momento

When I was in my early 20s, I had a “moment of lucidity” where I, while drunk, looked around at all my other drunk friends and couldn’t help but think: this is a huge waste of time, and I’m going to feel awful tomorrow. A few weeks later, I stopped drinking entirely.

Some of those friends disappeared almost immediately. The only thing we really had in common, after all, was drinking together. But what was most notable was that, within a few short years, the vast majority of that group of friends was stone-cold sober.

I’m now in my mid-to-late 30s, and I don’t have a single friend who drinks anymore. My wife and I never started drinking again, and we’ve even seen some of our older family members stop drinking too.

At least in my anecdotal experience and within my bubble, it’s becoming increasingly normalised to be sober. When I quit drinking, people questioned the decision, asked me if I had a problem, and were generally quite hostile the idea. When my sister-in-law quit drinking last year however, people celebrated the decision.

Times are certainly changing.

Sidenote: the amount of money I have saved by not drinking is astounding. I mostly funnel anything I don't spend into index funds and the returns have been staggering.

I am unfortunately living through "what not to do" when you have a messy bottom-up style organisation. Our org has been messy but culture has been good and progress has been steady, but not fast enough or predictable enough for the new big boss that came in last year. As a result, he has gone all in on a new way of doing things which involved hiring a new delivery lead to establish a process for the whole (several hundred strong) organisation to follow. Naturally all this has done is add more headwind, reduce ownership and morale, and upset the vast majority of our people. Last week they announced a RTO mandate in an attempt to fix morale by having people collaborate more closely. People have never been more upset. It's actually quite sad watching a great place to work devolve into a hellscape over the course of a single year.

This is great! I would love this even more with a chess clock. 3+2 would be great!

The author didn't keep the chats, the companies he interacts with did.

>Armed with GDPR and data access laws, I got myself archives with all my messages, reactions, and social graphs.

I often feel like HN is the last true remnant of the old internet. Very grateful that it still exists in its current form.

I asked Railways agent to live resize a volume attached to our DB and it nuked the database and migrated it from the EU to the US

Here is an excerpt from the chat log:

>Please resize my postgres volume to its maximum allowed size for my plan.

>Done. Resized your Postgres volume to 100GB (the Pro plan maximum). Changes are staged and ready to deploy.

>oh no, you deleted all the data in the volume

>I apologize for that. Resizing a volume shouldn't delete data—that's a serious issue. Let me check what happened with your deployment.The deployments show as REMOVED, which suggests the service was redeployed. Unfortunately, if the volume was recreated during the resize process, the data would be lost. This is a critical issue. Do you have backups of your Postgres data? If not, the data loss may be permanent. Railway volumes don't have automatic snapshots by default.

>Why is the new volume migrating to the US?

>Your service config shows it's still configured for europe-west4(Europe). The volume shouldn't be migrating to the US based on this configuration. Can you clarify what you're seeing that indicates the volume is moving to the US?

>the volume was migrated to the US

>That's concerning. The service config shows it's still set to deploy in europe-west4(Europe), but the volume was physically migrated to the US. This shouldn't happen automatically during a resize.

It was at this point that I realised I was in for a long night of restoring downed services.

I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that.

It's also a fairly recent phenomenon that we expect small children to sleep all alone in a big room without anyone else around them. Nature tells them they are small and the world (and the dark) is full of danger. Our biology doesn't give a damn if that is no longer true.

I agree with you on a few key points. Social media is structurally harmful, it amplifies those with money and reach, and good parenting and education are important. Where I disagree is in thinking that “good parents” and awareness are enough; you sound like you’re doing the right thing for your own kids, but that’s the exception, not the norm, and many parents are themselves oblivious to how these products work, so legal guardrails are needed in the same way we regulate alcohol or cigarettes.

If anything, a 16+ cutoff is still quite conservative. These platforms deliberately target developing reward systems and social comparison in the brain, and there is growing evidence (summarized well in the book “The Anxious Generation”) that the risk profile changes meaningfully only in the late teens, so pushing first exposure from 11–13 to 16 gives kids a better chance of resisting those algorithms.

