skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm in a rut. How did you get out of yours?
I'm a technical writer in his late 20's working remotely for a company based in New York. My background is in software development, but I took this job because at the time it was easier for me to find work as a technical writer than as a software engineer (and because I saw technical writing as close enough in spirit). I started the job this past fall.

In a nutshell, I'm dissatisfied with how my life is going. I can't galvanize myself to do anything. I'm on the clock right now, and here I am complaining about my life instead.

I don't give a damn about my employer, or the product it makes. I can't get interested in it. I can't get excited about the tedious parts of my work, and I can't even get excited about _automating and eliminating_ the tedious parts of my work.

And it's not just my day job. I'm ostensibly working on a game on the side, but I haven't touched it in months. I'm not even sure I want to continue it, as I've been working on it for years without being able to fulfill my goals for it. And this is coming from someone who got into computer science _because_ of video games.

Things that used to bring me joy...don't, any more. All I really look forward to these days is getting high and playing video games or watching Seinfeld reruns each weekend. And even that barely tickles my fancy these days! There's a game coming out this week that I should be excited for (because I love the series it's part of), yet I can't even galvanize myself to purchase it.

I can barely even open my IDE at work, as it greets me with dread where I once found joy and ambition.

Also, I have ADHD. This is probably relevant, but I haven't quite figured out how.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person here who's ever felt like this, so my question is this: *if you've ever been in this kind of rut, what was the nature of that rut and what did you do about it?*

Also, one thing I'd like to clarify: I'm not suicidal.
These are not numbers I'm used to seeing when discussing middle class in the U.S. The middle class in the U.S. has income from $100K to $1M [1]. Middle class is not the same as middle income. The lower threshold for upper middle class is greater than $100K [2].

Are they using adjusted numbers perhaps? Adjusted to what? Ahh... The non-paywalled article uses "middle income" the moment it starts giving numbers, so the title is click-bait.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_middle_class
You starmanning an entire invasion force makes my point perfectly.
at least 54k of them are in the bay area
I'm not sure this argument really works, because it's different doctors in both cases. There are lots of doctors who would be unwilling to do what you reference, but they're selected out of that area of practice. The difference here is simply that this selection effect isn't present here because this procedure is a minority of the field
For Film Theory, I think Big Joel is a good if weird addition. I don't agree with him on everything, but he certainly has interesting and (usually) well-founded opinions. Most of the videos are on really niche topics that maybe apply more broadly to cultural trends.
It sounds like you're talking about a bunch of different cases, and I'm having trouble untangling them.

If there's a simple refactoring everybody agrees is good whether or not your overall goal ends up making sense, then yes, by all means merge that. But that doesn't require stacking unless your review process is slow. In which case I still think the right solution is to speed up review, not to stack.

For the cases where we don't know the full story, my first thought is that we never know the full story. So there I try to instead find the smallest unit of work that everybody agrees is a step forward.

When that's not possible, where the unit of work still seems pretty large, instead of breaking that up into a bunch of stacked diffs that shouldn't be merged until we really understand something (which to me sounds like a large PR in disguise), I think a better option is a spike, where we intentionally do a quick, throwaway version of some change as a way of learning about the change. Instead of trying to do good code along the way to good understanding, we just go for the understanding. Once we have thrown out that scratch code, we then go back with our new knowledge for a proper PR.

So I'm still not seeing where I would use stacked diffs, except in this case here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215346

The premise of stacked diffs seems that we won't learn anything significant from reviewing or deploying code. (If we did learn something valuable, then the things stacked on top could be up for a lot of rework or might be thrown out altogether.) I think that has a lot of bad effects, but one of the biggest for me is that the bigger the inventory of code (whether in one big PR or a stacked set of smaller ones), the more a reviewer will feel obliged to say, "LGTM" and let it go, because they know there's not much point in saying, "Actually, I think this whole thing could be better approached by X."

So like you I'm entirely for small, reviewable lumps that are easily merged. I just think they should be then reviewed quickly, so that stacking or agglomerating is unnecessary.
How does Japan do this successfully?
Deport all illegal immigrants across the West, and increase standards for legal immigration. Aim for steady-state population levels, and immigration exchange only with similarly-developed nations.

Right now we are trading housing (and food, water, government services) for cheap labor in many countries.
Also: If requirements change or new features are added, rather than only making the changes nescessary to existing code, rewrite code it touches. This forces you to keep all corner-cases in mind and will lead to more correct code.

