sprainedankles

Very nice! I'd recommend that the landing page either shows an example right away (the Carl Sagan one is great) or make it more obvious to take a look at one first - took me a minute to figure out what this was for, but the example made it click immediately.

Impeccable timing, I finally got around to putting some old hardware to use and getting a home assistant instance (and jellyfin, and immich, and nextcloud, ...) set up over winter break. Claude (and tailscale) saved hours of my time and enabled me to build enough momentum to get things configured. It's now feasible for me to spend 15-20 minutes knocking down homeserver tasks that I otherwise would've ignored. Quite fun!

Congrats on the updates, TIL I've been using the original version for 4 years now!

That's a fair point! Fortunately, our company culture plays a big role here - unless folks truly don't want to take much time off, everyone seems to take about 6 weeks off. Some teams even plan entire weeks off near holidays so that everyone gets rest and work can be planned/scheduled more easily. "Unlimited" means: assuming you get your work done and are a reasonable team player - take all the time you need (which seems to be 6 weeks, ha)

It can be a slippery slope for sure, I think it only works when the entire team buys into the notion that life is always more important than work (which can feel rare over here).

Happy to say this has been working for me and if the attitude started to change, I like to think I would speak up pretty quickly.

My first job (2018) provided 2 weeks of PTO, with an increase to 3 weeks expected after _five_ years. Folks in the U.S. can't quite comprehend having more than that (or any at all, depending on the job).

I am very grateful for my current company's "unlimited" PTO policy, it's life-changing.

Neat! Pretty cool to see the traffic "snake away" right afterward. I was a few states over in Maine and can confirm it took nearly twice as long to get home afterward - I really not sure I'll ever see that kind of traffic in those areas ever again!

Any resources/examples you'd recommend for a Vue frontend w/django? I've been pretty firmly in backend land for a while and would to experiment with the other half of the puzzle!

As someone with moderate hearing loss in both ears since ~1st grade, I'm all for expanding access to hearing aids. It took changing doctors in high school to finally get a prescription, and it was life-changing. Not cheap, but entirely worth it - I'm grateful to have had access at that point.

Cost is still a challenge, of course. But I'd like to point out that my current set of aids ($2800 pair) just hit the 5-year mark of usage, and they are still working perfectly. For devices that I use ~16 hours a day, everyday, it's amazing. However, it took 3 visits to the audiologist to get the tuning/fitting just right. For the first month of use, these hearing aids were "garbage" (I was really frustrated). But once we hit the mark, I have had zero complaints ever since.

So, that all said, there is tremendous value to initiatives like the Bose SoundControl Hearing Aids (~$900 pair off-the-shelf hearing aids), but the biggest hurdle they face is the fitting/tuning portion. I've tried them, but they don't fit my ears well, so I can't use them effectively (yet - I want to try adjusting the receiver cables).

I'm hopeful this is just the turbulent beginning of a new hearing aid market that expands access to as many people as possible, because it is far from a solved problem.

Thanks for the links. I have to say, getting hit with an ad right as ignition was about to take place really encapsulated the whole experience for me. What a (weird) time to be alive.

I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work.

But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.

So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)

Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.

Interesting...I've collected and read a lot of old Maine books over the last few years, and now I'm trying to remember if any of them mentioned this sort of behavior in passing. The qualities of lumberjacks that worked deep in the Maine woods were fascinating (and surely, at times, exaggerated), and I know at least a few descendants of Northern Maine Frenchmen...perhaps I need to give them a shout (ha).

Purely speculative: but I wonder if the daily lifestyle of a lumberjack, which was largely built around routine, rhythmic work and minimized social interaction (spending months in the woods at a time), coupled with shy tendencies to begin with (lots of lumber camps were completely male and had French/English language barriers = minimal small talk with coworkers), could've resulted in those kinds of reactions. I know that for me, it's easy to fall into a "trance" while doing manual labor for hours at a time, so I'd be curious if the amount of time they spent in that trance could've dampened their...social skills? Social reaction mechanisms? I don't know. Either way, pretty interesting. I'll have to search for some more references!

Interesting. Will take a look at the links, thanks for the info!

I'll look into it. Thanks for the link!

Good call, thanks for the clarification!

Yikes, I grew up in that area (on the U.S. side) and my neighbor down the street passed away from a disease related to mad cow disease about 10 years ago. The article lists mad cow as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease...I wonder if this is what he had?

The area is largely agricultural, and the cancer rate for that region is high compared to the rest of the state (Maine). Hmm.

