Ask HN: What is the biggest thing you've changed your mind about?

Maybe fear of death?

You get older, you get more tired(?), serene(?), you can see the progress towards death as a natural process in your own life.

Also you're around more death. I was with my mother when she died. I can't say it was a pleasant process, but it was very natural. She accepted hospice, and seemed to be at peace with death. The last few months with her a lot of positive memories were made that will stick with me.

I don't _want_ to die, but its clearly something I can feel will naturally come and should plan for.

Having lived the first third of my life in the pre internet world, I'm no longer sure I think it's net beneficial in all things. I didn't expect to be this unsure progress works. It's unscientific. Progress by definition is improving surely?

Since in (very small) ways I helped bring it into being, this message is displeasing in several ways.

In my late 20s something activated in my mind where I inverted my woes - that everyone else is fighting a far more exhausting personal war than I am. I don't have the energy to help everyone with their war, but I can respect that the people who are giving their energy to me might not even have it for themselves. I feel like since then my relationships have been deeper, more genuine, often more challenging. I also have to gauge which are worth holding on to - I cull my social garden now, instead of growing it.

Someone said every person is a private universe. You're listening to someone talk and you don't see that universe. Each pause, each sigh, a litany of experience, an era of mistakes.

Life is very short. You can make it to the end and be caught off guard because you were still waiting for it to begin. It can be worth the exhausting questions from time to time - a followup of 'really?' to asking how someone's weekend went can take you off a highway of nothings and onto a forest trail of adventure.

The ability of private citizens to make an impact on our politics. We like to talk about our legislatures or Congress in the abstract, but the reality is you as a citizen can get things moved in the direction you want, and you don’t have to be wealthy to make it happen. It’s not easy, it takes a ton of time, but if you get involved, good things can happen.

I want to believe in upward mobility; that someone born with limited opportunity in the US can get ahead. I shift my feelings on this almost weekly.

The importance of software. Thirty years ago I believed that technology would change our world in positive ways. Now, I’m less certain that software is in many cases necessarily, useful, or beneficial.

Personal responsibility. I’ll counter some of the posts in this thread. Yes, personal responsibility is critical, but there are so many systems working against the average person over which they have no control. You can work hard, get an education, stay off vice, save for a rainy day - and still end up penniless in a gutter, if the wrong hand gets dealt to you. And the system doesn’t give a shit, and your neighbors will spit on you and say you should have taken more personal responsibility for your actions.

Let's ignore politics and religion for now. And only technology in the past ~30 years.

I dont know if change of mind is the right word. But may be proven wrong.

JVM. I was fist convinced JVM will be fast enough, and then it will never be fast enough for lots of things, and right now it is being used for even high frequency trading.

Excel is much much more important than most people are aware of it. When I was young I thought Excel / Spreadsheets or Access were toys. But working in the real world and some years passed I have a change of perspective. Since then I have been constantly calling it the most important software in computing. Far more so than even Windows or Linux.

Hardware Matters, a lot more than Software. This seems counterintuitive when most people would consider software is where the value lies. Especially when I started out as a Hardware Engineer but believed what Bill Gate said some 30 years ago, with Moore's Law all hardware cost will trend to zero. In reality Consumers dont understand software. And they are reluctant to buy software or features. While this works differently in Business, consumer tends to prefer something physical. Hence buying a new computer with free software update rather than paying for software. It is the whole software and hardware together as a "Product", and not one or the other.

Internet, or more specifically web pages. Are not what we envisioned with the Internet Super High Way. The actual network, where we can stream Netflix, or Spotify with 5G is great. But information on the web is, for vast majority of cases a net negative.

Mobile or Smartphone Gaming. Out of the 4B smartphone users, close to 2B are gamers. I never thought of a day that everyone is a gamer. In the old days Games were different. It could be an RPG with great novel and story telling. A simulation game like Sim City, Civ or Age of Empire that you could learn history or how the world works. Modern Mobile Games are a Casino, and the free ones are riddled with Ads. With both Smartphone platform owner have ZERO gaming DNA in them, but only a business person of how to squeeze every single penny out of it. Everything you imagined with Mobile Gaming didn't happened. Instead we got a Mobile Casino.

Objective-C - What was once thought to be an ugly hacked on top of C Programming languages. Is actually beautiful.

The existence of a non-physical realm.

Once I realize that I believe in the existence of laws of physics, and that these laws of physics can be found nowhere physically in the universe, I realized I believe in non-physical realms.

For me, it was probably work life balance

My family was very house poor when I was growing up. We didn't live in poverty, but we were on the low end of lower middle class, living on the fringes of a very upper middle class area so growing up I always felt poorer than we maybe actually were.

