johnnujler

Why would you want to talk about how each individual is multi-faceted, complex, and full of contradictory beliefs when you can conveniently categorize them into conventional and independent? Ah, I know the answer: because hackers come in only one flavor: independent; and everyone else who doesn't fit the description is a conventional thinker.

The level of (apparent) profundity(?) in these essays and the amount of people in SV that revere his words just boggles my mind. Maybe I am a conventional thinker :/.

I am genuinely curious to know more about this. Some of these companies dedicate multiple teams towards an OSS project, which I’ve seen first hand with projects like llvm. So isn’t it possible that the involvement of these companies could actually systemically turn things as most of the people working would be their employees and that the scales could be manipulated easily by these companies(need not be intentional). For example I remember “std::string_view” in c++ being one example which Google pushed and even got into the C++17 standards despite its bad design. Although I might be wrong, but my guess here is that Google had a use for it(which we know it had) and that lot of people on the standards committee being from Google led to a systemic bias. Couldn’t that happen with Rust?

Great thing but I feel these companies are just too clever for Rust. Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee. Or take the example of Web, made worse after the Googles and the Apples of the world got in.

So I have mixed feelings about too many clever people doing too many clever things to an awesome language.

The best way to be safe is to fail loud and clear, and definitely do not surprise your users who only use the api and don’t actually read the source code or how it is implemented.

Really love the intent there. Great stuff.

To the west India is nothing but a cheap labor centre that is here for the service of the west with its thick accent and bad tech support. It’s difficult to change it, and you see it even persist in popular culture with the likes of Tim Ferriss glorifying this culture with books like “The four hour work week” asking people to outsource the trivial stuff to countries like India. Accuse them of it and they will evasively mollify the situation by talking about the rich culture(while thinking derisive thoughts about the ever-growing population) and yoga/meditation(while mentally smirking about how insignificant a contribution it is compared to their own). Nothing will change until we change fundamentally in our approach to viewing people.

Now is the time HN. We need a decentralised YouTube alternate.

There is an underlying assumption here. You seem to be running with the theme of making the review process more objective without considering the psychological aspects of being a human. As much as an employee’s productivity depends on how talented, hardworking, and skilled they are, it also depends upon how stress-free the environment is; with the conventional review process I had to worry only once per year of the “recency” bias, but with this I now have to constantly be on-guard about not upsetting anyone otherwise it will be a blackmark on my career. Plus the additional reckless usage that could happen as a result of anonymity and instant feedback. For eg. Think of a sick employee(who is not open abt their sickness) or a new joinee that is taking more time than usual to ramp up(within the probationary period) or any two employees with bad interpersonal relationships. This constant worry of who is thinking what abt me can make the office a pressure cooker of sorts.

Feedbacks are good. I am not saying they aren’t, but when you are designing a system that deals with organisational productivity I expect it to be a thoroughly designed system that covers most of flaws of the previous system if not all. It seems to me that by focusing only on recency bias and instant feedback, you are making way for more such people to run with a single idea without catering to the potential side-effects that could arise as a result of your implementation such as immense pressure of having to constantly put on mask for everyone around you, be on-guard 8 x 7. And as the saying in the medical field goes “even if you do no good, try to do no harm”, but I feel it(the anonymous + instant + peer review process) has multiplicative prospect of damaging the employee’s mental well being in the long run.

This is not meant as a denigratory remark, but I feel this will make mine and many others' life even more miserable than what it already is. People like poking around, especially if you are a manager who manages (only) people, please don't incentivize such behavior.

Think about the second-order effects. The stress it can cause people if they have to constantly be onguard for what is to come? Think about situations in which people can misuse this to mask every little thing out of grudge and dislike as part of feedback/review/criticism, resulting in a more stressful job environment.

Please think about incentivising employees to work better and stressfree instead of a top-down fear mongering tool.

I know a lot of people including my dad and several of his friends who picked up music and programming after retiring from their 30 year old accounting job at the age of 62. Also many people like to term this as an exception rather than rule, but know that it is not. My observation has been that people who lack the motivation are either the ones who are constantly stressed with their job and life, or who are content with what they know.

