montyf

Yeah, you can play whatever game you want in life. However, playing the money game is dangerous, and can easily create attachment and greed. I'm not necessarily preaching about his choice of game -- more about his lack of perspective, really.

I see what you mean as well. But, I don't think this kind of thing should impact your well being. The guy said in other posts that he can't get into those better companies and is considering suicide. It sounds so odd to me that I don't know if he's serious.

Sorry, but is this a serious post? Honest question.

My total comp for the first year is only $145k out of undergrad with a base of $106k. My friends at places like Google, FB and Cruise are making more like $180k-$230k by comparison.

Heaven forbid someone is making more money than they know what to do with than you are.

Im honestly terrified that the value on the resume will decline over time and i will never be able to get into a more prestigious company.

Is this a real concern? Surely you can be hired on technical merit. Google hires new grads! And people who only worked at "top-tier" companies still have to pass an interview everywhere.

The idea of being relegated to a 2nd or third tier company has been eating at me, and comments on places like CSCQ, Blind and this AskHN nearly drove me to suicide before.

That's sick. Not to be insensitive for you, but our priorities in this industry are whack. Surely you can find a meaningful job outside of a megacorp that's bleeding the world dry. Or do you just care about money and status?

Is central control necessary? I know it's a tough pill to swallow, but I encourage you to think about it some more. And don't think in terms of subsystems but rather real entities.

Otherwise though, I found that his personas largely reflected his current emotional state. One persona would almost always be "out" when he was upset with a friend, or struggling with some stress. Another was more childlike and playful. He described them as always there, and even though he appeared to allow one of them to be "in charge" as he put it, he said the voices were always in the back of his mind, directing his thoughts.

That doesn't sound like a disorder. The abnormal thing about your friend is that he is more aware than the average person.

The illusion of a single, unified self is just that. When you talk to people in your dreams, who are you talking to? Their responses are quite intelligent, if you listen. When you say embarrassing things under anesthesia with no memory of it, who said those things? When you get irrationally angry, who the hell is it that comes out? Same with the alcoholic who swears one day he'll quit and forgets about it the next day -- different people.

Moreover, there are huge areas of your brain that work quietly and subconsciously (from your perspective). Not only are they conscious, they're smarter than you. They prove it through intuition and gut feeling, if you listen.

while his condition lent itself to occasional mood swings, he made a point of _respecting_ his voices, allowed them to become a part of him, and I feel had largely learned to cope.

I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but I found your tone somewhat condescending. It's not his alternate selves that he needs to "cope" with, but society's notion that something is wrong with him. This might sound too new-age for people, but the more aware you are, the more you realize just how sick everyone else is. We literally have conscious beings imprisoned within us.

He had figured himself out for better or worse

Probably figured himself out better than the rest of us ever will.

There are other things like adrenal hyperplasia which are really common and results in developing secondary sexual characteristics of both genders.

"Really common" is people bullshitting. Most of this stuff is in their heads. I don't know about adrenal hyperplasia but certainly you don't need to be a liberal to have it? So why do only liberals want preferential treatment?

Sorry, all this crap is just identity politics... it's not based in reality at all.

To suggest that people can't or shouldn't advocate for acceptance of their conceptual identity is pretty misguided.

I'm sorry, but made-up genders simply do not find their way into my model of the world. I never encounter such people in real life (hopefully they've all been siphoned off to Portland by now) and I simply do not have the time or the energy to so much as blink at such whacko ideas, much less accommodate the crazies by building special bathrooms just for them and their delusions. So sorry, but I will never "accept" this into any personal framework and will treat people like normal people with real genders, not made-up ones.

Simply not having XX nor XY chromosomes happens about in one in every 1666 people. Surely you have met at least two thousand people in your life.

That's a disease, not a gender. What makes people with such a disease think they are special? Moreover, why should I care about this particular disease when there are much worse?

Honestly, everyone has quirks, not everyone makes them the core of their identity.

Edit: apparently someone here is offended by my comments and instantly downvoting them. Pretty sad, and doesn't help your cause. If censorship is the best strategy you can think of, then maybe your cause is total fucking bullshit.