I had never even heard of Angkor until I listened to this episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast (I highly recommend it): https://youtu.be/ghmjIBD2Fd4

Resource management intertwined with poor leadership is a common thread in the demise of societies. Our ability to adapt to our environments is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as Mother Nature itself.

I'd love if we took the hint from these histories, because the scale of change in our global climate looks like it'll far exceed past catastrophes. Some days I'm hopeful, but others, quite wary. Hmm.

Another great episode from Paul Cooper's "Fall of Civilizations" podcast

Seeing this made me wonder if the author pulled it from the song _or_ if the song/author pulled it from somewhere else. A quick search seems to indicate it's a Pinegrove original, which makes me happy. One of my favorite bands!

The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification.

I didn't realize this (or at least, am surprised it's _twice_ as fast). Apparently the key factor is loss of sea ice. Can anyone ELI5?

I agree, the pretending to be asleep part usually works for me too. But as soon as I realize it didn't work...then my mind takes off. Checking the doors and looking out the windows aren't things I've tried yet, though. Thank you!

These seem great, I'll give them a try. Thank you!

If it defeats the purpose for you, sounds like this product isn't relevant to you? My guess is something as nuanced as a workplace (of which, there are MANY types, and you're right, a lot are just moving to remote work per COVID) will require different setups for different sets of people.

I won't dispute your jab at the traditional workplace culture/politics, but I certainly wouldn't assume your personal preferences (and perhaps, the common preference of HNers) is the golden standard.

Many people work better with others "around" and enjoy the company/atmosphere, myself included. Sounds like this product addresses that exact market.

While an 18-month fog sounds terrifying, I'm absolutely fascinated by the amount of clues we can gather from geological formations like glaciers. The universe has encoded information in so many neat ways, and our ability to cross-reference these measurements with written histories is pretty cool.

Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)

The four of us made a dating program where you would input men and women and their traits, and then generate a good matching between them with an algorithm of our own invention.

Could this be the very first "dating app"?! Amazing.

The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers.

I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve.

We couldn't possibly crowd-source how to solve this flooding problem until the majority of that crowd has been educated on several aspects of the issue. Perhaps what the author is implying is that there needs to be a better interface between Politicians/Engineers and the people such that the P/Es say "hey here's our plan, find the flaws" and the people say "here are the flaws"

But there's the difficult problem. There will always be flaws and trade-offs, and this kind of interface eats up large amounts of time that may be better spent implementing a short-term solution to buy a few more years until a long-term solution is reached. It's a catch 22.

The decisions must eventually come down to the P/Es, but maybe we just need to add a few more feedback points into the decision-making system.

That's true, but those distributed goods primarily come from rural areas.

Obviously we need both rural and urban areas, but I suppose my "born in a small town" bias wants a better balance between the two than we currently have. For the benefit of both!

I suppose the term "logging town" is less relevant now as the communities fade, but they certainly exist [Source: I'm working in a Mill Town right now]

Any any industry rooted in the natural resources of an area breeds communities that are located near them. I think most people _prefer_ settling near work if possible.

I guess I find it unfortunate that small but strong communities are a dying breed. A healthy community to live in is an essential part of a quality life. It's quite literally the foundation of modern society, and I sense that the concentration of populations in huge cities is only further compounding the challenges we face (climate change, economic inequality, the overall health of a population)

Amazing to see the "Duncan Memorial Cedar Tree" so close to a wiped out area (aaaand a quick search reveals it fell just a few years ago. Ouch.)

What exactly does it mean to do "reduced impact logging" in Europe, do you have a link?

Coming from the Northeast where our trees are also of great economic value (and of greater natural value), I completely agree that a more strategic approach to logging should be pursued. But at the same time, we need to develop methods for supporting rural logging towns economically. I'm not sure what the answer is, but ideally it can make use of and build upon existing skill-sets and lifestyles in those areas.

I want to believe that if communities are properly educated and given opportunities to improve their practices, they would.

Which village, if you don't mind my asking (fellow Mainer here)? I grew up in a beautiful area that has never (and probably won't) seen the effects of tourism due to accessibility (read: The County), but have since moved to Southern Maine.

Maine has done a pretty good job of keeping tourism in check (I would say) despite being labeled the Vacationland, but I wonder if that has to do with our state having a more "plain" natural beauty? For example, Mount Katahdin is obviously impressive for the area, but it is nowhere near as dramatic as mountains out West. Then again, perhaps the strict enforcement of Baxter's vision for a forever "wild Maine" has served us well.

Or perhaps we are fortunate to have fairly brutal winters that give us a break from those who don't snowmobile!

That makes sense. I've been doing some research here and there and have found some good alternatives, I'll definitely try to be as prepared as possible for that conversation. Thanks for the reply!