skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was suffering from this recently, but I'm in recovery.

I grew up in a bad area and programming/computers were my way out to a better life than that of my family or the people I grew up around/with.

For decades it was a core part of my identity. I always had to be working on something. I had trouble sitting down to play a game because I'd think about how I could be working on something. This of course leads to a long trail of incomplete projects as I move from one fleeting new shiny project to another.

I started burning out slowly at first after getting burned by a position that I had deeply invested myself in (I believed in what we were doing, it was helping people). They wrung me out for all I was worth and left me out to dry in the end. I then moved to another position that was more opaquely abusive and toxic. This started the downward spiral of me "falling out of love" with programming.

This gave me something of an identity crisis, without programming who was I? What was my worth as a sentient being if not _creating_ things? This story is also combined with the general apathy/depression/dismay that came with all of 2020. First this feeling was that of loss, then depression, and then apathy. I was spending all of my time watching Youtube videos, browsing reddit, and sleeping. Work, consume, sleep, repeat.

I've only recently managed to break this cycle. Part of it was thanks to my incredible partner helping me to realize that I am more than the sum of my ability to contribute to the perverse growth demanded by capitalism. Another part of it was getting therapy to help me address the underlying emotional issues I have with binary interest (things are great or things are shit). However the most significant development is that I've started exploring hobbies completely unrelated to programming.

Now I do my work, give it an honest effort, and then clock out and put programming and work behind me. My free time is now spent trying new things and exploring possibilities that I had previously decided were not interesting or (more often) not possible. For me that involved drawing, painting, and now finally music production. I'm not any good at it, I likely never will be, but it's something I can do for myself, purely for enjoyment rather than _productivity_. Nobody will ever profit from my shitty music, and I'm not defined by it. It's just a thing I do for fun.

Hopefully this is helpful, try finding something completely out of left field from what you've been doing. The change of scenery in interests may help.
I was huge into following the latest sound cards and video cards in the mid-late 90s, owned multiple soundblaster cards, and I didn't even remember a product called video blaster. I also checked the archive links, and aside from one model, these products were for encoding, not decoding. From my recollection, FMV on computers was a novelty reserved for short clips in games and encyclopedias like Encarta. You could go to a computer store and see a demo of a video playing from a cdrom on a 486/windows 3.1/MPEG-certified video card around 1993. But video on the PC was consistently even similar quality to VHS until Windows 95, MacOS System 7 and hardware from that time had decent support. If you had windows 95 and even the slowest Pentium, you could watch a good quality MPEG file. Granted, no content was available except for "weezer.mpg", a music video easter egg on the windows 95 cdrom, and you could download short high-quality clips such as clever commercials. For streaming an entire TV show, you could only find grainy "realvideo" streams by word-of-mouth. A sidenote is that they did work better in one sense than streaming today-- I remember watching star wars in realtime with IRC friends. The serving person had a cable modem and at least some of the viewers had 56kbps modems. These days, my phone plan throttles to 100kbps when I run out of data, and I can load HN, barely load a google search, can't load most news sites without timing out, and wouldn't even be able to navigate to any kind of video, let alone stream one.

I'm also still disappointed in the quality of streaming services of movies. 4K often looks worse than 1080p. I live in Japan and broadcast TV 1080p looks so so much better than most streaming at any resolution. The Mandalorian is the exception that comes to mind. It's annoying that anytime I've checked out 4k and 8k TVs in an electronics store, I see the same demo videos for the last few years. Great-looking but utterly boring content like a man swinging ropes around in a puddle and paint bouncing around on some kind of speaker cone or drumhead. Really drives home the point that content that actually takes advantage of the (amazing) 4k+, HDR screens is lacking.

On the other hand, I appreciate that the floor of quality is quite high, and for a person that grew up loving "this old house" as a kid, I can open youtube and see incredibly high quality/high-image quality content on any subject, whether broad or deep. And most of it is created, starring produced, and edited by one person. That's a totally different discussion though.
Humans are biased biologically towards cooperation. E.g. language skills and social organization into small groups, extended childhood, ability to empathize with outhers emotional states.

Humans who are not part of a group do not live long or well. Competition is just an artificially set up arrangement to find good solutions where the answer isn’t that obvious, like the allocation of goods and services in a multi-producer, multi-consumer money based economy. Free markets can work quite well when they avoid concentration of power in large corporations that start to violate the axioms of a free market, or when the corporations can overwhelm the government and stop regulation. But the sense of competition of all against all they seem to inspire is not accurate.
It is, and it's how media manufactures consent for punishing/outing whistleblowers who should be protected from any type of harassment.

