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kgin

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I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic 4 years ago

Most of the internet is actually a MMORPG where you use comment boxes to tell people why they're wrong.

HN is a very advanced level in this game, with high standards for gameplay, but it's very much a part of the game nonetheless.

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Ask HN: How do you cope with realizing you mostly wasted your potential? 4 years ago

Listen, you are being overly harsh on yourself.

You say that your intelligence was “given” to you, like a gift. But then you turn around and say the parts of you that made choices that didn’t result in the life you compare yourself to… those parts you say are 100% your fault. You’re saying your positive qualities are from the outside, but your negative qualities are all you. You’re not being fair to yourself.

We make choices, yes. You can choose to take job A instead of job B. But you can’t choose to be the kind of person who chooses job A instead of job B. Or if you can, you can’t choose to be the kind person who chooses to be the kind of person who chooses job A. At some level, there is something that you don’t choose. It just is. It’s not “choices all the way down”.

This powerful feeling inside you right now is a gift, as awful as it feels. You can, if you want, channel it into the energy you’ll need to confront the things that held you back. Change takes incredible amounts of energy and this feeling combusting inside you might be enough to nudge you in a different direction. Or if you want, you can sublimate that energy and apply it to something like helping bright kids growing up in tough circumstances. You may not be the elite 10x graybeard you imagined, but you probably know better than anyone how to help kids who are growing up like you did. Or you may take that energy and channel it into something totally different.

The way you get past the regret is to use this fire for something. But please, please do not take this fire and turn it on yourself like a blowtorch. Don’t use it to beat yourself and make yourself more timid and more afraid and more hobbled by your past.

You’re going to be ok.

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Show HN: Just Launched an App for Dads 4 years ago

For those reacting to the inclusion of "lonely" in the description: lonely isn't a dirty word. I worked at Meetup for over a decade and one thing I learned there was that loneliness is a normal experience when you start anything new in life.

You can be "lonely in a context" without being existentially lonely (though that's a very normal human experience also). Loneliness just means that at the present time, you don't know enough people who you can relate to in a certain context. You may have a million friends, but if you want to start a new career, you may be lonely in that context and feel the need to know more people in that industry. If you are newly diagnosed with a disease, you may be lonely in that context, not knowing anyone else who has been through the symptoms you're experiencing, even if you are surrounded by supportive family. And if you're a new dad or mom, you may have your spouse, you may have your kids, but you can absolutely feel the need to connect with other people who have experienced what you're experiencing.

Loneliness is just your emotions telling you that you could benefit from the presence of people who have travelled and are traveling the same road. It isn't a failing. It's fuel to reach out and connect.

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Would you take free land in rural America? 4 years ago

I have to agree that. In some ways, there is more socialization in a small town than in a large city. The threshold for "having enough in common" is lowered to "we both live here". In a city, people often interact less with others in absolute terms because there are so many people and talking to any one person over another seems arbitrary.

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Faster internet access has weakened civic participation in Britain 4 years ago

I’m not sure I understand what the proposed relationship is.

Web access for most people has been essentially the same experience for years. Whether you have 5mbps or 1000mbps, Facebook pops up about the same.

Why would having access to higher speeds change your engagement with civic institutions. I could understand if we were comparing dialup era (or even pre-internet era) to broadband era.

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Tackling the crisis of care for older people: lessons from India and Japan 5 years ago

Sometimes I have to step back and note the whiplash of future predicted problems.

When I was a kid, it was overpopulation. Then it became overpopulation combined with the prospect of automation taking all of our jobs. Now, very suddenly as it seems to me, we’re talking about declining population and a labor shortage.

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