It put me in that poverty mindset where I couldn't take breaks or vacations, I always had to work as hard as I could to earn as much as I could, then save every cent

I burned out hard just a few years after I started my career. I was a mess. I was on medical leave for a few months, then I was unemployed. I didn't have much savings because I wasn't actually earning that much and I was living in a very expensive city.

I had a lot of realizations then, about why I chose to live and stay in that city (proximity to my family), what was keeping me there (built in group of acquaintances), and my real career opportunities and trajectory if I stayed. So I left

I don't see my family as often anymore which does suck. I don't miss most of the acquaintances, few of them were real friends anyways, and the few that I do miss would have likely moved on eventually as they started having kids anyways.

I don't work nearly as hard or as many hours as I used to, I make 3x more money, and I have way more free time. I'm also a much more well rounded developer as a result I think

Taking time to yourself isn't optional, you cannot improve if you're constantly exhausted and focussed on just getting the next thing done. You need time to breathe and look at the bigger picture

Quite a few things actually, but the biggest one is that I believe that [almost] nobody is beyond rehabilitation. Even in cases where the person is beyond, it doesn’t mean we ought to make them suffer for their circumstances.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t protect the rest of society, but neither punishment nor retribution — especially in the name of “justice” — are justifiable. If anything, such responses only [temporarily] satisfy one’s desire for bloodlust. They cannot undo the harm done and they cannot relieve us of the pain.

All my life I considered myself on a particular side of the political spectrum in my country. My main values haven't changed, still, now I'm considered to be standing on the other side of the spectrum compared to where I was 10 years ago.

This a bit controversial but once this clicked it really helped me in work and social situations.

Humans have varying degrees of intelligence and you cannot treat them exactly the same.

I used to strongly believe that all humans are intellectually 100% equal. If someone doesn’t not understand simple logic or flaws in their reasoning, then it is because they are being lazy or malicious. I always understood knowledge gaps and didn’t expected business side to understand tech side and vice versa. I am talking about simple concepts like if you give a child caffeine once in a while, the child will develop addiction eventually.

By treating everyone equally, I ran into a lot of conflicts.

It took me becoming parent and realizing I can’t use logic with my children. You can say that children helped me develop emotional intelligence.

Now I try to really focus on the person and their emotions. And use emotional language. If I don’t know the person that well I use their culture, racial, religious background to develop rapport. I will use logical arguments only with trusted friends.

Sometimes, this feels purely evil to me though. I hate it when I use generalizations, I hate it when people do that to me. Sometimes, some smarter people especially developers get annoyed by it, no one directly said it to me but this might fall under patronizing, mansplaining, manipulation etc. But it avoids interpersonal conflicts more often than not.

Personal responsibility. When I was younger I used to put the blame on many things on others or my upbringing.

Now I came to conclusion of extreme responsibility. Everything that happens or ever happened in my life was purely on me; whatever things may happen I and only I I'm solely responsible for that.

I also learned about my place in hierarchy. I know I don't really have anything to show in terms of IQ, so I'm doing my best not to harm others by wasting their time by staying as low profile as I may.

I grew up during the "computer revolution" and saw the internet enter our lives. I was sure that digitizing information and all of the "zero-cost copies" was clearly the way to make information available to everyone, forever. Since then, I've seen much of this information become closely guarded (paywalls, etc.) and, in many cases, inaccessible. This is especially true for content born on the web that's now gone from the web, with only some busted links here or there to tell us it ever even existed.

Compare this to my local library. I can access a large collection of books, magazines, and newspapers instantly, for free. For something not local, I ask the librarian for help and that item appears a few days later through the magic of interlibrary loan. And for durability, I now feel that printed volumes in multiple locations can easily outlast much of our digital content.

Russia. I used to think that Russia was mostly the victim (I've been there several times and I speak the language; that's certainly how the regular people view geopolitical affairs).

Since the invasion to Ukraine I've been reading the history of the country, and I've changed my mind. In fact the country has a long history of invading its neighbors, and so a defensive alliance around it seems very rational. And the invasion of Ukraine was a modern day reminder for those too young to remember why NATO was created.

Islam

On the surface it always looked like just another abrahamic religion to me.

When I scratched the surface i was unpleasantly confused.

Let's see ..

1) Throughout most of high school, college, and years after college I smoked weed. I thought it was great, it made me feel good. I'd emphasise with posts on Reddit and such about how the "evil man was keeping us down", "it's just a plant man", "it's not harming anyone", etc. etc. Now that I'm older and I look back at that time, and man what a waste. I wasted so many years just getting high and accomplishing nothing. Yeah it didn't hurt anyone else. Yeah I felt good at the time. But looking back at my life do I get any satisfaction that during those years I felt good getting high and watching a movie and eating food, rather than actually moving forwards in my life? No, no I do not. It didn't get me anything other than fleeting good feelings, it's just being a drug addict. I haven't smoked in well over a decade now and I don't miss it for a second.

