skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if you don't know the answer to this question ("Why am I here?")? What if your answer is that you don't understand why you're still here? When your passion for everything and anything in life has waned to nothingness. When you feel like your body is in a constant state of physical and mental fatigue, bordering on a grinding, gnawing pain? When you feel like a passenger in your own life, stuck in the rat race, stuck in the routine of monotony? When every day boils down to sleep, eat, work, and everything in between ends up as a fuzzy blur?

What then? How can I shake this feeling? How can I restore the drive and motivation in myself that I never remember having in the first place? Is it even possible?

To follow Mr. Sivers's analogy: What if all my reasons have expired? Is that somewhere else... nowhere else? Should I be dead instead? That doesn't seem like a very practical path to follow, but yet living feels so draining that I don't know how much longer I can carry the weight of a life lived for nothing. It really is all for naught. At this point I feel like I am living this life because it is the life society wants for me: go to school, get a degree, get a job, get married, have kids, grow old, die. That sounds horrible to me and yet I feel so stuck in this formula. I feel so abnormal because I can't feel satisfied or fulfilled with this "normal" version of life. And I can't tell anyone these things because they will reject me, saying I should just enjoy this or that, or telling me that I should be grateful for what I have. Their words (and this article) don't change anything. I know that the change must first come from within, but I don't know where to start.
I always felt that Singapore just doesn't seem like the right place for someone like Derek Sivers. It's a beautiful and wonderfully located place, but the stated or unstated reasons many US expats give for moving there are narrowly selfish -- in the sense of irrational selfishness vs enlightened self-interest -- low taxes, clean streets. Yet Singapore's culture is strongly communitarian: there may be low income taxes, but there are tons of other rules and regulations. The reason for the low taxes, an efficient, universal, and well functioning healthcare system, and so on isn't liberal individual empowerment (which is often the reason given for both individualistic economic policies like low tax rates and for safety-net policies like universal healthcare in the West), it's greater communal good (which -- unlike in ther West -- is also defined in a way that's much more nuanced than "greatest good for the greatest number"). That reality may not hit people immediately, but it will eventually: e.g., if you plan to have kids, be ready for corporal punishment in most schools and even some junior colleges, and (far more burdensome and soul crushing for an individualistic soul) military conscription.

Derek talked about this in earlier essays and acknowledge that he was resetting his operating system towards a more communitarian, giving the example of nominally "converting" to Islam to marry a woman. Yet to me that reason still seemed narrowly selfish, a much more principled and selfless act would be to refuse to compromise one's greater cultural and religious heritage and forgo one of life's greatest long-term pleasures (love) -- something I would not endorse, as it would result in great misery for both himself and now wife.

Personally, I am lucky, as I found United State's "left coast" and "far west" cultures to be my home: I see my own culture was being a happy medium between these two, but I have a fluent understanding and appreciation of both of these cultures. They mesh far better than the cultures I've been brought up in (secular Jewish and Russian) and I'm very lucky that I have the ability to pick and choose -- I would simply not survive (in the physical sense) had I attempted to live a life true to my personal views in the land I was born in. I sincerely hope that Derek finds in New Zealand a culture he can belong to.
I will refrain from calling out coinbase for their alleged improper management and execution of transactions(alleged by me in great details in the previous threads) due to retracting a couple of my comments (on my own behest) due to drawing conclusions based on misunderstanding a reply to one of my posts. I have decided to subdue my biases against CoinBase practices for a few days for health reasons.

But, some of the issues that were highlighted may be prevalent here, as they do seem to behave like an exchange (even though they are allegedly not one even though they fit the definition).

Before someone points this out, its true that bitcoin is not recognized as a currency in the US, but it is considered a security by SECs definition of what a security is.

By CoinBase's definition they buy and subsequently sell or buy-back BTC like an ecommerce product. Wonder why an e-commerce product previously sold by them would be "offset" or reversed due to potentially fraudulent activity?

Also, it can be alleged that the OP is not being completely forthright about the full story? I don't believe that the OP is hiding anything.