Take some time off from work, meditate, be idle. Your mind will automatically want to do something that is productive. Most of these researches are averaged out observations which say no more about your ideal bp than I can by looking at you. So please learn all you want and please don't base your decision to learn new things based on a generic research result. And no MIT is not an authority on your life. If you really want to know your brain health, go get an fmri, but please don't let your desire to learn be dictated by what others say.

> “By navigating this website, you agree to our privacy policy”

Where is the consent button? And what in the actual ef? What should one do if they click before your pop-up appears? Or click directly on a link from outside of your website? Please change it and don’t put your audience in a lose-lose.

It is indeed a way to overcome the "well known psychological phenomenon", and also I wouldn't call reading or playing piano as non-instinctive or for that matter a "utopian enlightened state". My retort was more towards the mischaracterization of a pithy quote.

Did you note that the OP said it is a well known psychological phenomenon and not some utopian enlightened state that most of us can only aspire to attain?

And fwiw, Schopenhauer knew about Buddhism very well and talks about it in length in his essays on pessimism. What he means by attachment here is in fact, the Buddhist equivalent of craving. What you own can add to your vanity, but it is what you do not have or are longing for(in this case more money) that shows your true inclination, which Schopenhauer describes as worth. It does not mean that money has no worth, it means that the money that you already own has way less worth than what you don't. Aphorisms are pithy for a precise reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That is a category mistake, we need a better word for creating a niche, and it should definitely not be called competition. If we start looking at it that way then literally everything can be framed as competition. I mean you can reframe the intention to not compete with others as a competition for being least competitive. We need to separate esoteric and eccentric attempts at innovation and invention(which would include entering the niche market and offering something different) from the mainstream fish market.

It took humans thousands of years to adapt to the side-effects of the agricultural(Neolithic) revolution (https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...). I think we are in a similar situation—psychological revolution?—where the side-effects due to social media, globalization, and other related phenomenons are starting to change the landscape. My guess is we will soon see that the plateau we have attained in the form of psychological disorders will slowly fade away in couple more generations as people start adapting to this kind of stress. Maybe our generation is evolution's transition point? At least I hope that it is, I've never seen this at this level of intensity with my grandparents'/parents' generation and I do not want to see this with the next generation.

> Now then, isn't that nicer? (editorial) Build programs that do something cool rather than programs which flex the language's syntax. Syntax -- who cares?

I never really got to a point of learning Haskell or Lisp up until recently, it was always this --- I can do everything with C/C++/Java/Python and I could. But the thing is it is only after learning lisp that I really got the hang of thinking in top down manner(recursively), or for that matter it took Haskell to teach me composition intuitively, which then could be extended to my main language(C++). I understand that syntax doesn't matter much, but fwiw I still think in terms of lisp syntax when writing recursive code in C++/C. So yeah, take that for you will.

Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it.

I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)

Cute!

How do you say you don’t like a video/post/tweet without reading/watching those videos/posts/tweets?

Yes there’s a lot more academic fields than the “hard” sciences and vocational stuff, add them to the list too. That was not a treatise on teachability/learnability of a subject.

I seriously didn’t get your point, you thought of being sarcastic and bitter because I ranted about how I disliked VCs and Productivity gurus? Thanks, got your point, be well.

This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.

Remember, it doesn't matter if you've survived 100 Chernobyls, 50 Tsunamis or 20 Covids, all it takes is one bad one to wipe you out of the gene pool(kill). The worse is called worse precisely because it did not happen until then. Yes, testing helps but only when you know what to test, a hastily designed system where the workers are put under pressure and made to ssh into a fleet(See: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376) to fix bugs, is not a mere matter of testing. It is a matter of culture, autonomy, prudence, care, and add other things that would help build a well-designed system from ground up.

Wow...I always thought software development in the automotive field was superior in terms of care, precision etc to that of an average software company. Now I can without doubt tell the stack and the codebase in the organization that I work is far more robust and carefully done.

If there is anything that I realized after reading so many (apparent) researches on dietary habits, sleep cycle, exercise, and whatnot is that you are unique and you do what works for you. Most of these are just average(as in expected value) results that are extrapolated out of a superficial survey, which they call study; and some of these are outright bad. Yes, there are general heuristics like being disciplined with your time and effort which if followed can be beneficial, but most of us will have to go through the suffering to discover that; and fwiw, you'll eventually discover that on your as you age and see that your (unrealized) slothfulness, carelessness and temptation is harming you more than you think they are.

