skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Improvements in video-game technology help account for young men’s detachment from the labor force, according to a 2017 paper by economists from Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. It found that an increase in the playing of video games by men 21-30 accounted for somewhere between 38% and 79% of the differential in the decline in their time spent on paid work vs. the smaller decline of work by older men.

Attributing economic trends to video games seems lazy and dumb, given all the other potential factors. The de-facto decriminalization of marijuana isn't mentioned, and as much fun as it might be, there is nothing harmless about it, and drug use appears in pretty much every other explanation of social decline for other groups, but we don't seem to talk about it. It isn't boomer ditch weed shake anymore, it's 25% THC. In Toronto, even illegal dispenseries were given essential service status during lockdowns. That's only in the last 5 years, but those are the critical career years difference between 25 and 30 for one of the biggest demographic boom generations in the last century, and this sets their trajectory. These men just weren't raised well or with adequate tools. It's that simple. Many have been actively sabotaged by parents who used their kids as a source of narcissistic supply. Their dads' heroes were rock stars, who in hindsight were mostly guys who dressed like women and made a spectacle of complaining. Boomer and Gen X men as a cohort weren't much to emmulate. Compared to defeating global totalitarianism or building the internet, those in-between generations of corporate rock and blockbuster movies were a pitiful enterprise.

While I sympathize with the story of these young men, talking about mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse among young women is effectively taboo. Therapist friends tell me that young women are drinking themselves blind to hook up with randoms because they feel pressured to by their peers who encourage it to justify themselves. Sure, some really like it, but the ones who actually do don't challenge their friends to keep up with them. Peaches wrote a great song about how the rest of them feel. (Interestingly, Peaches ultimately became what she truly wanted to be: she is millenial womens' Joni Mitchell. When it lands what that means, you can begin to see.) The article isn't about young women, but they're suffering just as much and they are so much more harmed by the culture because their stakes are higher.

That men need each other with privacy to develop and thrive is an ancient principle, and almost impossible in modern society. However, the solutions are still right here, but they require effort, persistence, and risk - the very things that society makes the most scarce of all. Put simply, men are not meant to look at pictures and representations, we are meant to live in the world and engage it directly. It's time to wake up.
If you think your life is irretrievably broken because you don't get to be rich, your problem is not lack of money.
Bruce Dawson taught a 100 level class at the college I attended, it's been a while but I think the class title was something around image processing. The first or second assignment was to copy one image region into another, little did we know that we implemented bit blit.

After turning in the assignment the next class he grabbed one random assignment from the class and added some quick benchmark instrumentation and if I remember right then asked the class how fast we think it could run. The next 30 minutes was a total geek out on cache lines, prefetching, alignment and all the other dark arts of performance optimizations. I don't remember how fast he got it to go over the naive for loop but it was many orders of magnitude. There's a few classes that really stick with you and that was definitely one of them.
"Sports" may be hours per day for boys --- and even this is probably but organized sports definitely aren't, and that's where the coaches are. Unless he's playing AAU basketball or club soccer or something, I really don't think a boy is spending even a few hours per week under an "absolute authority figure" coach.

On reflection, the parent comment jibes with my experience growing up in the suburbs in the early 2000s. Literally all of my elementary school teachers were women. The only man I remember was a PE teacher, and I don't remember ascribing any authority to him at all.
I have hate for the post office because I get like 1 legitimate piece of mail a month, yet the post office is constantly stuffing those stupid supermarket flyers in my box with no opt-out.

So I got a PO Box...Aaaannnd of course the P.O. couldn't forward that 1 piece of mail properly :-p

so yeah - I find them useless and actively avoid any items that will be delivered by them (eg 'e-packet' stuff from aliexpress is a no go)
I suffered for a very long time of chronic insomnia, and I tried out lots of meditation techniques and even learned how to lucid dream because of it.

But for me, those techniques never worked and I had to adapt my workflow to be really "done" in the evening so I can get my mind away from code.

Last year my girlfriend discovered a random tiktok, where lots of ADHD folks responded to. Apparently there's ongoing research related to lack of melatonin and therefore the heart and the whole body cannot get really into a resting state.

The ironic thing is that I always thought that drinking a chocolate milk in the evening helped me in the past, and most of my meditation techniques from the martial arts world focussed on pulse control. But, as I got older I got lactose intolerant...and also skipped my evening chocolate milk (obviously).

Now I'm taking 1mg of melatonin in the evening and I've never fallen asleep so easily. I was kinda mind blown when I discovered it, because I've long accepted that nobody can help me and this is just how my "condition" is like.

