Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
... any blog post that had a major impact on your life, workflow, career, understanding, etc. qualifies.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summ...
Alright, it's not really a blog post about dating, per se. It's more of a blog post about becoming the kind of person who maxes out their dateability, no matter what their starting physical/mental/spiritual condition.
It's hard to explain what reading this post did to me. There are a few times in my life where I consciously decided to switch life trajectories radically and become someone entirely different. First age 8, when I vowed to become an idiot. After reading this was the second one, age 24, where I vowed to become a sexy idiot. I printed it out at the college library and reread it every day at breakfast - a strategy I highly recommend to my fellow nimrods. And, voila, age 25 when I, the jester, moved countries with no passport, no job lined up, and no plan, to go live with the woman who I would eventually call my wife.
Now I'm her sexy idiot. Progress!
* Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski. The first half I reread often because it is a short critique of technology/technique and the effect that it has on our life. Though not original, it touches on this feeling that we are enslaved to our tools. It also reminds me that "no, i'm not crazy" this world is totally absurd and the way we live makes no sense. Obviously, if you take this philosophy to its natural extreme you need to go live in the woods and suffer. Which is kind of larping.
* This is Water by David Foster Wallace. I reread this and hand out copies of this book to people all the time. For me it speaks to the part of me that knows that it is important to choose wisely what you focus your thoughts on, because if I don't the automatic monologue in my head will take over. It will start with complaining. It will continue with painting everything black. It will make me misrable and incapable of enjoying the beauty in life.
I am trying to break out of these two book being so influential because I feel like to grow I need to evolve a new understanding and have new ideas to toy with.
Anyone have recommendation?
We don’t have to accept this as the status quo. Learning to both realize this that this article is true then reject this as “ok” and acceptable is the next step.
Sure, other people might not care about all these things, but you can make the world less shitty if you care about those things.
How should the world change so that your "thoughts and prayers" make meaningful impact? They are meaningless things that religious people tell themselves make an impact, when it's the people handing out food that stops starvation not "thoughts and prayers".
Why the hell should I hire you when you want to learn Python but haven't done anything, when I can find people who can show they understand the fundamentals by making a hobby project or went to night school?
Why should the pretty girls talk to you just because you were safer than a bear in the woods?
It's exactly the same conversation that keeps coming up. They didn't destroy 3rd spaces so you don't have any friends. You don't go to those 3rd spaces that exist, or your being too lazy to create the 3rd space.
Or, paraphrasing a quote whose source I don't remember: "What's important is not what you can do; it's what you can prove."
So even if you're actually a Python expert, it doesn't matter unless you have something to show for it; cue job interviewers ghosting candidates who don't have projects that are public and open source.
Considering people as only being valuable if they can do something for tou is something you don’t have to do.
You aren’t going to change all of society, but you can change what you do.
I think the challenge here is that we as a society aren't going to reach consensus on this, thereby nullifying the point. As the article mentions, half of the people will take the scene one way, and the other half of people will take it another way.
FWIW, I take it a seemingly opposite way from you, despite not identifying as a "hustler" or "techbro" or even considering myself a "go-getter".
Underneath the societal scaffolds we build on top of it, nature is brutal. It's important to always keep that in mind.
Just because someone else doesn’t care if Randy is a good dad or Jane is a pleasant person to interact with doesn’t mean that I’m limited from caring. Life doesn’t have to be transactional, we are encouraged to live that way - but there is no law of nature that says you have to not give a shit about people unless they can do something for you, there’s no law of nature that says you cannot appreciate people’s efforts.
This stuff really isn’t that hard.
I came to similar conclusions a few months after my first job, carefully introspecting why I felt like shit working there, and introspecting that and understanding what I have to offer to society, and what people expect out of me. It has been very useful in dealing with people and advancing my career.
