The HN hug of death
370 karma · joined August 27, 2023
https://aalbacetef.io
https://github.com/aalbacetef
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Views do not represent any of my past or present employers (nor even myself at a given moment, as my opinion could have evolved).
I've seen this approach before, it mostly follows from using the code to signal application errors (200 + ok/error) from other kinds of errors that might arise.
There are hundreds of browsers these days, you shouldn't have a hard time finding one that fits your needs.
Whenever I read about that or the disasters that ensued in the following centuries I always spend a day depressed.
Grim.
Boylestad was an excellent first look at electronics with S&S being great for going in-depth on some topics.
Food? A party's just booze and music, maybe even move some furniture out of the way for a dance floor.
If I had to hazard some kind of heuristic with 99% applicability, it'd be to always strive to have code with as few indentations (branches) as possible. If your code is getting too indented, those deep Vs are either a sign that your implementation has a strong mismatch with the underlying problem or you need to break things up into smaller functions.
The Cold War for example was full of these intricate, complex and stunning feats of spycraft that they'd pull off on each other.
I disagree.
Example scenario of many young Europeans in their 20s:
- living in small or mid-sized city
- job offer pops up paying significantly more across the country, either capital or one of the top cities
- move and earn significantly more (even when adjusted for CoL)
- continue progressing careerwise
- job offer pops up elsewhere, possibly in other EU countries, pays significantly more
A reasonable person in their 20s would allow themselves the chance to focus on professional career growth/salary growth up until they hit their mid-30s in which they can start considering settling in a given place and purchasing. Before that it's nonsensical.
To give my own example, I went through various cities across several countries, starting at 12k, then a few years later job offer in another country for 33k, then a few years later at 54k, then at 115k, all before 30 years old (because I allowed myself to be anchor-free).
The rest who stayed put in the same city? 12k to 30k in the same span of time.
Anyone telling a person in their 20s: "buy a house and stay put" is giving terrible advice. The advice should be something along the lines of: "what you do in your 20s will bear fruits in your 30s, stay open-minded, adventurous, don't be afraid to burn out and discover your limits, see the world before your parents get old, and try your hardest".
I disagree with this - assuming the average white collar job (given HN), you _will_ progress salarywise from your early 20s to your early 30s.
When I was a Jr. Software Dev at 23, I both didn't have the money to afford a house where I got all the job offers (which wouldn't make sense), nor would it have been a good idea given I would've wanted to stay open to chasing higher salaries after 1-3 years elsewhere (which I did).
Maybe some decades ago it was common to spend your whole professional career in the same city, but as a dev I've had jobs pop up in different cities, heck even different countries!
If I had attempted to buy, I would literally have financially died (not to mention wouldn't have been able to pursue better jobs elsewhere at the drop of a hat - month's notice).
I've seen people go through the incredible pain of having to either turn down job offers because they can't sell in a month's time and relocate or be drowned in the myriad issues involved in selling/renting out.
Personally I can't justify buying a house to myself until I either hit my 40s or have picked a corner of the world I want to settle down with a family and probably die and get buried there.
EDIT: why downvote? I'm not opposing people buying houses, I'm opposing demonizing renting out when for lots of people it's the preferred option.
I feel the numbers would be best contextualized as ratios of demand (e.g: prospective homeowners).
As a rough first approximation, Google gives me the US population in 1974 as: ~212.53M, with the 2025 population at: ~347M.
So it'd be more significant with: 1.63 * 693k = ~1.131M new apartments.
Of course, this is a rough approximation which doesn't take into account a host of other factors, but you can already guess things are not as optimistic as the headline would make it seem. That said, I'd guess those factors would further increase the "households per capita", with phenomena like the shrinking of nuclear families relative to the 1970s.
For example, googling average household size gives me: 1974=3.44 and in 2025=2.51. This yields roughly: 61.78M households in 1974 vs 138.24M households in 2025. Which means we'd ideally want to see something closer to: 2.26 * 693k = 1.57M new apartments.
Some languages definitely had people gravitate towards them due to being innovative in a given space, but in many of those cases, the comparative advantage was lost to other languages/techs/frameworks that simply failed to gain a market share "equal to their innovative contribution" due to the first comer's advantage.