Note this is not medical advice, but my personal experience. Please check with your doctor whether it's okay to take melatonin safely (and whether your heart is okay, too).
Will there ever be another Silicon Valley?
I should have added the caveat that the person needs a sufficient proportion of actual ancestry so as to make it not an outright lie.
It's a power law driven game.

Also I'm skeptical of the Methodology... SLC has a performance ranking of 8 (which only the top 10 cities & 2 others have) yet is ranked 31st. It's better performance than Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin & Tied with Stockholm. Yet despite the performance SLC rates as a 1 for each; Funding, Connectedness, Knowledge and Talent. So I guess those other cities have 'very talented' 'low performers'?
Curious - what's your profession? Depending on your skills, you could, ironically given the nature of this article, apply to come to the US and it would be valued.
or just laying the groundwork to get the FDA to consider new, patented, non-opioid OTC painkillers.
Personally I got used to two monitors, and I find laptops to be ergonomically awful if used for an extended amount of time. If I'm going to work on a computer for 8 hours a day, I want to make sure I'm not hurting my body with a bad posture. A good chair, a desk suited to my height and monitors set at the correct height is important.
Another big aspect to trades is there’s often a union bureaucracy or something similar to navigate. It helps to have someone to show you the ropes.
I wonder what the whale felt. Would it be swimming around telling its disgusted friends a cetacean equivalent of:

"So I was just picking up strawberries in the backyard and all of a sudden this giant winged cockroach appears out of nowhere and before I know it that goddamn thing is in my mouth!!! Dammit I can still taste it. It's something you can't forget..."
I do suffer insomnia, and though I haven't relied on using this particular phenomenon to fall asleep, I have noticed it, usually between sleeping and waking. Typically, I notice it upon being awoken by soft stimulus but not feeling the need to completely wake, and I have noticed them when falling asleep (presumably more common than I observe, as I only remember instances where I have actually failed to fully sleep). They typically fade for me if I pay too close attention, however, and I transition to full wakefullness.

My issue is more of an 'unquiet and overactive mind' as well as this irrational (but very unshakable) sense that there simply aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish my goals, and that sleeping would be admitting failure in some regard.
While it’s an easy concept, if you look at billionaires per capita, Norway and Sweden edge out the us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Oddly enough I've struggled to find any data showing that the US is actually better for entrepreneurs. It's all anecdotal. I have a small business but it will stay small because I need my day job for health care.

Granted, this is but one article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-w...
While we're at it, the abstract should really be named TL;DR - who still says abstract?!

(/s, obviously)
Reading through the comments, the number of folks who simply can't get this running on their system seems to be fairly large.

The GPU compute ecosystem is truly in a very sorry state, and NVidia is very much to blame for this: in their quest to get a stranglehold on the market, they've reached a point where things don't even work reliably on their own products.
Nobody knows if a specific pullover is a DWB pullover (i.e. one motivated by racism, unconscious or conscious) or a legitimate outcome of a random draw. That kind of phenomenon can only be teased out with a lot of data.
A curiosity for me is that the Ivies are among some of the few universities where you get need-blind admission and financial aid. I have many acquaintances that did not pay a penny in tuition. But that does not fix the larger issues with the system.
Another fix is to use DC dimming.
> Historically, only a % of the population ever reproduced. About the same as do today.

This is half-right, as both 10% and 90% are technically both percentages. The rest is very much [Citation Needed].
Similar (?) items based on near top results of google searches today:

The greatest takeaway for me is that everyone is FAR worse off today and in my generation.

US nationally (today 2021) about 85K is equivalent to the cited 25K 1971 numbers. :: ~10X cost of living (edited, I unconsciously compared to the wrong number.)

Seattle is far more distorted, with housing beyond out of control (I don't know what kind of house was being looked at for the 1971 numbers, but it really doesn't matter, there's almost nothing even remotely near the national price within the region). ::

Seattle's rent is completely out of control; beyond any rational measure. No wonder neither I nor my generation can make any savings; it's all being consumed by rent seeking land owners.

Income 10600 %Income71
House 25200 237.736
Car 3600 33.962
RentYear 1800 16.981
UniYear 2600 24.528
Gas5000mi 100 0.943
Mail500invite 40 0.377
-
USA 2021 Equiv71
House 269000 113151
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 14400 84800
UniYear 26100 106408
Gas5000mi 483.33 51233
Mail500invite 290 76850
-
Seattle 2021 Equiv71
House 750000 315476
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 36000 212000
UniYear 31200 127200
Gas5000mi 533.33 56533
Mail500invite 290 76850
This study matches what I've heard from other companies, for what it's worth.

About a month ago I discussed productivity with someone at one of the large financial companies. They do pretty heavy tracking of employee productivity and noted a pretty significant decrease since everyone's gone WFH.

