nexus2045

For me (in BC), around 25-30% and I'm slightly below 100k. The deduction is usually a little more than if you use those online tax calculators.

I had the same problem when it came to “getting a girlfriend” (quoted because it might sound too trivial compared to this current issue, and also because I wanted one for the wrong reasons, which was to seem “normal” to others and stop being “forever alone”).

I was told I was acting too desperate and lacked confidence, to which I countered... how can I not act desperate when I’ve been lonely for so long? (Of course the answer to that is to enjoy being alone/single first, but I was getting huge FOMO and envy during college-age years when everyone else seemed to be in a relationship and I wasn’t). In hindsight, breaking out of a negative feedback loop requires a lot of conscious effort, or else reality becomes a nonstop fulfilling prophecy.

This is one of the most validating discussions I've read in a while. I think of myself as shy, lonely, maybe a little autistic. I grew up very alone as an only child, and would make up games or role play with myself to pass time in the evenings after school.

As I grew older, I had many poor social experiences. I felt that the social sphere was dominated by callous, insensitive jerks who talked louder, or whoever had the wittier comeback when being egged on, and I was hurt many times, and I most likely hurt others as well! I started to resent interactions with most people, thinking that most people aren't well intentioned or are unaware. I didn't want to have small talk or banter, because I was interested in random trivia and deep emotional experiences, which don't have a place in many social situations or seem to interest much people. Obviously I have also found quite a few people who were graceful in this regard, such as the few close friends I still have.

This is very much a description of the modes I operate in! And I get very high levels of engagement with myself. My thoughts actually distract me a lot from real life verbal conversations as well. People think I'm not all there and I don't listen well, but in fact I'm just at a different wavelength and processing speed....

I noticed that even if I cared or judged someone, the one who's wasting time and energy is actually me, and there are no actual effects on the target.

> Suffice it to say that the reality was...significantly poorer than advertised.

So like, the Fyre of coding bootcamps. But still better than Siraj Raval?

I've noticed my friends who are less comfortable with English don't bother with Reddit but they were all on Facebook at some point.

I'm biased as heck because I'm a westernized Chinese, and I am impressed with the rapid development everytime I visit China. In my mind, being pragmatic wins. When I visited SF recently, I was constantly wary of dangers and mentally ill people, though less as I went to Silicon Valley. There is something that feels immediately wrong and backwards that no amount of whataboutism and armchair debates about the harms of authoritarianism can persuade, because I face reality every time I go outside.

A case could be made if you consider that the first part of the word is masculine and inappropriate.

I have a phobia of cockroaches, having grown up in a place where they would appear here and there. I am grossed out by their body's front side especially. I've avoided opening their site in case they put up an actual picture of a cockroach.

I answered yes, even though I suspect I am not clinically depressed and nowhere near the levels of some posters on here.

But compared to the average person, I definitely appear depressed/emo/sad/tired.

And if you were to talk to me in a conversation, I would inevitably drag the conversation (like I am doing now) to be all about my woes, regrets, and how I find living in one of the best first-world cities to be "sad" and lacking of purpose. I will also cynically suggest that everyone else seems so happy and normal, that no one else really has problems. Then you might start to find me off-putting, impolite, condescending, all of which are actually just unwanted side-effects of my symptoms manifesting in social situations; after the conversation ends, I will surely start to ruminate and regret what I said, realizing that I am a PoS for having left a piece of negative energy in the world, and that the world would be better without my negativity. But since everyone in this thread is chiming in about their situation, I feel perfectly at home, because now I don't feel like the odd one out.

Man that is a crazy story. Congratulations on the English, wouldn't second-guess your fluency one bit. But I don't understand how you went through some social catastrophes and still manage to level-up in the rest of your life so well? Please allow me more vague details or in private for such an amazing turnaround.

The reason I ask is because I have been struggling with socializing my whole life. While not autistic, I have lots of shyness and anxiety ever since I was a kid, got a bit bullied in high school, cared too much about what other people thought. Even in my early 30s now this is still a huge problem, because I have become a pretty avoidant person and other people perceive this as lack of initiative, bad work ethic, etc. I also wake up every day replaying any 1 of 100s of bad social experiences in the past, where I said something I shouldn't have impulsively and made things embarassing or awkward, or how I mishandled some friendship.