We saw something similar recently with the leak of the SCOTUS Roe v Wade opinion. There was a huge push to move the discussion from how controversial the opinion was & what the fallout would be towards "leaks are bad & we have to find who did this".
WTF Is a Service Mesh?
My team does them twice a week and I still dread waking up for the call.

Maybe if I felt like my department head actually did anything to unblock people but sit there, blink a few times before saying “ok who’s next?” I wouldn’t dread them as much.

As practiced though, I really don’t know who benefits from our standups anymore.
Yes, so ordinarily we analyse an idealised algorithm running on idealised machine. However if an upper bound is clearly introduced to this idealised setting, as in the root comment, then it can’t be ignored.
Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on.

I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc..

Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.
Thanks for your post, I’m curious to know how you go about finding work as a contractor, where are you based?
I had two breakdowns from burn out. Burn out was a culture at my previous company. I stopped working for about 8 months, left the industry, and got a new job in a new industry and new role. It took a while for the feelings of anxiety and incompetence if I wasn’t working to burn out to go away.
A Bunch of Linux Gamers Are Trying Fedora Out in 2022
If you can, find a remote job and move to a more social location. It’s not for me, but I see lots people loving coworking and coliving around me. Reduce your work hours to 25/30 per week and work when/where you feel like it.
It's fraud and Amazon is profiting from it. No amount of rationalization fixes that. If batteries can't be sold without endemic fraud then stop selling batteries. Otherwise you're a fraudster and deserve whatever penalties are appropriate.

The truth is that it is possible to police the suppliers, resellers etc. to prevent this, and Amazon has both the power and resources to do it. Amazon just doesn't give a damn.
citation needed

the merger agreement is clear. the only thing that can free elon from completing the deal is lack of regulator approval and no regulators are even looking at the deal
Note that not the generated code ran twice (in LispWorks twice, in the specific SBCL interpreter once), just the code generation. In Common Lisp it's unspecified how often the code generation runs.
Many, Many, US "Hackers" have shown up on lists in foreign countries. After OPM and associated Briefs, many in the top offices of these agencies were explicitly briefed as such. Some have dealt with harassment with stolen identities, some have even been approached in "friendly" countries and questioned. This isn't new. While other governments may not be as overt with the vast majority of know "hackers" the same happens to many in the US that are found out. Some have to be strategic on flights out of the country to make sure they maintain friendly countries etc.

All said, most of it is political posturing and I don't expect people to be eradicated or disappeared but that is a very real possibility in some countries.

When it becomes "fun" is when you're at Defcon and you see people that also recognize you, but both of you know you're on opposite sides.

So the US isn't playing any game that other countries aren't. Unless you work in the US govt. in one of these agencies doing this type of work, respectfully, you are looking at it from a tainted lens.
My laptop now connects to my monitor with a single USB-C cable, providing power, driving the 4K monitor and connecting to its built-in USB hub where the other peripherals are connected. It doesn't even have to be wireless because you'd want the phone connected to power anyway.

I feel like any recent iPhone would be brilliant for this, though the RAM is on the short side, though with slightly more in recent Pros it could be a Pro only feature.

Shame it seems like such an un-Apple move to not provide this value, that it will likely stay that way.
Start with, where is your evidence?
> I have been like this for years, but all this time people thought I was making excuses to avoid getting a job or whatsoever.

I've gone from not ever being let go from a job (or even getting ahead of layoffs) to bouncing down the career ladder to lower and lower paying jobs. It's not that I'm unwilling to work its that my idea of what I'm worth or what I should even be doing has been so scrambled by the rejection from my chosen career and at times rejection from jobs further down the line too.

I have tried to go back to tech twice and had the most emotionally painful and abusive experiences to date.

I feel like there's a societal expectation that you should just relinquish any dignity or standing you once had when for immediate and maximal convenience to employers. Worked hard to get where you are? too bad! Life sucks it's not that way anymore you're only worth $13 an hour now. Is my resume a lie? Was the last 10 years a fever dream? Was any of it real?
I'm talking about second order effects. if the company you no longer saved money for don't have a business need to slash money left and right you may have a problem. If you have software related to mortgage companies you might have a problem in this market.
Applying Team Topologies to Remote Teams
> I just got turned down for another job and I am at the end of my mental and emotional rope.

Try not to let being turned down for a job (or many jobs) affect you. It's a numbers game where you apply to 100 and 1 accepts you. Like dating - why get all hung up on one girl when you should be interested in 10 others at same time. It's all failures until you get 1 match.
Let me rephrase:

If your communication is bad, then you will need more communication to get to shared understanding.