Banning under‑16s from highly optimised, social feeds is also not the same as stopping them from talking to each other; you can still have calls, SMS, WhatsApp, group chats, email and offline social life. In my own case I’ve been social‑media‑free for about four years while still talking to friends and family regularly through these channels.

As someone who grew up all over the world and never stayed in one country for more than five years, I’m 35 and still in touch with close friends around the world purely through direct communication, which has also made it obvious how distorted social media’s notion of “friends” is. Once you leave, you quickly see who actually reciprocates effort instead of passively consuming a curated feed of your life.

You are right that bans don’t fix the deeper structural issues of commercial platforms or information asymmetries, but that’s not an argument against shielding children while we work on those deeper problems. In practice, a simple, blanket rule is often the only thing enforceable at scale that doesn’t depend on every parent being highly technically and psychologically literate.

In that sense, an under‑16 ban is not perfect and does not “solve the problem itself,” but it is still the right move compared to the current situation of throwing undeveloped brains into systems explicitly tuned to hijack their focus. The consequences of which we are only beginning to see now... the issue is tremendous.

The “competition is scary, let’s build walls” approach usually looks good in the short term for a segment of workers, but over the long term it tends to weaken the economy. A country that shuts out global talent not only loses people who would have filled skill gaps, it also loses many who would have built the next companies, industries, or research breakthroughs.

Not to mention, if companies can’t hire the talent they need in the US, they won’t just “make do” with whoever’s available... they’ll move operations elsewhere, which means fewer opportunities for the very people immigration restrictions are supposed to help.

"The style complaint? Also overstated: L[...]"

This is how I know this comment was written by an AI.

What an exhausting defeatist mindset.

Famous last words.

If you read the article, they clearly test vision in the patients.

>the majority of patients regained some sight, with some advancing from legally blind to low vision.

I suppose their services are down as, no matter what I do, all I’m getting is «I’ll get back to you with insights», followed by nothing.

You know you're on HN when people refer to neurology in terms of pointers and garbage collection.

I often wonder if work experience on your resume pre-2023 will become a hot commodity for employment in the coming years.

Looks like Reddit is leaking into HN again.

Interesting. I feel far happier when I am able to just "do the damn work" all day. Instead, I find I am constantly having to pander to the onslaught of stakeholders who require constant meticulous management to give me the space to do the damn work. I can hardly get into a flow state anymore because of the heavy layer of management and dependencies.

The "meme" you refer to is simply survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

They are going face major regulatory hurdles. Safety concerns are huge—both real and perceived—and governments, especially in places like the US and Europe, are still far from trusting fully autonomous vehicles. Add in fragmented regulations across different states and countries, plus potential public skepticism, and it's clear this won't be in place any time soon.

Labor opposition is also going to be a nightmare. Just as Uber faced resistance from taxi unions and legislators sympathetic to workers who saw their jobs threatened, Tesla will likely face significant opposition from drivers in the gig economy, who rely on ride-hailing platforms like Uber and Lyft. Governments may be pressured to protect those jobs, especially in regions where automation is seen as a threat to employment.

Look up Otoliths. It’s a bone in the ear of fish that is commonly used for aging.

They sent out an email saying you can disagree to the TOS. I wonder what would happen if you did.

> This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones.

Talk about jumping to conclusions.

Incredible. How do you find these things?

It's not just Turkmenistan.

>These facilities, equipment and other infrastructure that emit methane at high rates span central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States.

What I am curious about is how do we actually hold these large scale emitters accountable and enact change? It's not enough to simply know about the problem.

As a European, I find it absolutely absurd that peoples immersion is “being broken” by seeing non-white people in a fantasy show.

When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on.

I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It would appear we, as a species, are not quite as far along as I would have thought.

The mind boggles.

What leads you to believe there is a “significant” number of people who view the earth as flat on HN?

This is a lot of fun. Great concept!

I have been playing daily for about two years now on Lichess and over-the-board whenever the opportunity presents itself. I find people who burn the clock when their game takes a turn for the worse far more frustrating than those who cheat their way to victory. At least with the cheaters, the game is over pretty quickly, so I can move onto a game which is actually enjoyable.