I don't think it's some other factor that caused this decrease for the company in the study. I'm pretty sure it's consistent across the board.

I voiced this a month or two ago in another thread about WFH, and warned people not to go off of anecdotal productivity claims (which is mostly where I've been seeing the "working from home is significantly better for everything") and got downvoted in to oblivion.
I wouldn't characterize Facebook as being all that different from Amazon. I'm sorry you view it that way. And Amazon is hardly "coach class". You make more money than my parents did combined as a SWE and with far less education. I suppose if you think being an elite means making millions it isn't happening at Amazon, but you aren't making millions at any salaried job short of being a C level exec. Just graduating from Harvard isn't making you millions. It takes 10+ years to reach that level regardless of what school you went to.

If your GPA was only acceptable then why are you blaming elitism for what you characterize as failures? Is that not a direct result of your own failure to study and succeed? (I'll also add that everyone I know who got into a good grad school aggressively pursued research and had multiple publications in top conferences by the time they applied; the standards are high and I wouldn't consider a 3.9 without research sufficient).
I wonder how many of the men are total NEETs and how many simply don’t participate in the formal economy but do earn money under the table?
Exactly - especially in the age of online billing and e-statements, the stupid super market flyers filling up my box for nothing is annoying as hell.

I got a PO Box, not that my local P.O. seems to be able to actually honor a change of address form. And I actively avoid anything that uses postal delivery. I'm much happier now :-P
On the other hand, people here don't tend to go bankrupt and lose their house, healthcare (ironically) and life (from a social aspect) in general when they don't have a perfect health. They don't have to hide their state of wellbeing from their employer in the hope of not getting fired, and they don't have to worry about living on the street because they don't have a job for a bit.

Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.

Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.
Will China, under Xi, succeed in rolling back Westernisation?
> Containers are also a simple, practical way to bundle applications and their dependencies in a relatively standardized way, so they can be run on different compute fabrics.

What I find interesting, is that many uses of containers are just reinventing statically linked binaries in a more complicated form.
Important note: IT != software engineering
There's been evidence of this for a while.

1) lots of regular working people getting suspicious notices about unemployment being filed in their name

2) high numbers of these reported cases. Even though many of those notices end up unopened (old address or dead person), many of whom get the notices don't report it (they think it's a mistake or scam), and of those who report it there's no central place to report. So the actual numbers are multiple times higher

3) reports of "viral" spreading of unemployment scams, bank employees quitting because they can't do anything about fraudsters going to banks and cashing $10,000 checks over and over, and considering how easy it is for people in prison and random small-time scammers on group chats to get this money, anyone smarter is probably way more successful.

And note that that SBA money is a whole other pot of money that's probably being scammed even harder. Similarly, they're only catching the obvious cases of fraud like people getting 10K loans for farms in the middle of Manhattan.

I've tried to bring this up a few times before but it feels hopeless (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515646, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258782). At the end of the day, I think people don't want to hear about problems that they can't do anything about, so they try to kill the cognitive dissonance by thinking that maybe the problem isn't as big, that it's still better a good use of the money because criminals are disadvantaged groups, etc.

The root of the issue is that politicians are applauded for nice-sounding new initiatives, but as you can imagine, the execution is the hard part. Every time there is a new initiative, it's like trying to create a whole new process, which is prone to error and cheating. Things that work fairly well in general (like income tax collection, our judicial system) have been refined over many years, and tested across all sorts of edge cases.
Exactly what is a meaningful life anymore, especially in America?

If you are looking for self-esteem through your job--for most of us those days are gone.

(I know way to many former Programers who aged out of the industry way to early, and gave up. Way to many are homeless. My point is don't expect too much psychological satisfaction from a job that barely covers the rent, has no real pension, and lousy medical. My father lived for work. He loved being an electrician. He didn't develop friendships, or hobbies. He died of liver cancer a few months into retirement. One of our last conversations was when he was dying. He got a letter from the union stating they will now cover his medical expenses 100%.)
NYC is not a typical US city.
Wow a place with high quality of life, education, equality, human rights, individual empowerment etc. is also a bad environment for giant terrible corporations. Who'da thunk it.
But a job provides you real money that gives you real options in life. You can't take someone out on a date with your video game points.
This is the problem with nearly every crypto project. Extreme focus on how it works and the tech behind it rather than use cases and who they benefit
From what little I know about you, it sounds like you are someone who just. keeps. trying. That can take you far.

For what it's worth, I know several (good) engineers who became engineers much later than their late 20's.
> A significant chunk of onboarding is driving the message through that if you abuse your powers as an engineer to access personal user data, you will be insta-fired without warning.

