cblum

I had been using several dating apps and had paid subscriptions to all of them. I was getting burned out by the experience and decided to let my subscriptions expire and take a break from dating, so I wasn’t actively checking the apps anymore.

A paid feature of one of the apps I was paying for (Coffee Meets Bagel, for the curious) was that it notified me whenever someone liked my profile. One day I got one of those notifications, checked her profile and arranged a first date.

And now here we are, happily married :)

If you put your heart in it, you learn to communicate effectively under pressure (especially when trying to conquer those 4th stars), tolerate/move-on from each other's mistakes, and control your temper around each other.

We've been recommending the game to every couple we know.

That’s my personal definition of friend, as long as it’s mutual :) The level of intimacy may vary, but if the “being there when needed” component is there then I regard a person as a friend.

I went through a couple of really hard life events during the pandemic, which was already hard enough. It was bitter to find out that some friends weren’t really friends. On the other hand, some people I only regarded as acquaintances turned out to be friends.

The linked post is really impressive. The author went way beyond what I did. I'm especially impressed by the I/O stuff.

The thing is, I don't this happens in isolation. At least not for me. I hate writing documentation because time is not allotted for it. So I have to rush it, and in the process I feel like I'm doing a poor job, which is demoralizing. I'm gonna dread it next time I have to do it.

All because I said China should be regarded by the West as an enemy/hostile state. Hell, it's the one thing I can side with the current administration on.

To me China is not much different than pre-WWII Germany: over-the-top authoritarian, has ambitions to influence the direction of things at the world stage, and is currently scapegoating an ethnic minority and putting them in concentration camps.

That wasn't the first time I tried bringing those things up in a group setting. In other occasions I was only met with awkward silence too. Feels like there's some subtle but insane denial going on.

What new discoveries, specifically?

I grew up in Brazil near the border with Uruguay, and we’d always cross the border to buy our electronics at the duty free stores. It was massively cheaper than buying them in Brazil.

Are duty free stores only present in border areas?

I actually pick up food from local restaurants around me.

I (and many other people) continued to pay my gym membership when they had to close due to the lockdown, to support them during that time.

And so on.

I don't even have the option not to wfh (and even if I had, why would I go to the office and risk unnecessary exposure to the virus?), since my office closed for our safety even before government lockdowns became a thing.

Sacrifice is exactly what people aren't doing and why we're living through this disaster.

The sacrifice we should be looking at is not the risk of catching COVID-19. It's that of following a set of rules that drastically minimize the spread of the disease. Simple rules, by the way.

If everyone had the kind of thinking some (most?) Asian societies have (collective first, individual second), we'd be looking at a much different world right now. I'm thinking mainly of Taiwan.

But no, we have to deal with people throwing tantrums because they can't wear a piece of cloth over their faces.

You would play the lottery with those odds, wouldn't you? But you don't want to play that lottery.

People don't realize how high odds of 1 in a 1000 are until you flip it around like that.

I can relate a lot to this. I'd say my formative reads were:

- 1984 and Brave New World. The former should be mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.

- The Bible. Going from "I was raised Christian" to "I'm gonna read this and ask myself if I really believe this stuff" (I do, but in general I deviate massively from mainstream evangelical Christianity).

- Dune. Yep, profoundly transformative. I'm bummed that some people I've recommend it to don't seem to have had the same experience as I had reading it.

Can you elaborate on that? What does that mean?

Oh yeah. It's the _one_ thing I can agree with them on.

My greatest motivation to learn Forth inside and out is its value in rebuilding civilization if we ever find ourselves in a place where a significant amount of technology has been lost. I don't think there's a more powerful and yet incredibly simple way to bootstrap a general purpose programming environment than writing a Forth. It's a relatively small amount of knowledge that needs to be preserved, compared to all the complexity that would be needed to have compilers, garbage collectors, and all that jazz again.

I mean, that's just my personal take on it.

I posted my project here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 I had an absolute blast working on it, and I'm looking forward to my next Forth-related project (still deciding on what it's going to be).

I was immediately sure it was a compiler bug when I realized I could make the code work correctly if I changed the order of variable declarations. It would happen on something like:

int a; int b; float c;

(again, that's only illustrative - too long ago for me to remember the specifics)

But not with:

int a; float c; int b;

Folks in my team didn't want to believe it at first :)

Edit: found it here - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/17395

Not quite as I described but close.

We've talked over email. Hope my pointers were enough to get you unblocked :)