So its as if I base my whole identity off how well I'm maintaining my personal relationships, literally rewrite Whatsapp messages the more I am not close with someone (should I end the sentence with a period or 'lol'? Is the frequency of these emojis too much? Yeah its that extreme).

When I read your comment, I just get the impression that though you lost all of it, you were able to somehow transform yourself after. How?! If I were in your shoes, I would literally be watching YouTube videos about social skills, and think that "if I can't get this social thing down, I'll never be able to survive at a job". Please break my brain.

This is a pretty interesting comment section to read. I went from Node.js to .NET Core development for about a year, and got the impression that Microsoft had already figured out all the best practices, and shoving it down my throat was for my own good, so I didn’t question whether or not DI was good, as if it was dogmatic. My team thinks the same. I thought DI was pretty much the final conclusion to how software should be architected due to the collective trial-and-error of decades of OOP programmers.

In usual HN fashion, even the most seemingly obviously true points to me are being argued and refuted.

One of the most famous Onryos: Sugawara no Michizane.

From the Wikipedia article:

> Within the abdication of Emperor Uda, Michizane's position became increasingly vulnerable. In 901, through the political maneuverings of his rival, Fujiwara no Tokihira, Michizane was demoted from his aristocratic rank of junior second to a minor official post at Dazaifu, in Kyūshū's Chikuzen Province, and died in exile. After Michizane's death, plague and drought spread and sons of Emperor Daigo died in succession. The Imperial Palace's Great Audience Hall (shishinden) was struck repeatedly by lightning, and the city experienced weeks of rainstorms and floods. Attributing this to the angry spirit of the exiled Sugawara, the imperial court built a Shinto shrine called Kitano Tenman-gū in Kyoto, and dedicated it to him. They posthumously restored his title and office, and struck from the record any mention of his exile. Even this was not enough, and 70 years later Sugawara was deified as Tenjin-sama, a god of sky and storms. Eventually Tenjin evolved into a benign kami of scholarship. Today many Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to him. He became the most notable example of an interesting spiritual transformation: a vengeful Japanese spirit, onryō, is a violent ghost, usually a former aristocrat who was wrongfully killed, and consequently seeking revenge. When well supplicated, however, onryō spirits may willingly convert to goryō, benevolent spirits who can be powerful allies.

That's a lot of coincidence.

But the Han Chinese are the overwhelming majority (92%). They pay lip service to the 56 ethnic minorities but for the most part they are expected to act Chinese or are just tourist attractions. China is not going to have or allow problems like BLM to slow itself down internally.

This is reality... so why is this being downvoted? Too much clashes with the morals of the privileged audience here who mostly grew up in an environment where no cutting corners was needed?

If it makes you feel any better, getting into FAANG is my life goal. Getting in even just once is enough. I'd finally win my own respect, that of my parents, and everyone else (though I'm sure no one really cares). I'm also jaded about programming in general and I know I'm not going to love the work, but at least the FAANG job experience will give you 1) proper credentials to get an interview easier at other jobs if needed and 2) a surefire path to financial independence. I currently work at a small company making around 1/3-1/5 your pay and when monthly expenses eat 60-80% of take home salary, building up wealth just isn't as optimistic. So give yourself a pat on the back.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there's any correlation between how technically smart someone is versus how immune they are to this over the top woke activism/virtue signalling. Works at a different part of the brain I guess. I've always been so puzzled to see extremely competent and productive open source developers who blast identity politics all day long on their Twitter, and I wonder... How can someone so smart be so stupid? Fortunately, they are easy to identify - preferred pronouns, effeminate appearance, infinite compassion for the in-group and total hostility for anyone that's their perceived tribal enemy.

That's the point of this whole thread.

Wholeheartedly agree. Programming is a vague term anyway. Speaking from experience, I could only code basic JavaScript with almost 0 understanding of the more complex fundamentals, but actually build functional SPAs. Repeat that a few years and I've only gotten better at creating apps via programming, but learned little in terms of fundamentals - and so trying to parse some debate on JavaScript would end up going over my head every time.

Pomp Podcast has had some phenomenal guests lately including Chamath Palihapitiya and Mark Cuban. Worth checking out.

Most people are just following orders at their job, where they've got bills to pay. Morals are not so important on the hierarchy of needs. It might not even be something that crosses those worker's minds because of a much different upbringing/education than yours.

