Govt blocks a PHP project for terrorism and anti national content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8820378
On Show HN:Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Did you win the putnam? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
To avoid network congestion, the TCP stack implements a mechanism that waits for the data up to 0.2 seconds so it won’t send a packet that would be too small. This mechanism is ensured by Nagle’s algorithm, and 200ms is the value of the UNIX implementation.
> Sigh. If you're doing bulk file transfers, you never hit that problem. If you're sending enough data to fill up outgoing buffers, there's no delay. If you send all the data and close the TCP connection, there's no delay after the last packet. If you do send, reply, send, reply, there's no delay. If you do bulk sends, there's no delay. If you do send, send, reply, there's a delay.
> The real problem is ACK delays. The 200ms "ACK delay" timer is a bad idea that someone at Berkeley stuck into BSD around 1985 because they didn't really understand the problem. A delayed ACK is a bet that there will be a reply from the application level within 200ms. TCP continues to use delayed ACKs even if it's losing that bet every time.
> If I'd still been working on networking at the time, that never would have happened. But I was off doing stuff for a startup called Autodesk.
> John Nagle
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947
The parent to my comment pointed to a most remarkable piece of internet lore, but it was really about your argument against taking VC. A very quick look showed that you did exactly what you said you were going to do, with probably the exact result you indicated. I pointed to TarSnap because that was the result, and it seemed important to the story. Success? Sure, exactly as planned, but what about the audience of your original argument, those that said to go for big venture investment? Surely they still exist here. What do they think? However, if the story is to be a guidepost for others, it's really about what you think about your story, and so I think anybody following can be grateful that you've closed the loop on this. I realize that you could have interpreted this as some kind of personal slight, and a few did on your behalf, but it's obvious that you think differently, and your lack of offense is very telling of your satisfaction. So really you've answered in two ways. For my part, I don't think that gifted people necessarily owe 'us' their highest altruistic purpose. Maybe that is between them and whatever higher power they believe in, or not. But we at least hope that others also respond to aspirational attention with some kind of honesty, even if we can't possibly understand. Thank you.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Semantic error. Like using past tense to describe someone you met once long ago and otherwise know nothing about.
> Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
Depends on your goals, eh?
"If all you wanted was money you could just rob a bank."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959139
[2] http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-ha...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104
Followed closely by 'tzs on Missile Command:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228350
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Ms9oq...
I had been telling my very similar story here of my experience for a few years, then to see another say same thing with email evidence was vindicating.
Around that time and maybe before more and more negative posts about said company started and have continued to appear on Hacker News. So her story along many other things going on I believe helped highlight they do evil/aren't to be trusted per the image they once sold.
Overall I'm glad she had the courage to post her experience and in turn help other dreamers/innovators (what my aim was) to not trust this tech company and highlight they are the opposite of the mantra they sold to the public.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826
The comment is about how to think about "news /social networks addiction":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002196
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21711221
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449
Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips.
1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It's about people and it's about solving problems.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occassionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. I say in every talk I give: "all things being equal people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends."
6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.
There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in. Good luck.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285438
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807777
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142737
Also, this one was nice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107536
Edit: Formatting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
"As a matter of fact, I did"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115661
Discussing Android apps and trackers.
"I predict that Libra will work for a while, but will eventually be overshadowed either by competitors or by the new markets that it enables.
There's this pattern I've noticed where every major tech company, once initial traction has been established, gets three pivots. You can think of them as adolescence, mid-life, and rebirth.
The first pivot happens when the company is 5-8 years old (since the 1970s at least; older before then), and serves to define the company. The System 360 for IBM, defining it as the provider of mainframes for enterprises. MS-DOS for Microsoft, defining it as the dominant PC OS. The Macintosh for Apple, defining it as the most user-friendly consumer brand out there. GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are.
The second pivot happens when the company is 10-15, at the height of its dominance, and usually results from it entering the hottest new technology wave with a vengeance. It looks like it succeeds for a while, crushes early entrants, serves to legitimize that technology wave, but ultimately peters out as the company can't keep up with the changes that it introduces. The IBM PC for IBM, which legitimized the PC market but ultimately fell to clones. Internet Explorer for Microsoft, which legitimized the Internet but ultimately was eclipsed by Google's many products. The Newton for Apple, which legitimized the PDA market but ultimately was too early. Google+ for Google, which legitimized social networking but ultimately failed to gain traction.