I know this will not be appreciated here, but, the problem with hustle mindset is that as labor you only have your time to trade for money. the hope hustle-bros have is that do it enough and they'll make it to 'capital class' and enjoy fruits of other 'labor class'. problem is in process of doing so they introduce additional rat-race and make thing difficult for other labor-ers while capital enjoys fruits of their collective competition for free.
ABC isn't BS.
It's akin to Agile's "working code over comprehensive documentation."
Hustle porn is a more vague, aspirational grind till you make it. Whereas, ABC tells you to fail fast.
This article made me question if the author was describing my life rather than their own, so I went and got checked for ADHD. 2 years, a diagnosis, and a medication regime later, I'm absolutely fucking slaying it and it was this article that sparked the change.
I count Ravikanth as one of my gurus. From working as a professor in a medical school to starting up a small microSaaS, I attribute it all to Ravikanth who condensed everything one needs to know into a few tweets, followed by its expansion on his podcast.
Now, I preach seeking of Specific Knowledge to all my students and the principle of leveraging bots through programming as well as learning marketing no matter which field you belong to.
I ended up selling the car and we've been a one-car household ever since... despite the addition of our kid.
Hedonic adaptation: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/22/what-is-hedonic-a...
Basically, once you’re accustomed to a certain “luxury,” it can feel like a necessity, even if you were content without it before.
Flipside: once you’re used to doing without something, you may find that you don’t really miss it, even if before you had trouble imagining doing without (in my case, full time car usage - I grew up in suburban Texas)
He himself also retired with a free and clear home and a free and clear rental home, which meant he didn't have to tap into his capital, not to mention $400k annual blog revenue shortly after.
But generally I enjoyed his articles over the years and a high savings rate combined with investing is always a wise choice.
A big part of "retirement" is feeling financially secure. I'm sure Pete (MMM) practices what he preaches for the savings rate part of FIRE, but when I quit my job, the lumpiness of my investment returns made me very uneasy.
Having a steady stream of income outside of your investments makes the "safe withdrawal rate" part of the theory kinda moot. (By the way, here's some nuance to Bengen's 4% SWR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7rH7h7ljHg)
Nowadays my FIRE stance has softened to "it's nice to have this pile of capital in case things go wrong" and frugality has always been my nature anyway.
Now, at age 41, for some reason I can't stand his writing, which I find pugnacious and lacking self-reflection. But at the time in my 20s, his classic early posts on MMM hit me just at the right time, and made such a deep impression on me.
Possibly his writing style is highly effective at introducing a new unfamiliar perspective.
I started these notes with Jekyll, then went to Retype, and now with VitePress. Seems to be just working pretty much out of the box. I had to have one plugin that generates the menu structure from the folder. Otherwise, nothing special or interesting.
I haven't written anything specific to a workflow (I think, I should) but these two articles should give an idea of where I'm going;
Like many young developers, I once aspired to be a game developer. But then I read a public letter by somebody at Origin Systems (possibly named Bill Armintrout?) who explained what a grind it is to work in the game industry and how [humorously] maybe he should just get a job working on boring business software instead.
I might have the details wrong; this was probably 30+ years ago! But it did make me aware that doing the thing you love for a day job can kill your love for that thing, which I have also seen happen to other people. So I focused my career on intellectually fulfilling work in a different industry, leaving me free to happily tinker with game development as a hobby in my spare time.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
Highlights how short our lives actually are. This in turn is what gives our time value.
Some more of her work:
How to Be at Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT40Rmjwd-Q
Tanya Davis performs at Words Aloud 9
I moved to a foreign country a few years ago and I've still not managed to make any friends. I've never had an issue doing things alone but having to do almost everything I find interesting alone was a little sad at first. It still is, but less so.
finding mentors and work/industry contacts online and IRL and then meeting them socially to see where they go and what interesting things there are to do locally
meeting local journalists, writers, authors, and musicians and going to their shows, events, exhibitions, and sharing tips and scoops
riding public transit, skateboarding, bicycling, and walking around a lot, doing street photography of the environs and interesting people, their fashion, and pets, and generally drumming up a conversation with anyone to get them talking about people in their life, about their own life, their work, their hobbies lived reality, and material conditions
going to makerspaces and hackerspaces, libraries, and basically any large public gathering place/space/event that is even remotely interesting to me or anyone I’d like to meet, and making and breaking stuff in public
It’s basically the FORD method and a numbers game to make the odds work out.