If the OP did send and receive BTC thus technically having different BTC than the ones CoinBase sold to the OP is there any reason that all incoming BTC transactions cannot be classified as fraudulent?

I will not personally answer any of these questions even though I want to.

The previous threads are at:
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360

edit: spelling and grammar
Yeah, that's a pretty shameful and classist thing you did. Glad you seem to have learnt your lesson.
No, nothing said implies that. Immediately, I see the following problems:

1) You're looking at amount of damage, not susceptibility.

2) You're assuming problems of government couldn't be for reasons other than those being discussed.

3) You're looking at the margin in one case, and the total effect in the other.
After I stuck an SSD in it, my 2nd-generation Thinkpad X100e makes a fantastic little dev box. The damn thing boots in under 5 seconds. I've always been a fan of the smaller laptops like this (I used a Thinkpad 240Z for nearly a decade).

An rMBP would be nice to have but in the meantime this laptop suits me just fine. The keyboard is better on this too. Maybe if that iPad Pro rumor pans out and it ends up having a USB port I'd just use that with one of my smaller keyboards (KBC Poker) instead.
What the hell are you talking about? People don't die from work exhaustion at their desks in Japan. I live in Japan and I've never even remotely heard of anything like that through my years here. And Karoshi is not even used the way you pretend it's used. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Very timely article. I am being laid off tomorrow (fri). I sent out this article to my team as sharing my last piece of nugget before I head out the door!

I think the question not only applies to a country or city but also the place you work, place you live, or any activity you do.
If you have an extra liver lying around, take a drink every time someone posts, in complete sincerity, "It has no where to go but up!"
How do you know =)
That seems a wee bit premature.
This will be even more common than you intimate since many of these boomers can't afford to retire. Work until they drop.
It also breeds malcontent and unethical behavior. My last employer gave me a very hefty raise while (unethically) telling everyone else that there was a pay freeze.

Unfortunately, the payroll person was a gossip - the incident undermined my leadership and put me in an extremely awkward position. I'm happy to have left that shady startup.
The fact you claim /r/science is for "hardcore 'truths'" kind of proves you aren't in a position to talk about this. :(
You can live without Google
"Guy", "dude", "him", "he"...

There are many kinds of programmer, but apparently they're all men.

Edit: upon re-reading the post I see a smattering of "he or she" references at the beginning. They quickly give way to nothing but male nouns and pronouns. I wrote my comment after finishing the article, at which point I'd forgotten about the brief nod to the existence of female software developers at the beginning of the post.
Are you serious? I'd feel like a fucking idiot walking out of university with a brand new degree and demanding 100k off the bat. I guess the market is different outside SV though right?
Any reads relating to this?
"This holiday season is one more reason to cry")
>but I couldn't possibly rip my daughter away from her friends and the school she loves

I wouldn't be so sure. My parents made two significant moves during my school years which meant a new school and new friends. If you had asked me whether I wanted to move I would have said absolutely not. Looking back as an adult, being taken out of my comfort zone and forced to make a whole new set of friends and being given the opportunity to experience different places was fantastic for me.

That's not to say that there weren't some tears along the way...
He confessed. Even if he had not, I'm sure they could have run forensics on his laptop to find traces of the email. All they needed was probable cause to narrow the investigation, which they got.

You also seem to be under the impression that circumstantial evidence would not be enough to convict -- it often is, when combined with motive. I'm guessing the suspect had finals in those buildings that day, and was under considerable stress.
"PHP you're part of the largest computer joke in history" <-- Good Luck with Scaling Ruby/Python
Interesting variant, but it still bothers me that he made it to set out to help solve the problem of experts, most of whom will never play this game. One of the biggest reasons it was created was to solve the issue of constant draws at the highest tier. Seems like it would be more advantageous to target such a game to amateur and intermediate chess players.
David Sirlin wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirlin
Is he taking that last excerpt out of context? I read it as speaking for Rubin et al at the time thought the lack of a keyboard was wrong. It doesn't seem like anyone would really try to argue the point anymore.
> Imagine what the ubiquitous "grandma" is going to think when her graphics drivers stop working after an prompted update.