The third pivot is when the company realizes that they basically incapable of innovating, and returns to the roots they established with the first pivot to live out their old age. Open-source consulting for IBM, leveraging their massive installed base of enterprise customers. VS Code, XBox, and Azure for Microsoft, recognizing that they are fundamentally a platforms company. The iPhone and iPad for Apple, refocusing on their strengths in UX and delivering top-quality consumer electronics products. Alphabet for Google, realizing that they're fundamentally a conglomerate that lets a thousand flowers bloom (and cancels 990 of them).
Libra is Facebook's second pivot. It'll look like it succeeds for a while, it'll legitimize cryptocurrency, but it'll ultimately end up eclipsed by what it creates. "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20210791
That's an interesting thought. Is it Google or Amazon or Facebook?
Amazon: AWS + retail + Alexa + Kindle + Prime.
Everything about Amazon (going even further back than Google), for the most part, has been Internet based. They're clearly an Internet conglomerate. AWS is a drastically bigger deal for the Internet than Gmail, YouTube or GMaps; AWS is a present or future $600-$800 billion company by itself. Alexa owns the smart speaker market. Amazon is close to being an online retail monopoly. Prime is the world's largest loyalty lock-in program, which none of the other tech giants have (they have various leveraged network moats instead).
Facebook: FB core, FB messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram.
I think FB's combination is at least as potent today as GSearch + YouTube + Gmail + GMaps. How quickly FB's sales have grown rather speaks to that as well. I think GSearch has a plausibly more enduring position than Instagram though. And if you remove Instagram then FB's upside drops off dramatically, it's a shaky position that can be threatened. WhatsApp isn't worth much commercially (relatively speaking) and probably never will be, that acquisition was a competition removing action by FB. As Instagram ages, it'll face an endless line of cooler TikToks vying to rip its userbase away (young people not wanting to be where the old people are or where the last thing was), that process will never stop because social networks are almost always built on trend / fashion / cool and as they age they shed the cool factor. What threats have GSearch and YouTube faced? Not much, it's far harder to compete with them than it is to build the next small social homerun and scale it if it hits. Today, and for this decade, FB is probably as great of a conglomerate as Google, however I would rather own Google's properties than Instagram and WhatsApp (if FB had shown an ability to rapidly spin up new products to catch each cool wave, that would be different; but the exact opposite has happened, FB is risking turning Instagram into Frankenstein's monster, contorting it to keep up with each upcomer like Snapchat and then TikTok).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002262
"""
No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do.
But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.
In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI
This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.
But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.
You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.
But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.
If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.
"""
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
> fiaz MANY days ago | parent | favorite | on: Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?
> APOLOGIES for making this post so annoyingly long, but I really hope you find value in the words below. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm going to first share a personal experience from my early trading days to illustrate where I'm coming from. I used to wake up at 4:30 am everyday in the Chicago suburbs to beat rush hour traffic and make it into downtown Chicago at 6:30 am. In order to wake up so early, I fell into a habit of sleeping at 9:00 pm and like a robot waking up at 4:30 am. This simple routine was indirectly helpful when things seemed darkest.
For the first six months, I lost money and was ridiculed constantly by other traders who were more successful than me (which was about 20 other guys CONSTANTLY using me as a punching/whipping bag). The only thing that kept me going was the fact that some of the very same traders that would be making wise cracks at me for losing money were some of the most successful people I knew at the time. For better or worse, if I needed a trader to model myself after, it was the same people that were telling me how bad a trader I was - and although I was not open to really hear what they were saying, they were right about my skills in every way (but their feedback was always packaged in some sort of insult). After racking up some rather hefty losses, I was determined to quit at one point during month four, but because I had a habit of waking up at 4:30 am I simply "forgot" that the night before I told myself I would quit and spare myself further humiliation...by then I was warned that I was now on the red list of traders ready to be cut. Also, my personal savings were starting to approach zero (the base "draw" for house traders was enough to pay for food; you usually make your money on a percentage of your profits, and I was deep in the red at the time).