F - family O - occupation R - recreation D - dreams
There’s also one I recently learned called HEFE which is also useful.
H - hobbies E - entertainment F - food E - environment
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/aep2h8/why_fo...
The more compact one that gives a good mental model for deciding how to engage with something that seems like might be a trap (or obviously is a trap, but you have to engage with it, anyway): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/
Made me realize that it's ok to be a slow thinker, and there is nothing wrong with me. It has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Whatever genetic lottery gave me I have to play with it
https://www.pbs.org/johngardner/sections/writings_speech_1.h...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...
Less about the specifics of the battles being mentioned, but rather:
1. Battles can be real even if they don't involve actual physical fighting. If I, like the author of this post, am a pacifist, it's best if I try to stay disengaged or uninvolved.
2. Many people play a certain role in a battle, and it's helpful to understand what role a person is playing as you interact with them. That is, are they a soldier, a general, or a diplomat?
China and Russia are likely responsible for some of these battlefronts, too.
IMO people talking about political correctness often miss an important point though: that what's believed to be acceptable is largely derived from an actual philosophy that is changing over time, which develops and evolved as society processes new ideas in the background. That processing happens online and in communities, in books and essays, in art, etc... and then everyone becomes aware of its new conclusions over time.
All of the philosophical work underpinning the 2010s was very much around in the preceding decades in a less crystallized form, but it rose to prominence on the back of various crises and scandals. I can attest, for instance, that the underlying philosophy of social justice predates Occupy, because I first heard it in college in 2009-2010ish, and it wasn't new then. By that point it had a life of its own already, as people people subscribed to it (because it gave them a framework to feel like they were being a moral person).
Aside, I think people overpredict manipulation of culture by organizations and elites because they aren't sufficiently imaginative to see how it could happen organically. Ideas have lives of their own, largely based on the problems they solve for people: how to feel moral in their life, how to put into words their moral intuitions about justice and duty, etc, and (rarely, much less than people think, but definitely sometimes) how to have social power over other people.
We know with absolute certainty that much worse atrocities happen in places like Russia and China. What makes you think that the US is immune to that kind of thing?
We don't have quite the same problems and they aren't so obvious.
But every once in a while, the curtain comes down and you get to see how things really are.
Wide-scale domestic surveillance. The US government chasing so hard after people like Snowden and Assange. Bernie Sanders being completely ignored by the Democratic Party in 2016. Epstein being mysteriously killed.
The US does not openly speak about its corruption, but there is plenty of it anyway.
While we are a democratic country don't forget that democracy is something you fight for every day. And if you look around, when is the last time there was a serious fight put up for democracy?
> don't forget that democracy is something you fight for every day.
No it's not? Democracy is a steady state that we mostly ignore every day. Over time it tends off course and when it gets too astray we correct it.
Since about forever, some people became preachers or prophets who attracted crowds and destabilized entire empires. That was true even in the days when most people were poor and illiterate.
Current social networks give a lot of platform to such preachers, and find them an ample audience, because controversy drives attention and attention sells ads.
Quite logically, we get a lot more commotion and political radicalism than before such systems came to be.
Prisoner's Dilemma, but at the societal level. Defaulting is the logical move for the one-shot game, but it does not produce overall benefit, and is not best in the repeated game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
Local optimizations, under imperfect knowledge. Small local maxima can halt progress. Eventually Goodhart's Law takes over, incentives break down, then shortcuts, grift and corruption come to dominate. Self-preservation and expansion of elites or bureaucracies are always hidden objectives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
Destructive patterns such as: Bait and Switch strategies, like Enshittification of business; Divide and Conquer applied by those with power to keep power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Wicked Problems, which are not solvable in the current context or state of knowledge. You can't get there from here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
"Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
Great blogger, and I've only read a handful of what he's written. Most of it not lifechanging, but entertaining. e.g. silicon valley house party posts.