I understand now, though I would argue that nothing you call "objective" is actually so. These goals you listed are just the formulation of a game, which a lot of Westerners choose to play (though not all global citizens, which already makes your opinions non-objective). We can choose to play any games we want on this planet, and it baffles me that people choose to invest time (the only thing you ever truly invest) into one of the worst games.

It's no wonder that whenever I go back to America or see Americans in my travels I am struck by how utterly shallow and unhappy they seem to be. And the stereotype of the American Smile is already disappearing from people's memories.

Because we're humans, not asset-collection algorithms. I'm sorry that this is an honest question.

Do you view everything in life in terms of investing and value extraction? If so, that is deeply, incredibly sad.

you have several multi-decade goals to work towards

Why do you think the goals you listed are worthwhile? Who made these goals and why?

I deleted the comment in case there is some sort of HN 404 taboo I'm not aware of.

Never do this. If someone doesn't like your comment, then you are just letting them win by removing it. That's exactly what they want: for the comment not to exist. Don't give them the satisfaction; people who engage in censorship practices don't deserve it.

That's not true at all. Overtime can most definitely be unpaid, and usually is.

Sounds like something I'd be good at. All I have to do is stroll through the woods and I have 20 ticks on my person.

I enjoyed your comment despite it being light gray. I never considered Google to be particularly rich in "opinions". Some buy into the culture more than others, but the workers are mostly left-wing. I also think a better term than opinion here is "radical ideology", which is more accurate and less vague. But yes, I found the comparison to communism to be quite apt,though it applies to much of SV. People are afraid of saying something they shouldn't. Even though the consequences may not be as severe as in the USSR, you can still lose your career for something like saying you agree with Trump on anything.

I'm not into new age / whatever stuff but I like to think of it as night time meditation as while it's still not as good as sleep it's still a great deal better than full blown insomnia!

There's a reason advanced mediators have vastly reduced sleep requirements (four hours a night or even less).

Or the US using Agent Orange and inflicting shocking health effects to millions of Vietnamese. Hiroshima/Nagasaki pale in comparison.

they belong in the same category as French or Japanese

Huh? French food I can understand, though I don't have much of a taste for it, but Japanese food is terrible -- I was there for two weeks. A lot of foreigners are deeply disappointed when they travel to Japan, especially by sushi (though I found a couple of good sushi places). However, by far the best food in Japan is found in Chinese-style restaurants. Chinese food completely eclipses Japanese.

Eastern European food is fantastic. It completely spoiled me and my gf -- we couldn't stand the much-loved Spanish tapas when we went there. And Poles make as good or better pizza than Italians.

And then we went to Asia and found ourselves in a whole different ballgame.

you can get an _amazing_ meal for cheap in Greenpoint

I completely sympathize -- Polish food is rewelacyjne when you're used to shitty American food.

I also remember a time when human decency wasn't shrouded in the pejorative "political correctness".

Not sure what you're getting at with this rhetoric (no wonder you're a fan of vague, politically-correct statements -- I have no idea what the second part of your comment means). People don't like political correctness because it's a manipulation tool of policy makers, used to misdirect and to prevent unwanted discussion -- like with e.g. the illegal immigration problem, which no one dared bring up before You-Know-Who. Political correctness is also a cowardly and intellectually dishonest mode of discourse.

You're absolutely right, but HN users don't realize that most of America exists outside of their ideological bubble.

For example, if child of meth heads grows up to be president, he's yet another privileged white president, not an outsider who overcame adversity.

It's racism and nothing else. Thing is, it's OK to be racist nowadays, as long as you're a liberal.

Edit: to the guy quoting the dictionary below me, this is racism in a really obvious way. It is "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race" and it's not okay just because you don't explicitly declare your race superior.

Air Asia is the worst airline I've ever flown with. Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid them when flying in Asia.

Japanese people seem to be in a pretty good place emotionally. They are pretty closed-off, as I expected, but they're more laid back than people in many Western countries and definitely much less stressed than Americans. I'm speaking in generalities here, of course, and I haven't been to Tokyo yet.

There are several reasons why satisfaction is rising. Partly because of the cost of housing, more young people live with their parents. Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist, calls them “parasite singles”.

Yeah, accomodation is ridiculously expensive here and it's reflected in the price of hotels and how small everything is. It was pretty claustrophobic my first few days here. There's an interesting article[0] talking about the housing situation but I don't know if it's accurate or not.

Life is pleasanter in other ways too. On every street corner is a 7-Eleven or similar convenience store where young people can buy everything from stationery to ready meals (and heat and eat them on the spot), flick through manga comics, and buy tickets to baseball matches.

My favorite part of Japan is that you can walk down an average block and expect to pass a dozen vending machines with coffee, energy drinks, and beer. Always gives me a good laugh. In this sense life is pretty convenient, but in Korea it is even more so (their skyscrapers literally have miniature malls in them).

Although rapid economic growth is history, they appreciate that living standards remain high, and that life (apart from housing) is affordable.

This seems true, stuff like food is not as expensive as I expected (coffee is a dollar, a sushi dinner for two is 60 dollars maximum and usually more like 20.) Korea was even cheaper, though, and the food was much better.

That is good news for a country where the word “youth” tends, with good reason, to conjure up images of gloomy misfits: hikikomori—people who shun society—and otaku—nerds.

Most "otakus" I've seen so far were foreigners and not Japanese. I can't comment on the number of hikikomoro here, for obvious reasons, but I do think these are exagerrated stereotypes. Perhaps these stereotypes were more true in the past.

Just some observations, I've only been here a week. Oh yeah, and Japanese people drive less, bike more, and tend to be rather fit (or at least not obese) -- that gives them a big leg up on Western countries in the happiness department :)

[0] http://thejapanfaq.com/FAQ-Prices.html

I thought it wouldn't be so bad, but now that I have seen the screenshots... it's pretty bad.

The thing is, a lot of developers seem to have no anesthetic sense whatsoever. I realized this when I noticed that almost all Emacs themes are garbage, and that no one seems to mind. I even wrote a blog post about it with several examples and people thought I was trolling.

I mean, just five minutes of work put into this Slack thing would have improved the look a lot, so the other commenter's point about priorities is just kind of dumb. Slack may be a piece of junk but at least it is passable in the looks department. It's not like it's the 90s or anything. How can someone think that looks aren't important?

I wrote a blog post on tool mastery a few days ago, mostly in response to an egregious article named "You are not your tools"[0], but also to write down some of my recent thoughts on this topic[1].

I agree with the OP that internalizing a tool changes your brain for the better. Everyone knows that learning a new language (human language) expands your brain and improves your ability to learn more languages. Let's continue this example, just to make things clearer. Mastering foreign languages is not a cakewalk, despite scattered marketing claims that you can do it in a year or even three months. From the OP:

Just having a passing familiarity with the tool doesn't empower you.

You can't learn Korean just by visiting Korea and waiting for osmosis to take effect. Even people who live in foreign countries for decades fail to learn the language if they don't put in the appropriate effort -- I've seen it happen. But "You are not your tools" makes the following dim-witted assertion:

Spend your time listening and learning from everyone, whatever tools they use: most skills will transfer just fine.

That's exactly the opposite of what you should do. You will internalize nothing with this plan, nothing will "transfer" (if anything you will have interference[2]), and you will just end up like so many other mediocre programmers I see. Anyone who's learned a foreign language knows this -- you need skillful Practice and Concentration. Trying to learn two languages at once takes more than twice as much effort than if you focused on one, if you don't do it with great skill.

Quote from my blog post:

There is a huge gap between the average programmer and the real hacker. On one side of the gap is the doe-eyed little boy who goes into every project clueless about how to start, searching for a relevant tutorial on Google while frantically asking questions on StackOverflow. On the other side is the man who plunges into the project with an air of mastery, controlling his environment with a fluid ease which is rare and somewhat dangerous – a man who’s already finishing the task by the time the boy has gotten his first response on StackOverflow. Which side of that gap do you want to be on all your life?

Now returning to the OP.

What qualifies as a tool? Does critical reading qualify? How about writing well?

These absolutely qualify. These are fundamental tools -- mastering them will improve many other areas of your life. But you would not believe how few programmers take the time to improve these skills, or even care. Sometimes I get the feeling that the average programmer hasn't read a single book in his life (apart from maybe some programming or self-improvement books, which are generally poorly written and unimaginative). It shows.

What are the tools that benefited you the most?

Emacs, without question. I took the time to learn it during a spell of happy unemployment as I was living abroad. This one decision has paid enormous dividends in my life, but only because I took the time to truly master this tool. It not only has made me more productive at pretty much everything I do on computers (which in itself is valuable -- the more prolific you are, the better you become), but it made me smarter and more confident on account of having mastered something. Men are supposed to be experts. Mastering something silences your inner critic and cues your brain in to your innate self-worth -- it's how male brains seem to function.

You can learn Vim instead, but please avoid IDEs. Easy-to-use, lowest-common-demoninator, "thoughtless" tools actually seem to be making people dumber. It's the path of least resistance versus the path of blood, sweat and tears -- and they go in opposite directions.

A question the OP should have asked, but didn't:

How do you know when you've mastered a tool?

You will know. It changes the way you see the world. New possibilities arise, the horizon broadens, and you begin to see with lucidity how powerful you are and how far your potential truly goes.

As J. Peterson says,

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.

A quote from Kafka on the Shore:

Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.

[0] https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/03/23/you-are-not-your-too.... These kinds of articles are not just idiotic, but harmful to society -- the attitude expressed here will make people worse at their jobs and at life, and we should speak out against this pernicious mindset.

[1]: I won't post my article here, as my blog can be found on my user page. I posted it on Reddit and received a hostile and, well, juvenile response. A lot of people took issue with the idea that certain tools are better than others (seems like Vim/Emacs are not liked there) and the idea of someone taking mastery seriously ("You must be fun at parties" was, I kid you not, an upvoted response). It's not just about mastering your tools, but mastering your environment by extension. It's about power -- the power to change our world -- for the better. Many people embody a mediocrity mindset and go through life without skill or strategy -- they unconsciously know their own inadequacy, and you can see this on their faces.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory

I liked the irony in this post, considering that the main draw of Electron apps is that they are supposed to be cross-platform. (To be fair though, FreeBSD is pretty niche.)

There have been far too many false stories about Russian hacking published for them to carry weight.

They never carried weight for me. The "evil Russians" angle has always been about disinforming and misdirecting the public.

That's good, you're not the same person from day to day after all. As we all should know by now the continuity of the Self is mostly an illusion. Most people, however, decide once during their lives that they are, for example, "not a morning person", and never stop to revise their self-perpetuating beliefs. In our endless quests to categorize and label everything in the universe, we end up doing the same things to ourselves and our own self-images are often composed of simplistic and hastily-formed judgments and categorizations. It seems natural that people don't know themselves, an extreme (but common) example being a bodybuilder with body dysmorphia.

I'm actually up in arms now against people who insist that mediation/yoga/SSRIs/most therapists can make a damn bit of difference in the case of actual depression. I wasted 20 years of my life listening to them, when the people those things are going to help aren't actually depressed to begin with.

Woah, "actual depression"... hardcore!

The problem isn't other people. You are the problem. Your ego is so big that it bleeds through your posts, as if it's crying out for someone to stop it.

Before anyone suggests it, I'm experienced enough to know I wasn't 'doing it wrong'.

Hello, Walter's ego!

You were meditating incorrectly because everyone does in the west. It's not a mindfulness life hack, and there are millennia of spiritual and philosophical background that are ignored when people claim it's simple. And as I'm sure you know, the Buddha taught that ignorance causes suffering.

I've got a lot of thoughts on meditation now...

Oh man, I love the delicious irony of this statement. I wonder if meditation actually helped with your ego problem or just made it stronger. Have you taken psychedelics or started a spiritual practice yet?