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a_techwriter_00on Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

Hear hear. I left software engineering as a discipline because I hated the interview process.

a_techwriter_00on Love the smell of old books? This bookseller would like you to leave

It's like abstract art in book form, or trying to interpret a dream that someone else is telling you about. There are glosses of the book out there that give more context to the words and references. Having one of those can fill you in, but it's still going to be a slog.

Maybe I'm unkind, but I've never been a fan of the Wake. It's always seemed to me to be the sort of thing academics in English literature departments and lovers of abstract art really go for, but few other people can appreciate. (Nothing against literature academics or abstract artists -- it's just that their tastes are informed by things that don't inform most people's!)

If you want to appreciate Joyce as a more approachable author, 'Dubliners' is a great collection of short stories and not experimental.

a_techwriter_00on Millions of Americans Regret the Great Resignation

Why should anyone pay any attention to this propaganda? Caring about what Bloomberg or the Washington Post has to say about the workplace is foolish and self-defeating.

a_techwriter_00on Ask HN: How to Call the Opposite of Enlightenment?

Ignorance

a_techwriter_00on Ask HN: How do you give advice?

Dress it up as coming from a source with more authority. This isn't merely your advice, this is the distilled wisdom of a philosopher from antiquity. Stoicism's trendy right now, so say it's a quote from Seneca or part of Marcus Aurelius's _Meditations_ and some people will buy in. If you want to future-proof this tactic, with the rising geopolitical tensions you're probably going to start hearing the name "Thucydides" bandied around.

Reduce the advice to something short and memorable. A rhyme, pun, or clever garden-path sentence are all good techniques - different people like different kinds of wordplay, so have a bunch of these at hand and know your audience.

Make sure the message is the same across time. People trust consistency on the one hand, and on the other people can become worn down by hearing the same advice for a decade and decide to adopt your thinking.

Charge a lot of money for your advice. People are more likely to accept advice they paid ten thousand dollars for over advice they paid nothing for.

a_techwriter_00on Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

For a moment, take away the fact that this is your dad. Imagine a friend of yours with a background of "well, I took CS101 as a freshman" wanted to go into business with you. The pitch is that you use your experience and business contacts from being a thriving contactor in order to find and make deals and then you give the work to your friend to program the implementation. What sort of knowledge gap would exist between "learned the basics n years ago" and "someone you'd feel comfortable outsourcing work to in your real, actual professional life"?

Spell out everything that your hypothetical friend would have to go and learn for you to feel comfortable giving him even the most junior-level coding responsibilities or vouching for him as a "yeah, this guy can do the job" to a professional contact of yours. Write it all down, show it to your dad, and spell out the effort involved. That's what he's looking at learning in order to be taken seriously in the marketplace.

(I'd venture that some kind of consulting/contracting is what he'd wind up doing, both because I don't think many companies would take a resume like his seriously for a junior developer position and also because I don't think someone who's been at the top of the org chart would tolerate going to the bottom of the org chart for very long.)