To say the least, there were many excellent reasons to be "reasonable", forget about my dreams, and quit. After 4 consecutive "failures to quit", I realized that I didn't quit because somewhere deep down I was hanging on to a dream, however remote at that point: that I could somehow be as successful as the other traders that I knew. At the same time I realized that I had hit rock bottom in that I couldn't even succeed in failing! Very tough times indeed... An interesting point to note here is that although my losses were starting to get very large, the people who were funding me as a trader kept me because I had one redeeming quality: EFFORT, and this helped build tenacity. Other traders who barely traded but had a fraction of my losses were cut much faster because they didn't put forth much effort. They were not willing to take losses and be bold/brave and fight it out; I was willing to take risks, and this saved me from getting cut faster than others.
Slowly I began to reinterpret the constant humiliation I was suffering: perhaps the other traders were right about their "jokes" and there might be something in what they are saying that will help me get out of the red. I also realized that since I had failed at quitting (which was now the ULTIMATE failure), there was no further failure for me and that if I took baby steps they were surely to succeed (this translated into taking smaller trades/profits).
Only after improving upon my abilities as a trader and channeling my energies appropriately did I succeed and earn everybody's respect as a trader (and you have no idea how this made me feel!). I quickly made enough in commissions to be trading my own account, and be successful as an independent trader onward. When I look back at those final months of 1999 (yeah that's right, I was losing huge cash at the end of 1999 when the entire market was going crazy UP!), there was more good than bad even when I was getting my ass handed to me. It's just that I was intentionally creating my own feedback (I'm right everybody else is wrong) instead of seeing the results I was getting (losses/insults) as feedback and information that would help me be successful.
I kind of snicker every time I see somebody ask for feedback on their startup on YC.News only to end up justifying themselves by telling everybody why they did what they did when they get negative feedback, which is the feedback of greatest value. If somebody tells you how crappy your idea is, thank them that they even spent a few brain cycles considering your idea.
The lessons I learned from this that are perhaps relevant to your questions:
- Determine if you believe in yourself to succeed as an individual (I know this sounds odd, but for a moment just examine your thought patterns and your actions and see what message you are sending to yourself; do you listen to the voice that says you can't or are you paying attention to the feedback from your efforts and the results you are getting?)
- Search deep down inside and see if the project you are working on is something you believe in or not. If you can't sell yourself, then you shouldn't bother trying any further...
- ANY attention you get for your efforts is good attention. If you get LOTS of negative feedback, then be grateful - you've jumped the first hurdle of getting people to give a damn about what you are doing! :)
- There is responsibility and accountability that goes with both success and failure. You need to be ready for both because they can be equally painful in equal ways. The amount of accountability that comes with success can be more unbearable than the accountability that accompanies failure. I personally know of some very talented people who enjoyed phenomenal initial success only to find just as fast that they were in over their heads.
- The more you resist the possibility of failure then you are less likely to recognize possibilities that will help you succeed. If you are afraid to fail, then most certainly you are afraid to succeed. This sounds counterintuitive but it's based upon the fact that fear makes your mind less supple and less responsive to the changes that will push you out of the game - or conversely it will lessen the impulse to jump on the opportunities you need to succeed.
- The results you get has everything to do with your users/market and less to do with you as an individual; it's sometimes hard to separate these two. See the other side of the equation and what side you are on before trying to solve it. Don't ever think you are above the feedback of your users...EVER!
- Don't have expectations (this is just setting yourself up for failure). Because you are starting out you may not know what is best to help you succeed - ESPECIALLY if you're lacking motivation. Keep in mind that whatever results you get from your efforts will lead to more possibilities (in the form of additional information).
- Have some behavioral "context" within which to exercise discipline and structure. Seek to grow your efforts within this context. My context was my sleep schedule. It was a routine that was so ingrained that my drive had a laser focus. This might not work for some, but it worked for me. Finally, I will add that in my opinion failing hard and fast is MUCH better than failing slowly. The faster you know for certain something isn't going to work out, the sooner you can cut your losses and move on to your next idea. When you eventually succeed, you will look back at all the times you were quick to cut your losses and get to where you are... ---------------------------------------------------------
Please do NOT contact me asking for advice in trading/investing. This is a VERY personal thing, and it has everything to do with who you are, NOT with how much information you have, or which tools you use, or who you know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24543596
> From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
> It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
> At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone).
> Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached.
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566
It wasn't a good comment, it was a bad comment — I am only sharing it on the off chance that somebody else will remember and post the link.
The discussion had veered to bicycle helmets: should they be required, is there innovation to be realized in their design, something like that.
Somebody posted some comment about definitely wanting people to have a helmet when they crash their bike and hit their head on the curb, and some other person became incensed at their evidence-free assertion that wearing a helmet would be helpful when crashing one's bike and having one's head hit the curb. The incensed party demanded links to scientifically rigorous studies, rather than some layperson's hunch, that helmet wearing would be beneficial in this particular circumstance.
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it so pithily and absurdly epitomized what is often _wrong_ with this website.
> Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
> Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
I think the funny comment I am trying to find occurred in a thread that wasn't even about bikes or helmets though, it was just off on some little tangent.
The other common area for this is nuclear power (is it easy?) and climate change (is it fragile?). At the heart of those debates are deeper philosophical questions that have little to do with science. But it is always easier to throw around stats than grapple with that.
Strangely neither can I find those comments at the time.
I have the fuzzy memory that it was about a bikes around Sydney or Australia but HN comments tend to derail from the initial submission so I can't be sure.
edit: found it ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4262081
The problem is, I think I myself might not have even commented in the thread, so it is hard to search for... anyway, I think it is unlikely to be you, because I wouldn't have laughed at a demand for evidence if it was about legislating a helmet mandate (sure better have real evidence in that case!) but it was more like "I crashed and hit my head on the curb, thank god I was wearing a helmet!").
(I myself mainly get around Tokyo on my VanMoof X2 ebike and almost never wear a helmet...)
You've motivated me to keep searching for the comment now, though... ;-)
(The comment I am looking for also started rather emotionally, something like "Ugh I hate — HATE — when people... (make assumptions like this without evidence, something something)". And then possibly invoked the names of a couple of logical fallacies.
(T_T) I thought I'd be able to find it with the double "hate", but I can't... it was some years ago too, at least 4-5, so I am probably mis-remembering.
> I am always annoyed with articles promoting safe cycling when illustrating pictures show cyclists without helmets or any other form of protective gears.
> In Belgium there is a small movement promoting bikes and there are all kind of hipsters, bobo and 50 years old grey hair vegan on fake vintage bikes riding without helmets and without any sense of road conduct. Good bikers wearing yellow jackets and helmets are really rare ; I am beginning to think the formers are ruining the latters's image.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261122
Take motorcycle helmets. In over 40% of motorcycle accidents, you hit the chin bar, or what's under it. It's an undeniable argument in favour of a full face helmet.
I’m going to hit you in the head with a bat, do you a) wear a helmet b) don’t ware a helmet c) there’s no scientific evidence so I’ll toss a coin.
Btw. Here’s a vaguely related discussion on a seemingly paradoxical feature of helmets which I find interesting cause this yes might go against our intuitions in some cases.
https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-bike-helmet-paradox
Normalized per capita that is well above the EU average, but you shouldn't forget that we cycle a lot in the Netherlands, which means that per cycled kilometer, cycling in the Netherlands is still ridiculously safe even without helmets. It has been argued that forcing people to wear a helmet in law will reduce trips taken by bicycle and increase air pollution due to an increased number of trips taken by car (25% of ALL trips in NL are taken by bicycle, versus about 16% in Denmark, to give some comparison). And this is not even counting the psychological effect it has on car drivers and their behavior around people wearing helmets. Besides: cycling injuries and deaths are skewed heavily towards the elderly population (65+), if you're a 20-something person, statistically speaking you're more than fine not wearing a helmet in the Netherlands.
Let's not jump to conclusions here about helmets and think this stuff through before shouting 'You should wear a helmet'. It's not quite that black and white. Forcing everybody to wear helmets might very well cause more death and injury than not to. We have taken other precautions to ensure cyclist safety, such as designing our roads to protect them, and those measures make a lot more sense. You shouldn't forget that a helmet only helps a little if you are already in a bad situation (e.g. an accident), so it's much better to prevent that situation from occuring in the first place. The Youtube-channel Not Just Bikes has great explanations about how we approach those problems over here.