In a similar vein, when starting a new project form scratch, first do a quick and dirty prototype and then throw everything away and start anew. This way you know up-front what the challenges are.
I mean, I think my real complaint is that

1. humans are fuckin' terrible at thinking through second order effects, and
2. often they are simply unknowable a-priori

so to the extent that I am doing the thing I'm unhappy with, it's less hypocrisy and more accidentally proving my broad point.

At any rate, about kids: the same reason kids aren't especially susceptible to COVID seem to also substantially reduce their transmission of it. It might be the case that it's still worthwhile for the broader community, idk - I'm certainly default a little skeptical of anyone saying "think of the children!"
direct thoughts:

> Balance your early engineering and infrastructure with achieving Product Market Fit

No, not really, you should focus way more on the latter really. We devs love the first tho.
e.g. comment from your original post 12mo ago: "Super stoked to see you launching after working on it for so long!" -> how much of the code you've written was necessary to come to the realization you eventually came to? Based on the way you described your trouble selling, seems like very little to none.

- Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity lolwut)

- corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you worked. Seems like your original idea was heavily based on something u saw internally. Just because something works well at one (usually large) company you worked at doesn't mean it serves a widespread market need (I've been burned by this).

Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!
> Two weeks of service, made possible by 26 years of development.

With already unanticipated levels of micrometeorite collision and mirror damage [1], I'm worried we may not see a full service life out of JWST.

All of the "look what the JWST has accomplished in two weeks" press seems like drumming up accolades in advance of an early retirement.

I hope I'm wrong.

[1] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-micrometeor...
Have you bought one of these new devices yet?
Laughter with friends differs from laughter with romantic partners
Such naked contempt for working people. Everyone deserves to have their voice heard. Ideally, no one group is in charge of everything. But given a choice, I would pick bus drivers over billionaires.
But it's a C++ replacement, not a C replacement, so they should have named it Nitrogen.

Edit: it appears that Nitrogen and Phosphorus are already used by Lisp dialects.
"Isa Ruiz has always known children are not part of their plan.
But the 22-year-old Orlando communications specialist"

Anyone that says they know their plan that early is just hoping their plan works out. Life is chaotic and full of many surprises.
I did some research recently and found 50-60% to be the norm. On top of that if I remember correctly more than 50% of the websites didn’t even respect the choice.

Don’t quote me. Do your own research.
Late 1960s Haight Ashbury Hippie Community, San Francisco
Merely a transition point, my friend.
Ban commercial ownership of residential properties. That's the headline, but more complex to implement than the headline. To be able to fund and build large residential apartment or condo complexes, you need cities to be able to charter projects and hand them off to tenant ownership or renters associations.
Title: Global

Actual problem: Seems to be mostly in western countries.
> However, a PA earns £39,766.76 - far more than the juniors with none of the responsibility

"far more than the juniors" is quite misleading: junior doctors only make less than £40k during the two Foundation Years immediately after graduating; they make more than that as soon as they start their Core and Specialty training [1] (and this is ignoring any supplemental Banding payments).

Once they've completed specialty training and transitioned from being a Junior Doctor to a Consultant (which, admittedly, takes several years, and involves considerable responsibility) they're on a minimum of £84k [2] (not counting any extras like Clinical Excellence Award payments, which can go up to £77k). If they become a GP instead of a consultant, pay is more complicated, as GPs have traditionally been Partners in a practice, though an increasing proportion are Salaried employees instead.

[1]: https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pay/junior-doctors-...

[2]: https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pay/consultants-pay...
Black truffles are already commodified in a sense that the main aroma compound has been isolated, is very cheap to synthesize [1] and it's used extensively in "truffle-flavoured" products. That's what makes it possible to pick up a bottle of "truffle oil" in your supermarket of choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dithiapentane
I had part of my comment responding to this point, but I wasn’t sure how to best phrase it so I cut it off.

I don’t believe for this to happen enough at any frequency to be a valid reason. People usually knows their pain point, and go to great length trying to address that (normally spending a lot of time due to, well, spam-ish marketing). And to be frank, most products are not game-changing things that magically solve a problem no thing previously could have solved. People are already using tools and solutions for their problems, and if they are looking for a better thing, they already know which tweak it needs. They just can’t differentiate the solutions between a sea of junk marketing.
> What it would do is make residential property a much less attractive financial investment.

While I agree with this, bear in mind that for some people, housing is the only "investment"/inflation hedge available to them. Without public pensions, lower to middle class people need something to fund retirement and we should be careful that " make residential property a much less attractive financial investment" doesn't just hurt those people vs the REIC, Berkshire Hathaways, etc.
I'm surprised I never really hear people talk about GNU's Savannah. I've never hosted a project there, but it seems like a good fit for a GPL'd project

https://savannah.nongnu.org/
> my understanding is that for the poor person, inflation is only part of the picture: wage growth is the rest.