Yes, better communication would also be a great solution. But "if you are bad at X, just do X better" is meaningless advice. Useful advice is either how to fix the problem (advice on how to do X better) or less popularly but often very useful, how to mitigate the problem (advice on how to avoid bad outcomes from being bad at X).

Turns out that more communication is essentially the only way to mitigate ineffective communication.
The pronunciation of the letter v is one of the few cases of ambiguity in German orthography. The German language normally uses the letter "f" to indicate the sound /f/ (as used in the English word fight) and "w" to indicate the sound /v/ (as in victory). However, the letter "v" does occur in a large number of German words, where its pronunciation is /f/ in some words but /v/ in others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_v_in_German
I know a couple people who escaped to QA. Some QA departments are serious software engineers, but others aren't. One good friend of mine now works like a couple hours a day on real work, and the rest of the day on his personal android app. His supervisor has full knowledge of it, so he is not doing anything wrong. He basically does all the work they have for him, and after that there isn't anything to do. Rather than make up busy work, they let him work on his app where at least he's building technical skills. There are days when looking for a similar gig is tempting :-D
If he were an adversarial plant by some government who intentionally sowed distrust by revealing factual things, would you lean more towards upset or thankful towards that third party government?
IFixit: Tearing Down Apple's 2000$ Tools What's So Special?
No, the tan box is similarly non-sensical and the example is 3 primes so it doesn’t explain it either.

Your explanation is clear though, thanks!
I'm sure that we haven't found the limit yet. Usually this kind of discussion turns to supply-and-demand economics and somebody says that if you want to hire software engineers you just have to offer more. That's not wrong, but it too narrow a view. A free labour market ensures that skilled people get allocated to the highest value work, which is a great outcome for everyone. But there are so many projects that never happen at all because software engineers are so scarce. The cost of a software project is not just paying the engineers to do the work, it also has to get over the hurdle of finding, evaluating and enticing them to join the project in the first place.
> I don't think we have many narratives to get them out of the hole they're in.

I believe the US chose this path (by accident) by yielding control to open sociopaths (particularly thinking about Trump and how he came to be president), contrary to what would be required to maintain a high functioning civilsation.

Somewhere down the line in US cultural evolution the axiomatic acceptance of common good, civic values and middle class society were cast to the sideline and replaced with dog-eat-dog competition and status chasing/signalling. I realize it's a large, diverse country and YMMV, but there's definitely a bad aftertaste.

I believe by and large individual psychology tends towards self-preservation and a lot of people must subconsciously feel the gun to their head. No wonder so many are going crazy under the pressure; the online noise notwithstanding (it's a common impression in Germany).

And those, who can't or don't want to adapt, decompensate: In Japan they become hikikomori, in the US they shoot up schools (generally speaking): It's a final "fuck you" to society.
While Subway franchises specifically don't seem to be especially profitable, others aren't bad and a local businessman can own multiple. Overall, it's probably a safer bet--though possibly less non-financially rewarding--than going independent.

https://www.eposnow.com/us/resources/how-much-do-franchise-o...
i used to then i went for a job at a mid size company. i settled for less money.

i log out when its time to clock out.

someone told me the higher the salary, the more tasks and stress come with it.
I meant something more along the line of "if your code is ill-optimized, you gotta throw more CPU time at it".
Sure... I've been the subject of this for sure. However here are two options

(1) Leave the company. There are plenty of companies that don't do this. Just keep changing jobs till you find one

(2) Make sure you defensively program to keep yourself out of emergencies. That means doing your work on time, and if you're not consistently capable of that, then waiting before taking on more work.

I'm not saying be a social pariah. Just introspect once in a while and adjust from there.
Obviously the software industry is growing much faster than the oil industry, so yes, the industry has not yet satiated its demand for software engineers. That time is coming, of course.

You do seem to be discounting a STEM career / education, however. E.g. stating that "STEM jobs [won't] save you." Yes, there isn't much growth in the oil industry for chemical engineers or in the construction industry for civil engineers, but that doesn't necessarily mean the work or jobs are bad. You can still earn a decent living doing fun, mentally challenging work. You might not make 600k a year doing it, but you can probably get close to 400k household income if your partner also does it.
Because without cooperation you don’t get the internet, you don’t get compilers, you don’t get HTML on top of C. And humans are strongly biased towards cooperation. Saying everything eats each other is flat wrong about people. Better to understand cooperation and competition as two ends on a continuum of “how to allocate people to solve problems”.
Armory Continuous Deployments-as-a-Service Is Now Available
You cant be member of NATO without having the army. It is literally one of conditions. NATO itself does not have an army, it is literally composition of nation states armies.