However, halfway the post instead of going all metaphysical and try to create a garden, isn't the logical conclusion that individual gains in the rat race trump any grand plan you might have? Is it about the balance between being the best rat and finding a community to create a garden? If you garden by yourself, isn't that just being a rat with extra steps?
All the examples quickly settle on a static state, skipping the inertia of the dynamic state that precedes it. And it is in that dynamic state that the rats manage to get their gains.
There are many steps between "Tim decides not to use the purifier in his fish farm" and "So many people don't use their purifiers so that Tim doesn't have any gains anymore". That takes s long time, and after that it's something else. Because it's not the purifier that sets Tim appart, but his attitude.
I think this is a general trap, where the static state makes something look obvious one way, but the trick is in the dynamics of inertias, and the time it takes to reach the static state.
I have used filters in Gmail, but they are annoying to create and maintain. Would prefer to use JavaScript to direct where an e-mail should go to or whether it should grab my attention or not.
But one thing which I was surprised helped me enormously was setting up some simple "canned replies" using Quick Actions in Outlook (my simplest is to send a one word reply "Approved"). I think this is because it seems to avoid the need for me to mentally "context switch" so much.
E.g. if I run a book club or something via email, and all book club mail goes to a label or folder instead of the inbox, I can wait to look at it for when I'm doing book club work, instead of seeing it all the time.
https://medium.com/raymmars-reads/7-reasons-why-you-will-nev...
Finally, reliable and valid summaries of nutritional science — with links to the actual research so you can fact check and decide for yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/20/cant-sl...
I'm so grateful for it.
EDIT: Originally this article was a blog post here (that's where I first read it): https://web.archive.org/web/20190703083843/http://www.oliver...
This made me realize I didn’t want to run the company I was running anymore. That my unhappiness was due to my company.
It also lead me to find 80,000 hours, explore jobs on techjobsforgood.com, and generally be more aware of myself.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230614053908/http://bookofhook...
This changed me from being lazy smartass to the very productive team lead.
https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r0/Day1.htm...
[1] https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a...
What kind of life should it be that it is easily changed by random opinions of some random people...
Unless it is a blog post with a password to a huge Bitcoin wallet :)
I'll just say that sometimes, someone can explain an issue or a concept in a way that really strikes you. Maybe it's a perspective on an important issue that changes how you view it, or maybe it's an idea that opens up an entirely new avenue of thought you hadn't considered.
Sometimes that random stranger can string words together to convey the right information to the right person that positively affects their life.
But is it “life changing”?
That is too much to attribute.
We are collectively mentally ill
Maybe I'm too tired and missed the point, but usually when I read things about living more simply and not keeping up with the Jones, it's presented in a more romantic way than sleeping in the back of a $1,000 car and dog food. Is the point to make the reader feel better about the stress they have, because they don't want the stresses of the alternative?
Right at the top of the article... and putting your own shitty life in perspective doesn't hurt and can help to keep your sanity. Eating dog food in a trashy car is still better than drowning in the Mediterranean or in the Gulf or staying put in a war torn country.
This book have all the knowledge one might need to understand distributed systems to a certain level. Many of the topics I refer from this book as and when I want to use those in real life applications. Recent one being 2 phase commits.
A primary literature review on the thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
It introduced me to the idea that most employees are "economic losers" who are "people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks." (At least in the early - middle life cycle of a company).
It encapsulates this as "The Gervais Principle":
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
(The terminology is quite specific to the article - i.e. not sociopaths in the movie-cliche view).
I won't attempt to summarise the article here. Suffice to say it altered my thinking about future roles. Search HN for many prior discussions here of that post.