Depending on how you define "wage", there might be a 3rd category as well: government-provided benefits. E.g., social security, food stamps, tax credits, etc. My impression (very well could be wrong) is that there's often a lag between true inflation and adjustments to those benefits.
Another solution would be to add an extra positive and negative leap second every year to make sure all those code paths are tested.
well, for the most part in healthcare we treat symptoms not causes.

cavities caused by acid producing bacteria? drill and fill

gum disease caused by oral dysbiosis? bone and gum grafts

diabetes from autoimmunity? insulin

high cholesterol from… anything? statins
Vasectomies are not always reversible.
If they're poor, their debts are likely not backed by collateral - akin to credit card debt or payday loans.

Those debts are at such high interest rates that inflation and rate hikes have little bearing relative to how much it already costs to sustain them.

By contrast, wealthier people mostly have mortgage debt, backed by real estate as collateral. Those are at much lower interest rates and benefit from inflation.
Yes, this is more practical than anyone might imagine.

The guy who just poured the concreted for a foundation, does he care that much that it's torn up or not use? Probably not, even though he's likely skilled and professional.

We are far too precious.
IVF is a much bigger deal and cost than a vasectomy reversal.
“In an ideal world” that info would be collected, organized and accessible to all, alongside usage/performance/satisfaction data.

Gp is right, marketing is horribly inefficient and everything about it’s current configuration is toxic because it seeks to influence by stealing attention, stealing time, stealing memory, spreading selective (dis)info and manipulating you into buying things.

We’re just unfortunately pretty far from that ideal world.
I'm not telling you that you can't live in the country if you prefer that lifestyle. I am saying that you shouldn't be able to dictate the level of density in your current neighborhood just because you are afraid of loud neighbors or you want to create artificial scarcity to inflate the value of your home.
Oh yes, of course, the upper middle class are the ones who use a plane to travel 40 miles.
Are there any good examples of 5x products you've learned about through marketing efforts (and not, say, trusted colleagues)? I can't think of one.
Personally for me, I think HN is as good as it's always been. Sure, there have been a few jerks reply to me here or there, but I wouldn't still be here over a decade later if it was as toxic as other corners of the internet.
About 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year.
you are leaving out a whole host of use cases bro. maybe in the past robotics was just for industrial use cases. but there are orders of magnitude other use cases that a ROS can help solve. simple things around the house , in the neighborhood, and other mechatronic integrations that would not properly called a robot. I would say the ones you are addressing with billy bob on the 3rd shift are like 1 percent of the cases. There are plenty of things you can actuate in the world that dont require sub mm repeatability. like what about tending my hydroponic vertical garden? theres nothing about the ubiquitous robotic future of humankind that needs any of the things you mentioned. thats more of an improvement on current use cases.
This is a difficult subject.

The first and most obvious point is that I, personally (FWIW), fully support body autonomy so if people want to get sterilized if they want.

The article points out the issue with regret. I'm not sure how you handle that other than maybe coming up with a more easily reversible procedure?

Either way, if someone may end up regretting a decision is no reason to take that choice away from someone.

But you can't talk about this issue without talking about how the medical profession treats women. Women are often ignored and their pain and concerns are downplayed or outright dismissed, sometimes catastrophically. Some women are sterilized without consent for reasons with little or even no medical basis. If you're not aware, look at the "husband's stitch" for an example of misogynist medical barbarism.

You also can't ignore the politics of this and how the fight against reproductive rights sprang out of "Great Replacement" fears [1]:

> In an 1865 essay issued by order of the AMA, Storer went so far as to say of white women that “upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”

If you think that's ancient history, it isn't [2]. Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) called the defeat of Roe v. Wade a “victory for white life.” This is the same Miller who said "Hitler Was Right on One Thing" [3].

[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-fight-to-ban-ab...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtdOAdmqqIY

[3]: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/illin...
You have just discovered collectivism. Individualism sounds worse, but to my understanding is ultimately just an excess of enlightment, which is the better philosophy™.
A lot of systems are based on trust. The checkpoints are sometimes in place not so much as a thorough verification but rather as a signaling mechanism, a vote of confidence.