2) Along the same line, and counter to multiple other posters in this thread, I spent years on the whole atheist train. I thought people who believed in religion were just morons. I saved (cringe worthy) images about how it was superior to be atheist and various logical arguments for atheism, etc. Looking back on it, it's just another social hate cult. In that cult the enemy is the religious and they spend their time and effort just pouring out hate towards them. Just another hate echo chamber. It accomplishes nothing good. The older I get the more I see that traditional religion at least (for the most part) instilled good morals in people. It built solid communities. It accomplished good things. I'm old enough to have first hand memories of what communities used to be like, before the complete obliteration of religion in the west in the last 20-30 years, and I want it back. I'd rather be around those type of people than card carrying hate-based atheists. (Of course not all atheists are hate filled, but the people that make it part of their identity usually are.)

Psy* specialists (Psychologists, Psychiatrists etc) aren't doctors, they are here to keep society of consumption running. They have effectively no invention with exception of Weber-Fechner law, no Noble prizes (Economics is not exactly Noble prize) and the most important - their working/practice/business is controlled by the Government more than by the scientific consensus. Probably introducing to Psy* some freedom from the Government will improve the situation because Psy* disciplines are not exactly from thin air. But anyway Psy* is an ugly brother of Neurophysiology.

Whether I want to keep my kids in my life. I recently got accepted to a Caribbean med school and didn't see a way to matriculate while raising two kids. Told my partner I wanted a divorce and signed over custody. He didn't like it, but my divorce attorney made sure it was done legally.

It's wonderful having all my time to myself again, and in four years I get to go back on the dating scene as an M.D. which will hopefully get me better prospects.

Politics. Israel. From admiration to contempt due to Netanyahu and the right-wing religious fundamentalists in power there.

Giving a hoot about what others think.

I used to think myers-briggs was phony, now I use it daily and it's super useful.

Growing up in a conservative area in the Bible Belt, I once allowed myself to be brainwashed into believing crap like "drug dealers are the scum of the Earth and basically pure evil and should get the death penalty."

Later I discovered libertarianism, realized that I was a libertarian, and came to believe in self-ownership and adopted the position that all laws restricting what substances we can ingest, imbibe, inhale, or inject into our bodies should be repealed, and that all prisoners in jail for solely drug (usage|possession|distribution) should be released. I am also now staunchly opposed to the death penalty.

Once believed in god, healing, tongues, etc. Thankfully public schools and secular communities helped me to rethink all that. Now I believe what can be tested and proven. This also led to a big political shift from a moderate conservative to a democratic socialist, though the Republican shift to the party of Trump also helped make that happen.

sex work

(which includes a wide range of activities from things behind a computer screen, to stripping, to more explicit physical interactions. as opposed to an older lexicon that was just about physical interactions.)

but all of them, even the more salacious physical versions, have more analogies and similarities with fast food for both workers, consumers and productive public policy responses

workers overinflate its dignity just to get the little support they have achieved, but I’ve never seen a McDonalds worker brag about working at McDonalds while the universe of options for most of them are similar, the compensation is similar if you look really closely, and worker protections should be at parity

interest or avoidance as a worker or a loved one to a worker similarly follows the same interest or avoidance as them working in fast food, but the aversion to wanting that option for a loved one is used as a strawman argument to discredit any normalization of sex work or reduction in marginalization when its the same opinion theyd have about their loved one working in fast food

policy based on exclusion, conflating consensual work with sex trafficking, even treating sex trafficking differently from labor trafficking at all are policies that create the occupational and exclusionary hazards with various forms of sex work

I’ve changed my mind about what the public policy should be, alongside opinions about sex workers themselves.

I realized that many “women in tech” were doing the same thing to sex workers that they accuse men of doing to them - speaking over them, speaking for them without getting input from the people directly affected - ultimately with the goal of exclusion and control of sexuality. That the particular women I encountered in these tech organizations and fortune 500 companies were not adequate representation but were masquerading their opinions as such when it comes to excluding other women that choose other paths that men cater to. Recognizing SWERF talking points now as familiar, “sex work exclusionary radical feminism”, I don't see their exclusion as productive. I see it as a selfish way of trying to be taken seriously in corporate environments, privileging their comfort at the expense other women and everyone else, which is obvious for me not to agree with now and scrutinize. And when being “taken seriously” fails that should be a problem with the men/people that limit their corporate growth not the other women catering to carnal desires existing in the same or similar spaces.

I don't support any policy based on exclusion or “ending demand”. I’m skeptical of any policy that simply makes people feel good because of its ostensible point of curbing sex trafficking. The existing labor trafficking policies make sense and have their own room for improvement. So I can get behind the goals to normalize it at parity to other jobs. I don't see it as needing to be someone’s whole identity like activists seem to require. I don't see it as inconsequential. But definitely more akin to fast food workers.