Nah you're just on the wrong side of the internet, and formed an opinion based on a misguided recommendation algorithm.

My very elementary (just skimmed some blog posts about it for a few hours this morning [1]) understanding of why Zettelkasten is a game-changer is that: its a system of organizing notes in a bottom-up, atomic fashion, instead of the usual top-down categorization where the notes don't lend itself well to reviewing or linking with concepts you've previously learned. Basically, a graph (where links are bidirectional) instead of a tree. The power of such a system is that it maps closer to how knowledge is stored in our brains, and that the more you use the system, the better benefit from "network effects".

In traditional note-taking systems, the category is the most obvious first-class citizen. In ZK, the little ideas take precedence, because some little idea that belongs to category A can easily end up belonging to other categories B, C, D, ... as time goes on and you study more subjects/discipline.

I'm sure the idea I'm describing is nothing new, groundbreaking, or unique to ZK - but this is the impression that I got, and I've had the pain of having very poorly managed knowledge via Evernote/OneNote/Notion/etc. before. I also dabbled with Anki and mindmapping. I believe the optimal solution is to combine all 3, since mindmaps have the "graph" structure part down; Anki only focuses on recall, but not conceptual understanding/linkage; and traditional notes, while obviously storing more information, are usually organized in hierarchical top-down structures that don't lend themselves well to reviewing or building a deliberate map of knowledge.

Another alternative to mindmaps is something like Jerry's Brain [2], where irrelevant nodes are collapsed until you explore them. Jerry has given extremely compelling presentations because he's used it for something like 20 years.

I am aware of a bias as I write this: I simply might not have had enough discipline when using traditional note-taking systems before, and am going through a bit of a (pre) honeymoon phase with this new ZK stuff. Just my 2 grains of salt.

[1]: https://nateliason.com/blog/roam

[2]: https://www.jerrysbrain.com/

This is a joy-sparking product, as I've been turned off by Anki's UI/UX especially when it comes to code snippets, and I'm very accustomed to Markdown.

Born and raised in HK but don't live/work there, and obviously I can't speak for everyone, but we get brought up in a pretty top-down authoritarian system, with parents/teachers being very stern and unforgiving, so we end up using our smarts to cheat the system at any given opportunity. Autonomy isn't really ingrained into us. Working in the west, I feel that there is more assumed trust and less micromanagement.

Reminds me of a website called All Japanese All The Time, where a guy from America made his environment all Japanese while still in college in Utah (?). TV, kanji posters, Windows language settings, friends,...

As a native Cantonese speaker learning Mandarin since I was 5, you think I'd have some advantage (which I do - vocabulary is largely similar), but I still struggle greatly with communication the more informal it is. Learning from language teachers is almost similar as reading travel phrasebooks - those situations are too forced and not realistic enough. Most communication involves lots of jokes and nuances where the topic isn't even clearly defined, unlike business settings.

I used to be obsessed with many different things during childhood, perhaps because I am an only child and had large chunks of time where I was in my own room, alone, as a child. I would do things like lay out a paper map of a city, and start tracing my fingers along the roads as if I was a bus driver, or pretending I had multiple estates. I would start documenting the statistics of my Pokemon card deck. Take apart my computer. Spend hours trying to create something significant from random Lego blocks. Make songs by humming into a cassette tape recorder. Even invented a language (very short-lived hobby).

Then puberty hit. I became more interested in making sure my hair and clothes were cool enough, so I could fit in, so I could attract my crush. I became much more addicted into the mainstream grooves of video games, such as League of Legends. I lost interest in random obsessions, and instead replaced it with a more artificial one governed by Riot Games or Blizzard, and the digital points/levels that I got in game.

Then I grew up. I am now working as a software developer, but don't even have much obsession for programming at all. I just don't see how someone can get excited about the intracacies of a programming language, because its so dry and boring. And I feel a bit ashamed for not being too interested in hacking together a MVP anymore, even though programming presents such a huge realm of possibility available to anyone at no barrier/cost to entry. Nowadays, whenever I have a slight interest in anything, the capitalistic worldview has polluted my thoughts by always triggering the thought: "but is this a viable business idea? Could I get recognition from others and provide value such that the market would compensate me?"

I would trade anything to get my childhood obsessions back, because I am living mostly like the repetitive 9-5er you describe.

Made me think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem