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I’ll add on to the other responses and tell you that for a lot of people getting old sucks and the thing that sucks worse than getting old is being old. Constant pain. Lipoma pressing against your spine means no matter how you sit or lay you feel uncomfortable. It hurts to take a shit, it’s hard to get all the piss out and even when you so you have to clean up the floor and toilet because it dribbled everywhere. You can’t remember the last time you jerked off and don’t care to try because it started hurting every time you ejaculate more than a decade ago. You can’t stand for more than an hour before your back is on fire forcing you back down to your sitting position which is “only” uncomfortable.

If you are reading this do yourself a favor and take your body’s health seriously right now before it’s too late. Exercise every day, get that 30 pounds of fat you jokingly call your dad bod off before it’s too late, go to the doctor and fucking do what they say instead of nodding and convincing yourself you know better and don’t really need to do that. Oh and brush and floss your damn teeth. The above story doesn’t have to be your story but if you sit at your computer all day everyday and don’t take care of yourself it very much can become your story.

Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain.

That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of a false positive is marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as “professional judgement” and anyone who has ever referred to that statement in the course of their work should be concerned because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part of it, we’ll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient, but we’re unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time soon.

The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.

I’m a pretty smart guy, or at least I keep getting told that, and I work near HFTs in the finance world. I am also a huge space nerd thanks to a love for things like Star Trek and Star Wars in the 70’s 80’s. I would take a significant pay cut to work for NASA because that work would feel amazing compared to the grind I’ve been in.

I am 100% confident I would not be hirable by NASA, confident enough in that assertion to shut down without trying. I think you may have some bias from your media bubble coloring your perception if you truly believe what you wrote is true.

Not the OP but it’s not hard to get a charitable interpretation of his point. You know why gun ownership is important because you surround yourself with men holding guns. But while you do that you want to take away my gun? I don’t have a ring of men standing around me, it’s just me between my family and the world.

It’s literally equivalent to Bill Gates telling us how critical the coming ecological crisis is going to be while his family lives in a mansion. It’s okay though because he paid your family to live in a cardboard box so he can claim he’s carbon neutral. When he moves his family into a 300 square foot home so will I and when you put your guns down, you can talk to me about mine.

I very much doubt this is true. I’m sure there are a very large number of FAANG quality engineers all over the eastern US, let alone other countries, that couldn’t or wouldn’t make the move to SV. I would be willing to put money on it being the MAJORITY capable of being hired into those roles couldn’t or wouldn’t move there to take them.

There is no amount of money that would have convinced me to leave Florida. My family and my wife’s family is here. My children’s friends and extended support networks are here. This life is not worth losing for any pay raise. I’m willing to bet a very large number of quality engineer made the same decision I did.

They were director of design! I am not part of that company so it’s possible that director is a joke there but in most companies that’s the highest level prior to the c suite/owners (public company/professional services firms). That would mean she likely had immense autonomy and a large group of direct reports whom themselves had teams of direct reports. Going from that to “just a coder” ie one team member of one team responsible for only their contributions to their current projects.

In nearly every organization that would be a huge demotion WITH a huge pay cut. In this instance because coders are paid so much more than most other professions it’s possible it was a lateral move or even a pay raise! But no question as far as responsibility for the direction of the organization it’s a huge demotion.

I remember DivJoy 1.0 and wow you have come a long way! Looking forward to seeing where this project ends up in a few years. A couple of questions/comments:

1) postgres is critical but I saw in another comment you were already on that

2) where are the big boys under hosting? I had an imposter syndrome moment when I clicked on that drop down because I didn’t recognize a single name on it...I’ve been at this for almost 20 years now. AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, and Heroku were some of the things I would have expected.

3) anyway to see a sample code base without paying? I’m not sure how that would work as I don’t know how you can do it without also enabling people to take your work without paying but it’s a non starter for me. I’m probably not your target audience though so take this request with a grain of salt.

Congrats on shipping and best of luck with the product!

Edit: I went back and noticed to hosting options are all serverless so not surprising a crusty old Rails guys wouldn’t recognize them.

A good read if you are interested in the topic. I do take exception with the constant tonal use of absolutes which seem to be trying to lead the reader to a false conclusion based on that false fear.

If the president (Biden or Trump) ordered a first strike nuke against Toronto or London there is a 0% chance it would happen. I personally doubt that an order against Moscow or Pyongyang would be followed either, but I wouldn’t argue with someone who wanted to take a position that those first strike orders would be followed.

My point is just that there is obvious a lot more...”human nuance” in the situation that the author is describing.

[dead] 6 years ago

Even more so as you must guess at the motivation for doing so. Is it a reminder and warning of what could happen? Or is it a subtle call for violence trying to incite people to repeat it?

Turns out recent precedent says I can read it whichever is those two ways I want. Maybe it’s time to remove HN from the play/Apple stores for allowing this content to remain unmoderated? /s I flagged it.

Like every market it relies on three large groups existing. One large holding the asset with no intent to sell over the next “horizon” whatever that’s defined at. One group holding the asset and needing to sell it soon. And finally one group holding USD (or your local context equivalent) looking to buy into the asset. The winners and losers as far as appreciation of the asset (I made money holding it!) or depreciation of the asset (I recovered 70% of my value) are determined by how large each of those groups is.

The stock market has been great because the population has been booming. The holders looking to sell have no trouble finding buyers looking to buy so they lock in their appreciation. The real estate holders in Detroit and now maybe SV (recent buyers) didn’t do great because demand for their asset cratered.

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen to Bitcoin. Will it go mainstream causing the buyer class to massively outstrip the seller class and lock in huge gains for the current holders (to the moon!) or will it become as illegal as heroin in the major markets causing all legit holders to exit and the price to tumble to next to nothing?

Only one thing is certain, in this time of uncertainty, you will certainly have no trouble finding lots of people willing to tell you which one it’s going to be with absolute certainty in their conviction.

My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait.

Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front.

What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of.

Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support).

That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.

Not sure what your point is considering that I expressly noted the existence of fast food steak houses like your example in my parent comment. I mentioned the existence of places like Longhorn Steakhouse and Outback Steakhouse which are places where you can get a $20 steak. Cattleman’s is a two dollar sign on Google indicating it’s a typical fast food steakhouse restaurant like those examples above.

Most people would draw a clear line between a hamburger and fries from McDonalds for $5 and a hamburger and fries from an upscale burger place for $20. Those steakhouses you are referencing are McDonalds equivalent and every city in America has them in additional to upscale steakhouses that are 4 dollar signs on Google. It looks like Mahogony Prime Steakhouse would an example in OK. The comment I was responding to expressed disbelief at $100 steak which is a staple of the American experience (meat eaters obviously) and not at all “just for upper middle class” Americans. Giving out a steakhouse gift card for birthdays and graduations was pretty common amongst lower class families when I was growing up. Buying a $100 steak twice a month might be upper middle class behavior but buying it once or twice per year is well within all but the lowest classes ability to purchase when desired.

Steak houses in the US (not places like Texas Roadhouse) like Bern's in Tampa (most famous East Coast example I know of - don't spend much time in DC or NYC) or Marks Prime for a more mass produced McDonalds approach at the same concept generally cost around $100 per head for the full experience. This includes a steak, a sauce for the steak, a side, a soup, and some fancy types of bread. The whole place will usually be done up like you are dining in a side hall of the Vatican and of course you can go up to $1,000 a head easily if you start looking at their wine bottles.

Its a staple experience of the meat eating upper middle class here in the US.

Sorry citizen, Game of Thrones has reached its download limit. May we suggest The Wheel of Time of Sword of Truth instead? Quite the dystopia you paint.

More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.

There is a massive pushback against taking the vaccine going on right now. People coming up with a litany of different reasons not to take it. One of those reasons is a lack of trust in the government. If that smiling 34 year old has a lot of constituents telling him they are scared to take it because it might not be safe it becomes his duty to stand up and take it as early as possible with a smile on his face.

What ever happened to starting out with assuming good intentions?