That wouldn't be a problem if OEMs sold computers with Linux pre-installed and fully supported. Dells would run a Dell distro of Linux that's properly tested on their hardware.
Orcon are great - although my only experience is connecting to their game servers from here in Australia. Looks like I can put NZ back on my "places to flee to" list.
Incognito mode doesn't escape retargeting, at least for adwords / doubleclick. I work in the space and it's truly a pain to see the 'natural' ads.
Most redditors are actually college-aged,[0] with the majority being between 25 and 44.[1]

[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/reddit...

[1]: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-de...
They'll already know that the expert is making more. If she deserves it and the company pay structure is fair, then no good employee will complain.
Ironically, the obscene verbosity it is also a common trait of "not very smart" people.)
Salaries are highly linked to cost of living.

NJ, NY, CT have higher salaries, I've heard Seattle is high and the San Fran is obviously higher.

Of course then you pay more for rent and all of that.
I moved to Cambodia on a whim 4 months ago and I have ~14,000$ in the bank. Given my current monthly expenses (100$ rent, 200$ food, 50$ miscellaneous), I'll have the next three years to work on projects and coding (more than enough time) without worrying about making money.

Like others have said, money is not the limiting factor for most people in regards to moving half-way around the world. Being 12,000 miles away from my parents is very hard though; this move was something I absolutely needed to do, but I know if something were to happen to them I would completely regret my decision to come here.
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retargeting is crazy effective (for me at least). After buying a home, I spent a lot of time buying things like tools etc. Often times i'd be about 90% ready to purchase something, but for some reason or another i'd decide against it. Those ads following me around would usually get me across the finish line. I ended up installing adblock.
Is the amount of radiation and heavy metals being released by Fukushima significantly more than was released by the nuclear testing (that is, blowing up islands with atomic bombs) in the Pacific in the 50s and 60s?
When you run a company, you just assume that your competitors know the pay structure. It's trivially easy information to discover (through interviews).
I get that the name is a cute joke, but adding hidden information is totally contradictory to the core beauty of chess.

I took a quick look at the rules and it seems like an interesting game, but from a game design perspective, it's a radical departure from vanilla chess.
Change your routine. Run, exercise, listen to new music.

If nothing else helps, what you're describing sounds like (IMO) some kind of depression. In that case, get professional help - seriously.
There is. There is a single culture that tends to upvote the same things over and over again.

Reddit.com is defined by its default subreddits — its front page. The fact that other subs exist doesn't negate the very real culture that has risen to the top of the site like the layer of oil on a cold, disgusting bowl of soup.
Basically my entire philosophy of life. The year I spent studying Buddhism in my last year of school rub off on me, and I still try and practice that every day, 8 years later.
Religious language isn't built on a predictive theoretical framework. I don't see what the big fuss is about:

Those deaths happened to teach the rest of us a lesson.

Does saying this commit one to the believe in some Divine Story that has a triage of lessons? No. Some people learned from the events, though it might seem disingenuous to say, or maybe strictly hear?, of others, not so elsewhere, amongst a different crowd, in a different conversation. A journalist may compare one disaster to another, and then we learn something else. Another facts rolls into the epitome of history.

Religious language effects an innocence in that it enables for other ways of talking to pass into and out of it with greater elasticity.
There are a lot of people bringing up edge cases and contingencies on this thread. The success of Buffer's culture is what happens when you stop being afraid of the edge cases and start deciding what kind of people you want to be. People will follow you if you stay true to that, as corny as that sounds.
One of my coworkers, my mentor and someone who taught me what it meant to be a good programmer, was murdered by his wife, who also murdered their two children and then killed herself.

It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors. I actually saw his face on the evening news and my heart started racing, because they made it seem as though he was the murderer, but as events came out, he and his beautiful children were the victims.

It was really horrible because he was one of the star programmers at work and responsible for a lot of the success in the company. Everyone loved him and he deserved to be loved. It really hit our company hard, and we had things like counselling meetings but all that did was fuel our anger.