I think focusing on a rogue employee as the threat it missing the mark. The real threat is the ability for huge corporations to legitimize institutional access to data ("business reasons"), and to fight the legal fight if they are caught doing something wrong. Moral hazards of this mode of failure arguably has much more cumulative societal damage (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).

In other words, I worry less about an evil employee reading my messages than a scaled up corporate machinery milking all my data for dollars that feeds the machine back and also can fight any fight at the courts, DC and the public eye.
It’s not just that. It’s knowing that whatever I do I cannot have social mobility or the happiness the typical Googler* has because of the state of my life from 14-17 (and the state of my genes that determine intelligence, which is more relevant than school for Google in particular).
It makes perfect sense. Intel's strategy at the time was to hold back x86 by limiting it to 32 bits while pushing ia64 as the up and coming solution for systems with more memory. AMD then stepped in and designed x86-64 as a way to migrate from 32 bit x86 to a 64 bit platform while maintaining backwards compatibility with 32 bit applications. The first generation Itanium plonked an obsolete and slow Pentium II or III core (my memory is vague on exactly which core it was, but it was out of date by the time Itanium began shipping in production as x86 was evolving quite quickly at the time) which consumed large amounts of die space while not providing any performance benefit. As history demonstrated, AMD's strategy resulted in better performance for both 32 bit and 64 bit code while fitting into a larger share of the market than Itanium ever managed to take. x86 grew up while ia64 failed to grow down.

Low end CPU architectures like x86 and ARM have had great success growing up into the higher end of the market. Architectures attempting to do the reverse have not done so well. POWER tried to grow down into the desktop market as PowerPC, but lost out to the performance race of Intel and AMD pushing each other along in the x86 market. MIPS had a brief run while it was popular in embedded, but everyone has essentially moved on to ARM these days. There are way more ARM cores in the world today than x86 thanks to affordable and generous licensing terms.

It remains to be seen if RISC-V will do as well, and the association with Intel is probably not a good thing. Intel killed StrongARM. Atom was garbage, as the larger x86 cores did a better job of growing down into the power constrained space that Atom was targeting. It's hard for Intel to do anything but put their A grade CPU design teams on x86, and as a result any non-x86 CPU made by Intel will be inferior to the designs the x86 golden goose gets. RISC-V might have a few good years at Intel, but I expect it to languish and die like every other non-x86 CPU Intel has ever produced.
France may join Russia and China in effort to build lunar research station
I do the same, after noticing I carry my stress in my jaw. Occasionally something will break my concentration on a task and I'll notice that I have my teeth clenched so tight, that whole mandibular muscle group is positively aching (think of doggedly chewing gum for the whole day). Probably going to have some negative dental effects later down the line, so I do my best to relax when I realize I'm doing it.
So when making medical decisions you should... not consider empirical evidence? n=1 is good enough when n is the only subject in question.

My n=1 experience with "tylenol" is that, even carefully prescribed, the use of acetaminophen can cause very severe problems when combined with pre-existing conditions and other medications.

No one told me that shit until I was in the ER 4 times.

Knowing how toxic it is, how potentially harmful the drug interactions can be, and how little evidence exists for its efficacy as a generic painkiller, I have no qualms saying that acetaminophen should be a highly regulated drug - Available to anyone who needs it per a doctors order certainly, but removed from all "consumer" products.
Could also be depression and learned helplessness. Playing video games all day is just a coping mechanism or distraction from the first two problems.
In my experience[0] that's not really true. This comment[1] is pretty on the money. Being a NEET is not a vacation, and playing video games all day is often a means of avoiding confronting the realization that you're a waste of oxygen. Many have substance co-dependencies that function similarly. It's the sort of life that sounds cool as an overworked wagie but gets stale rather quickly, plus a massive helping of sunk-cost behavior justification once one realizes how hard it can be to get back in the saddle.

The people in this situation I've personally known who have been in the best mental state were those who went beyond just playing games all day to do something more productive though still probably non-commercial: forum mod, fan translator, guild webmaster type of thing. Again, at least in my experience, pretty much everyone has a desire to be useful to others in some way. Wallowing in purely consumption-based activities can help at first but doesn't hold off the demons forever.

---

[0] 30k hours of runescape gets one a lot of NEET acquaintances

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479336
Another cameraman got gobbled by a Bryde's whale while he was filming a bait ball off the coast of South Africa a couple years ago. His wife took photos of him while he was half in the whale. Fortunately, the whale spat him out a few seconds later.
As soon as he got out of the whale, he swam up to his wife to ask, "did you get it?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChcEb6mlEUo (worth the watch)
> It's a skill, like anything else it takes practice.

That’s why you should never stop dating, even after you’ve met someone. You never know when you’ll break up and have to find someone else. Best to stay sharp.