While I do think that a better aligned system of immediate incentives can ameliorate the symptoms, it's only a patch for moral behavior.
I did not think about that, but you are right (with appropriate maths modifications)
Uruguay always interest me but I heard it is basically impossible to naturalize as the judge holds evidence of ties to Uruguay to an impossibly high standard. I guess that makes sense since Uruguay is a very open nation with easy permanent residence, closely guarding citizenship allows you to hold priveleges of your citizens dear while grasping the benefits of open borders to goods and labor.
[Fedora-legal-list] Change in classification of CC0
I don’t have any contempt for working people. I think it’s part of my responsibility to help take care of them. But let’s call a spade a spade. If you put the bus drivers in charge of everything the system would collapse.
This same song gets sung no matter how much more an EV costs over an ICE vehicle. EVs likely do save $10K~ over the life of the vehicle, but EVs cost $20K more than a similarly sized/styled ICE right now.

For example the Model 3 Vs. Corolla is $20K difference. If you spend $4K extra on the Corolla Hybrid instead the fuel savings advantage for the EV reduces. EV proponents always want to pretend Hybrids and Plug-In Hybrids don't exist.

It is also all predicated on driving a lot. As EV prices continued to increase, proponents just increased the "assumed mileage" to make their arguments. I literally read someone's post about "cost savings" that assumed 30K miles/year. That's almost commercial usage levels.

To be clear, I'm extremely pro-EV but I tire of the "just ignore the sticker" talk vis-à-vis pricing. EVs are darn expensive and the $10K savings don't magically change that and are based on a whole host of assumptions that may not apply.

The next model year Bolt EV and EUV may be significant vehicles, because they're going to be priced low enough to where the $10K lifetime savings may actually make them a little cheaper than their ICE contemporaries.
I don’t think you can call anybody outside Europe in 1900-1950 a ‘fascist’.
Why can't large tech companies that need synchronization similarly switch to an alternative time without leap seconds?
Let's say that, ultimately, it's personal. I have no problem whatsoever taking fleeting notes in a variety of places. As do many other people I know who run this game. But, others I know also feel the need to have a single entry point. To each their own.
It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause.

This article details some of the problems: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html

(You may want to scroll down to "Implementing the plan outlined at Torino".)

If we end leap seconds, it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours.

By 2055, the "minute" displayed on a clock may be incorrect, which again may cause issues with legal timestamps.

And by 2083, sundials are measurably wrong.

All because programmers wanted to save some lines of code.
The Mathematics Behind Monitoring
Define it here for everybody then please.
I'm not sure where would be a good place. It seems most places have some degree of us/them mentality, media biases, and most definitely wasteful spending. One place to maybe check out is Switzerland.
It does not: it assumes that corporations have their own interest in mind, and are kept alive at the cost of "as long as they are profitable for (most of) the owners".

Whether we, the people who have to suffer them, want them to exist or not does not particularly enter into this. If that's the part we want to take aim at (and maybe we should? or maybe we shouldn't?) then that's an important but completely separate issue.
Time to call a lawyer.
Not OP, and I doubt it will work, but the idea is to eliminate property investment and return homes exclusively to people who own them to live in them.
Wouldn't the higher taxes just be passed off to the renter?
For salary bands, Wikipedia does a better job for middle class as opposed to middle income, which the article seems to deliberately conflate. Middle income is near the floor of the income range of the "middle class."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class#/media/File:Globa...
Would it be possible to contribute back the corrections from proofreading so that others could benefit, if not some of the fancier formatting/fonts/etc.? Or is that prohibitively difficult due to what is effectively a one-way conversion from PG to your own format?
Bike, walk or use lightweight electric vehicles (e-bikes, 3wheelers, mobility scooters) which need a small fraction of the power, fraction of the resources to produce, are safer, smaller (thus higher throughout on city roads) and quieter.

The problem with electric cars is that they are still cars.
Do things that give you energy rather than take it away.

Also motivation and inspiration are unreliable. They ebb and flow. Discipline is key. It precedes any action and will bring you closer to your goals.
Biased and inaccurate article, but has some useful references.

A Fascist is a corporatist socialist with totalitarian and nationalist tendencies. True Fascists are opposed to both communism and capitalism.

Thiel is no Fascist.

People use “fascist” as an all-purpose way to sling mud.
In case you're being facetious, old Mercedes diesel cars can literally run in old MacDonalds french fry oil with a tiny bit of modification.
Then you have a strong motivating reason to do it.

Honestly, I mostly mean things like "if we xor the two variables we can save one variable during the swap", etc. Clever code is not a great thing.
Caprover: Scalable PaaS (Automated Docker+Nginx) – a.k.a. Heroku on Steroids
Good idea. Another consideration is that you may remove the problem from roads and move it elsewhere. The fine particles could be problematic in water, collection could kick up more Dist, etc.