To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest forcing people to wear helmets, by law. My thinking is simple: it is safer to wear a helmet when cycling. Therefore one _should_ wear a helmet when cycling. It’s about as easy to wear a bike helmet as it it to wear a surgical mask.
On the subject of helmets, I don’t think deaths per year is the right statistic. I’d be more interested in head injuries per year. Not all serious head injuries cause death, and not all deaths are caused by head injuries.
I do understand your point. That in a safe cycling space like The Netherlands, the risk is low enough that The safety provided by a helmet is very rarely used.
There’s a good chance that I will be living in the Netherlands in a year or so. I wonder if I’ll wear a helmet or not? (probably not). I’ve cycled a lot in my life, both on and off-road. As a child I never wore a helmet, cycling around the neighbourhood; but as an adult I always have.
I looked into head injury statistics, but it seems like this isn’t publicly available. Multiple sources (cyclist safety advocate groups!) claim these to be low numbers though.
The problem with wearing a helmet is not that is inconvenient to wear it though. It is a storage problem at your destination. Dutch high schools often only offer small locker spaces, I doubt full size biking helmets would fit. Considering >90% of middle and high schoolers are coming to school by bicycle, that would involve carrying around a helmet all day. Ofcourse it’s not an unfixable problem for schools, but this goes for every little trip: going to a bar? Leave your helmet at your table I guess? Going to the bookstore downtown? Walk around the store awkwardly with your helmet in your hands I guess? The friction for these trips would be a lot higher with a helmet, and these are the type of trips people tend to use their bicycles for. I live about 2km from the city center of a 150 000k city. Parking is 3 euros an hour, and it takes pretty much the exact same time to get to the city center by bike as by car. I’ll take the bike any day for all trips that don’t involve my carrying a bunch of stuff back, and this is a common sentiment. We’ve got free supervised underground bicycle parking lots. It’s a no-brainer :)
If you do end up moving I’d love to hear about your experience a few months in. Maybe we’re all indoctrinated into believing cycling here is super safe when it actually isn’t, but so far my experiences cycling in other countries have been terrifying (I really wish I had a helmet using the bike-sharing system in Belfast). An outsider perspective would be very interesting.
That top impact is my head, smashing the windscreen. The lower impact is my arm (broken in two places). The side of the car was my knee, breaking the my thigh in the process.
I was cycling along, in my cycle lane, with the right of way on a main road. A woman turning left across my path into a side road either didn’t look or didn’t see me. I had time for “Oh Shi” before the impact and the pain.
I was wearing a cycle helmet, actually one issued by my work, which is what saved my life that day. The ER nurse said a young woman had also been admitted because of a car accident that evening, but she’d only been wearing a climbing helmet. She died.
My body was broken, but I didn’t even get a bruise on my head. I remain a fan of cycle helmets.
Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do.
I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA
It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'll be in the same ballpark. The estimations are that forcing people to wear a helmet will save about 5-20 lives a year on the Dutch roads. That'd be impressive, but the reduction in people opting for bicycles would yield a much bigger negative for the health of the people. Feel free to read through a Google Translated version of this webpage: https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/wat-vindt-de-fietsersbond...
I'm convinced anyone who would be wearing a helmet when driving a car, and narrowly escaping death in a similar way (e.g. a racing driver who is kept alive by their helmet?) would argue much the same way in favour of helmets when driving cars. It's just more rare because we don't wear helmets when driving cars.
What do you think of that line of reasoning?
It’s a hard line to draw. I remember reading a comment on HN a while ago. In it the commenter said that whenever he left the house he wore earplugs, and protective glasses. Earplugs because he got a bit of tinnitus once, and the glasses, because once he almost walked into a tree branch and almost lost an eye. He’d probably say that we should wear a helmet no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
Do you have other places that you prefer?
What would you say HN should change to become a better place?
That comment is one of my favorites because it was funny... it was "soooooo Hacker News". It might only have been so funny because I've spent so much time on HN over the years.
I don't really use any other websites like this (reddit or whatever). HN is a kind of unique thing for me.