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aor215

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I don’t think anything will help the author as much as giving a bunch of money away. I grew up in a community where I met good number of very rich people with inherited wealth and every one of them is depressed or has some other issue—hypochondria, feelings of inadequacy, or some strange striving for significance through conspicuous consumption which is, of course, ultimately unfulfilling, etc. The root cause in all these cases, in my view, is the money. Just give it away and face the fear of engaging with the world again.

The late Derek Parfit explores numerous answers to these questions in his paper “Why Anything? Why This?”[1]. It’s hard to give a quick summary of the paper, but basically a lot of different views are considered—theism, atheism, brute fact view, etc.—and in the end Parfit seems to suggest that the existence of the universe would be somehow non-coincidental if one appeals to simplicity in ruling out or deciding between competing explanations.

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Why-Anything-Why-This-...

I used to think the same. I too find my job to be easy and sometimes feel like we have this secret in the software industry that our work really isn't all that difficult these days, with so many hard problems having already been solved. I say this as a senior SDE in big tech.

But, after watching a close friend, who is brilliant—she had gone to a top 30 college undergrad and had top SAT scores—go to a coding bootcamp (the same one I went to) and fail to switch careers I started to think differently. For some reason, I find the work easy and interesting, but many others do not.

I do agree that many more people are capable of becoming developers than choose to do so. But this fact may not be as interesting as it sounds. Many people just don't like coding. Many just don't want to spend their days writing code, even if it pays well.

I don't mean to downplay irrational reasons why people choose not to pursue software. The industry still has a lot of negative stereotypes about what the work is actually like that prevent people from giving it a try, but, more and more, I've noticed that, even among people who know such stereotypes are false, many just don't want to do the job, even if they could.

Hi HN, I built yagss because I wanted to build a couple simple websites that are mostly just markdown, html, and css. I thought there would be a tool I could use that would make this easy but I couldn't find one that checked off everything I was looking for, so I threw together yagss over the last couple weeks.

I know, I know—there are so many static site generators. Still, I just wasn't satisfied with the available options. None seemed to support cache-busting and minification without a lot of setup; and many seemed to have significant requirements for building themes, many of which didn't make sense for my use-cases.

Yagss uses Jinja style templating, has a built-in cache-busting mechanism, minifies output by default, and has a few other features that aim to make it easy to throw together a simple website without having to figure out too much config.

I hope that yagss might be useful to a couple other people out there with similar requirements for their projects.

I also recently received a masters in philosophy from CU and know exactly who you’re talking about! By and large, I agree with her assessment. However, I would add that close-minded professors and students are quite rare - or at least they were when I was in grad school. Among the students, I found everyone to be willing to debate any of these issues, even if passions were strong.

I’m surprised no one has brought up how extreme punishment has become for engaging in these behaviors. I don’t have data to back this up, but my sense when I was in high school in the mid 2000s was that any slip up in any of these areas - smoking, drinking, etc. - would result in professional ruin. If caught, the punishment in many “zero tolerance” schools is expulsion and no top college admits students who have been expelled, except in very special cases.