> Not having an army and angering Russia at the same time, not so sure..

Lol, trying to blame victims. Russia is angry when other countries don't act like their puppet states. Don't pretend someone is going out of way to antagonize Russia, this is not true. What is going on is that Russia is ruthless and don't care.
Yep. The air quality issue does create anxiety for several relatives who live or visit Silicon Valley. There can be a few days a year that are intolerable for those with particular sensitivity and they must cancel their engagements and head out of town, or hole up in room with a quality purifier.

Can't really say that is a problem where I live, although recreational fires in fire pits are increasingly annoying as people increase outdoor gatherings in covid times.
Eric Adams, is that you?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/08/cheese-is-li...

For real, I love dairy and cheese and I'll fucking mourn the day my doctor tells me to give this stuff up. It's coming. I'm not looking forward to it.

I still think Adams is a disgrace for the comparison tho.
He probably means what the osm2pgsql import tool creates.
That's equivocation between a pyramid as hierarchy and a pyramid as a specific business model. As far as I know, capitalism doesn't require constant recruitment because growth can be achieved in other ways like reducing product quality, reducing wages, deteriorating working conditions, increasing technological efficiency, enclosing commons, privatizing public goods and services, etc.
Or! https://www.vulture.com/2022/05/theory-top-gun-maverick-is-m...
> Do you mean to say you're giving up on dev due to failures to land a new dev job...or you are trying to transition out of dev and not able to find a job in a new industry?

Curious about this as well. I figured they were just trying to find anything to bring in money and thought they'd pick up a local hourly "unskilled labor" job until they landed another developer opportunity.I've tried this too but even though I have a lot of experience in restaurant work and "unskilled" manual labor, those who are hiring still only want to hire candidates which fit their expectation of who "fits" the role. And it's rare that a recently out-of-work software developer can adapt themselves to seem like they'd fit in.

So generally it's easier to find another developer job rather than a temporary unskilled labor position. It can also take 3-9 months to find that next developer job.

Good luck. Be kind to those around you and allow them to be kind to you.
Was always dead since there was no way prior to a conversation possible to assess the quality of it.
Unless you are playing/horsing around, who’s willing to play the lottery with their time like that?
I can't even imagine what happened here. I do quite a bit of coding on front panels like this for my job engineering industrial controls. Even without the need for security, I wouldn't allow a front panel to make decisions. It has only two jobs, to accurately display what it is asked to and to report in a timely manor what keys have been pressed. Doing more than that is not only unnecessary, but it reduces the ability to easily re-use it as a drop in module in other products, and it makes the architecture of the system more confusing. Clearly somebody had other ideas here, but I can't see why.
it may well be. this is not a comment on what the person I'm replying to is saying
Same model as FedEx ground.
> Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.

We must have very different definitions of the word "catastrophic" ...
> The radiation hazard disappears over time but how do you know this stuff isn't poisonous for example?

Oh, it is -- it's mostly heavy metals. But:

- We're not going to stop using heavy metals.

- We produce a lot less of it than other heavy metals-- so we're talking about a tiny portion of this hazard.

- We can reasonably expect it'll be a lot better disposed than what we typically do with heavy metals.
Several past discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804079 - April 8, 2020 (82 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121028 - May 21, 2018 (158 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045987 - April 5, 2017 (161 comments)
We've all burned out. We've all burned out recently. You're not alone.

Try to detach yourself from your situation as best you can. Take a mini-vacation, if possible. If you want to take a retail job for a bit and regroup, do it. The prescribed burnout period is however many days/weeks/months/years you need.

Failures == learning. Learn from your failures, make incremental adjustments and try again.

The burnout will end, and eventually you'll have another period of burnout, and that will end, too.
Franchises offload the risk on the franchisee and collect their percentage fee regardless of the performance.

There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees.

In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?
Also sustained wet bulb temperatures > 35C rendering some areas pretty much uninhabitable for anyone not in an AC building or vehicle. Would anyone want to live somewhere where if your AC or power dies then you die when you can try and migrate somewhere more hospitable?

Edit: And I am acutely aware that I live somewhere that is likely to suffer the least directly consequences from climate change.
Ah, yep, all three languages I'm using are latin scripts, that explains it. Thanks!
> I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS)

Arguably, the ICO boom was a realization of this end-game. There were guides to create a new etherium-backed crypto token in minutes, services to help create and manage them, and so on. Each ICO functioned as its own MLM, with the differentiating factor usually being branding, sales, and whitepaper quality.