I use to work at a seed stage startup, where I had to grind out days together without sleeping and eating, because of which I suffered from severe health issues mostly lifestyle related. I browsed through every blog, every paper, every podcast and youtube videos I could get my hands on --- tried all of them over a period of 2.5 years to a deteriorating health and increased stress. Luckily 2 years ago, I went to a Vipasana silent meditation retreat, where for 10 days you eat on time, sleep on time(9pm), wake up on time(4:30am), and meditate rest of the time. I don't how that retreat itself helped me, but I somehow managed to adhere to that schedule for 2 years now and I feel better than ever.

NB: I don't meditate all day, but I meditate 1 hour every day while also maintain my eating habits and sleeping habits.

I have a strong feeling that it is not an either/or situation. In the ladder of unknown, if spirituality is the first step, religion is the final. And I am seeing a huge increase in spirituality in developed and wealthy countries. It is as if you drop the current one only to eventually create/adopt a new one. For all we know it could be a variant of science the way people are appealing to scientists as high priests. It seems to me that it is too complex a phenomenon to categorise based on the average proportion at any given point in time.

Adam Smith has this wonderful quote on why it is difficult to model humans and societies in the theory of moral sentiments, which I feel holds even today:

> The man of the system. seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.

My advice would be to create your own echo chamber, not the bad ideologically biased one, but the one that helps you put yourself and your work out there while being able to stay updated on the developments within the community. I feel that twitter is a far better platform to learn than quora, reddit, and what not because of its mainstream nature and authenticity where you can interact with real experts without falling into the linkedin trap(networking for the sake of it and spamming people). The only thing is you will have to excercise at least a little bit of caution and restraint on the side of meandering around mindlessly.

That day when no wants to put any effort into anything will be a fun day in the history of mankind.

Hmmm... Btw that was a joke to showcase the universality of trade-offs. And the idea that you do you and with that comes the responsibility to bear the consequences. Anyway be well.

Withdraw unto yourself and your immediate/close community.

Seriously, who are these people who believe that sales alone can fix everything or building a great product alone can change their life? Everyone, and I mean literally every human being I have interacted with on this topic have assured me of the difficulty, complexity, and multifaceted-ness, of what it takes to get something going from ideation to profit, either through their fear of stepping into this territory of entrepreneurship or through their experience. And anyone who has been an entrepreneur or at least has tested the water will definitely have some sort of intuition for what it takes. If people still rely on a single factor, either they are one of those fraudulent aholes or the asocial nerds who should improve their sales skills(or hire someone who has the required skills). Never understood people taking about the multivariate and complex nature of life. It is complex and multivariate; and everyone knows it.

I sometimes feel very uncomfortable reading such stories, especially when the person in the story is a legendary mathematician. It is as if my mediocrity is afraid of their excellence.

Maybe this is why we have so few Terry Taos and Ed Wittens, idolatry aside, there is a kind of fear that lurks inside of most people. Realising which the average joe distances himself more instead of striving to attain his full potential.

All true! But to invoke a common ground here, most people put up a lenient license in the beginning thinking I will attract some attention and if things pick up I will create a product(or some serious library) out of it, make money, while leaving the core as is. But when it surprises them they are not ready for it(which is pretty much all of us). In fact, if I were to guess the OP would have just dropped the original project if it were not for the pacing provided by the Tailwind CSS team. The thing is for most of us personal projects are a way to express our autonomy where you do what you like and want instead of being constrained by some guy telling what you can do, which tools you can use, what features should go in etc, which is the case with most jobs; this autonomy allows you to walk away from your project any time and when that autonomy is played with by anyone who you did not originally see as an ally it can be upsetting. Tbh, it would be naive to think that OSS is still an altruistic movement, maybe some still go by that, but the commoditisation with GitHub becoming your Resume has only made it a more selfish endeavour.

Actually I agree with you and it doesn’t make sense to rant and pity oneself on the Internet, but I think this is a natural consequence of what is being made of OSS in general.