Basically there's nothing you can do. You just have to deal with it and move on. It's been 10+ years, but I'll never forget him though, he deserves at least that.
Please, go back to reddit. Your posting history on this website is complete shit.
You know what I find far, far more offensive than someone using gendered pronouns? The kind of smug, pandering post that deliberately strives for gender neutrality through tortuous 'he/she' verbosity.

I happen to think that most women are probably clever enough to work out that just because a writer has used a particular gendered pronoun, it doesn't mean that the writer's point applies specifically to that gender. Furthermore, literally none of the women I've known have ever complained about gender pronouns; such nitpicking seems to be the exclusive domain of gender-political activists and HN commenters.
And it's a complete distraction from legitimate environmental concerns.
I am talking about suicide. I felt the article was mostly about that thought process with the reality being kind of the side note.

When I have run across people that I thought were having a hard time with failure, they are usually measuring themselves against the completely self contrived version of the peer that they see as being better. My context may be skewed, but the guys that have the hardest time are the ones that thought no one else was having any issues. This is of course a symptom of the military culture, but can play out in the tech world as the insanely successful skew the perception of failure, upward. By that I mean tech people measure themselves against, not the just doing fine peer, but to the exploding all expectations peer, which is completely improbable and truly self defeating.
Serious question: What's stopping them from doing so?
And they are all more or less bad.
If you've never understood the idea of "privilege" before, your attitude of "oh what, this doesn't work for everyone else? It works for me!" is something that gets discussed a lot. Some examples of the many, many situations people can find themselves in where public salary disclosure would be a major problem:

- You have family members who have substance abuse issues. It's common for addicts to steal from family members who they rationalise can afford it.

- You're in an abusive relationship, and your spouse steals your money. Hiding part of your salary may help you feel independent enough to get out.

- Your kids' friends find out how much you earn, and bully them.

- All the rest of your family are part of a religious organisation that demands a tithe. You've lost your faith, but it would tear your family apart to leave.

- You have family who live in a country with a much, much lower standard of living. You support them financially, which is known in their community. Now their neighbours know _just how much_ you're worth, exposing your family to the possibility of kidnapping or extortion.

- Your name is Google-unique, and identifies you as part of a group that is stigmatised on the internet. If your identity leaks into your internet activities (e.g. via Google's real name policy), another major vector of harassment is exposed.

Just a couple of things off the top of my head.
"They say Google has the highest concentration of smart people?" -- This might surprise you -- https://medium.com/p/1b1cde25627a ?
Winterlicious Tag
Technically meteors are small objects that do not impact the earth (the ones that do are called meteorites), and meteor showers are completely harmless to both people and datacenters.
That article didn't cite any of its data, and it even conflates reported rapes with rape estimates.
Black electrical tape is a much sleeker solution.
As far as Keystone XL and other pipelines across the country the training programs are for actual terrorist attacks. An attack on a pipeline is a mess if local law enforcement does not know how to deal with it. I remember sitting in my dad's office looking at a pipeline map and asking him who "protected" all of it? At the time his response was no one. Anyway's the mess in Oklahoma City had to deal with four people at the Devon Tower downtown. If protesters get anywhere near pipelines or fracking zones, well there is pretty long history of legal action against people trespassing on energy production sites. It is whole new territory charging people for protesting at corporate office building under a "terrorism hoax" law in the State of Oklahoma that has not even been tested. And if this actual goes to trial there will be strong media and legal coverage. Of that much I am certain.

<update>
The state of Oklahoma has historically gone after activist groups. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) & Green Corn Rebellion being the extreme examples.
Their large contract with Google, perhaps? That's my guess anyway.
Get drunk. Write it, and be complete. Go to bed. Sleep poorly. Get up before alarm. Caffeinate. Move your rousing conclusion to the top and try again, picking off your darlings. You're finished when you can't stand yourself anymore and it's time to shower. Think of something much better during steam. Dragon dictate while dressing. Rehearse en route -- a problem if you're just upstairs in the conference hotel. Email text to friendly teleprompter girl as sulky technician hooks up your mic. Wing it. Humbly accept false adoration. Cash the check. Add line to CV. Iterate.
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