The cynic in me feels like they wouldn’t care. The deal they have with your phone provider allows them to identify you by the phone you signed up with. The deal they have with Amazon facial recognition let’s them identify you with the cameras you walked past every time you go in the store. The deal they have with the state let’s let track where your license plate was seen this month. And of course they have what they want which is the card in your pocket giving them all of your purchases in one easy column.

/s.....hopefully

I pulled down a copy of HN earlier in the year for analysis and was shocked to find polls among the data. It was a very small % of the total content, small enough I assumed it was an old feature that got removed.

If you want a breadth of grounded fantasy (IE takes place in our world but contains elements that don't really exist in our world) then I would recommend picking through Stephen King.

If you want to completely escape our world then I recommend the old Conan books or the modern Brandon Sanderson starting with Stormlight Archive.

You have received plenty of Sci Fi recommendations but I will add my own personal favorite (this is one novel in the series): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Death_Ground

If you want fiction that is grounded in reality with little to no fantasy elements then the murder mystery genre has quite a few gems that are fun to try and guess the twist of when you are reading. Murder on the Orient Express is great if you havn't experienced the story yet.

I will go against the grain here a bit because on anonymous forums humans (myself included) have this nasty habit of forgetting they might be talking to a 12 year old child and instead imprint a vague version of themselves on the people they talk to.

If you are close to the beginning of your journey, like say 1-3 years ago you didn't know how to program at all, them I would take the advice you are getting with a grain of salt. I would recommend pouring your free time into your trade, gaining both a breadth of knowledge about software engineering (like spending 3 hours learning about C++ not to write a program in it but to be able to understand what it is and what it isn't so you can carry a brief conversation when the topic turns to it) and a depth of knowledge with your preferred toolset (like 200+ hours going through 3-4 ground up resources on Python because its your most reached for language to get work done).

Once you have that strong foundation, the other advice here is very sound. Turn your computer off and go do wood working, or read a comprehensive history series that tackles each decade (and then do it again from an Asian focused author rather than a Western focused one), or find a solid podcast to listen to while you go for long walks in nature, etc. Pretty much anything other than sitting at your computer for both your job and your hobby.

I would reconsider trying again with a larger budget and try to do some targeted marketing. I wanted to buy it just from your description on the play store but I’m IPhone only unfortunately. If not maybe there is a marketplace for selling your game (the rights to it not copies) like there is for selling businesses. This completed project would likely be an easy buy for someone with more capital than products.

Either way congrats and finishing and shipping, that’s a serious battle in and of itself for a side project!

I don't know much about the details of how things like this go down but it also seems like maybe admitting that wasn't such a great idea for that poor person...Can that admission alone be enough for a judge to compel she unlock the phone for law enforcement?

I think we are doomed to this forever by human nature.

As a thought experiment ask yourself what you think would happen in the following scenario:

We enshrine the two party system into law but allow all Americans to chose their party freely each year. You no longer pay taxes or receive services from the government but from your party instead.

Do you think this would lead to harmony where the half of the country that wants high taxes and many services would join the D party and the half that wants low taxes and few services would join the R party, all living side by side in harmony?

Or do you think this would lead to total chaos where the people with money to take (IE money to spend on services for themselves) all join the R party and the people without money to take all join the D party looking for services they can’t provide to themselves.

I would say it’s pretty obvious what would happen but then again my world view is a bit cynical and of course not the only one. I would say it’s exactly what has happened to our system without needing the thought experiment to make the incentives obvious.

Intriguing concept but I couldn’t tell from a quick glance where this website falls on the scale of say “BBC/NPR affiliated” down to “Ted in his garage has a cool idea and knows how to website”.

The inclusion of a donate button, an empty dead section titled something like “who is talking about us” with no content and above that “who is supporting us” which had a few names that didn’t carry recognition with me.

Anyone know how serious this project is from an industry adoption point of view not so much from the people involved in setting it up view.

Again the tilt of my comment is a bit negative which isn’t my intention so I would like to point out again how cool the website looks and how interesting the concept is.