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at the moment the comment immediately below this is advising folks to find an internship, and in many ways that's what you're describing - a role with a limited timeline and a low minimum bar, but within which some people will be able to demonstrate abilities and promise far beyond that minimum.

It's reasonable, but it doesn't always work out. One of the larger heartbreaks of my professional mentorship time was bringing in someone who seemed like they could be a "diamond in the rough" but was just unable to ever quite pull it together. Watching this person's limited successes and repeated failures and their understandable, almost always mature emotional responses, and being unable to help them get over the hump was pretty frustrating for all parties involved. I also think it was short-term bad for my career: I felt judged for putting so much energy into someone who wasn't quite working out, and I don't think that opened any doors for me personally.

So - it's still a risk! What I think is that when it works it's great, but the people doing the hiring, evaluation, and training are still taking a fairly time-and-resource intensive risk, and when it doesn't work it's no fun at all. Gives me a lot more sympathy for folks who take the safe route.

Maybe there's a paraphrase of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" along the lines of, nobody ever gets dinged in performance review or passed over for promotion if they only hire candidates who can sail through whiteboard-algorithms questions.

Of the things you listed, tap water is highly variable across the US; no city or region would be representative of the rest.

Evidation Health | software / signal processing / data / analysis / QA / project mgmg / product management | Santa Barbara, Bay Area, and REMOTE | Full-time

Evidation Health runs distributed virtual health care studies in partnership with research, government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations. We're a mission driven company aiming to use technology to improve health-outcomes for everyone. Evidation has existed for 7+ years, but I think uniquely in our current moment it's very obvious the kinds of projects that can be tackled with distributed virtual health care studies.

Please see all listings at: https://evidation.com/careers/

Note that nearly all of them are looking for some level of existing experience, we are largely not interviewing jr. candidates at this time.

What if i'm walking or bicycling? I still don't want to be blinded.

I agree -- i think in general putting someone a bit on their own, whether they're the first employee of the co. or department, or the only person assigned to a substantial project, is going to make their approach, competencies, and weaknesses clear.

Unfortunately in my experience this often takes more than a couple days to shake out, so it doesn't help in interview / recruiting.

I would also add that Santa Barbara generally has some of the most delicious air i've experienced in a place that still has restaurants, stores, jobs, etc. It surely gets worse with proximity-to and volume-of car traffic but overall the air quality here vs. other places i've lived is noteworthy[0]. (0: except when there's fires.)

I've used credit karma for the last 2 or 3 years - it's very easy if your taxes are simple (e.g. a job change mid-year, a spouse, itemized deductible, all very easy). It was even ok when my taxes included some weird forms last year because a previous employer was sold and my options were worth a few k - had to figure out where to enter things, but i paid roughly the amount of taxes i expected to so i assumed i filled out karma credit's app correctly.

Overall i think CreditKarma is fine if you don't mind that you're sharing data with a company that would love to middleman you into signing up for a new credit card or something. I find their emails pretty easy to ignore and it's felt like a fair trade thus far, though I may look into the IRS offerings this spring and see what else is available.

edit: in California.

yes! there's a couple dozen tech companies in the area, but there's a large demographic of byo$$. happy to connect via other channels if you want a longer discussion.

It's kind of an open secret that the city of Santa Barbara (CA, US) has banned several forms of public outdoor advertising: we have no billboards, no promotional posters, no taxi toppers... It's delightful, and very high on my list of reasons why I enjoy living here. Every time I leave I'm reminded how noisy space is when it's filled with advertisements. I wholeheartedly recommend others advocate for similar policies in their municipality - it can be done!

agree for exactly the reasons above. the internship i did helped me understand so many things, from version control and unit testing to larger / longer-lived codebases, to the interpersonal dynamics of corporate settings... To this day I feel like I went through a relatively strong CS undergrad based on what I learned there vs. what my coworkers report having learned, but I also learned just as much via internships as I did in school.

I recall that OSX used to let me select which updates, and I was always happy to explicitly allow security updates while skipping the latest versions of all the things i don't use, and also skipping unwanted OS upgrades. IMO the worst thing they did for security was making it impossible to distinguish between security patches, Garage Band releases, and UX changes.

as others have said there's many donation based retreats available.

I can also offer a rough line-item of where money goes, on retreat that have a sticker price:

1.) Cost. Many communities don't have their own retreat facilities and are thus basically booking room and board at a venue. Every venue has different amenities, costs, and profit models, but even a retreat site that operates at low margins as a gift, where retreatants share rooms and do substantial amounts of their own cooking and cleaning, even that is easily going to top $50 per person per day, while having a basically "resort-ish" experience where the group has single rooms and very little chores can approach $200 per day (in California).

2.) Back into the community who volunteered to organize it. There's probably 100-200+ labor hours behind every retreat, which is done in part so the teachings and practice can flourish, but is also motivated by the need to keep paying rent and other expenses on the community's primary practice and meeting space.

3.) To subsidize others. I think the teacher or leader of almost anything typically pays a reduced rate or nothing in recognition for their skill and leadership. Additionally it's not uncommon for part of the "profit" from retreats to be rolled into a scholarship funds for those whose ability to contribute is less than the bottom line costs, when the amount from donations doesn't match the need.

Also, Buddhism, and even more so mindfulness isn't necessarily concerned with conforming to our ideas of minimalist or anti-materialistic. While it's true that renunciation is often presented as part of the Buddhist path, retreats meet people where they are in their readiness to leave their comforts behind. A 5 - 14 day retreat might offer such comforts as the presence of a swimming pool or lounge furniture during break times so that people don't feel like they've joined monastic boot camp. There's many different things that get called "meditation retreat" and generally they're each well suited for different people at different times.

I recently got the same phone! Mine doesn't crash, but what amazes me is how slow it is -- The flip phone(s) from circa '05-'08 that I had been using weren't fast, but this Alcatel / KaiOS feels like it's running an interpreter in a virtual machine and waiting for network roundtrips on every keystroke ... I mean i'm exaggerating but the lag for all my actions is a real bummer.

Evidation Health | Santa Barbara, SF, San Mateo | Full time and Interns | ONSITE or REMOTE | https://evidation.com/careers/

Evidation runs health studies combining digital data with traditional markers. In addition we run a "why don't you build some good habits" consumer app.

It's an exciting place to be: we work with companies you've heard of to do research you'll hear of. Additionally the company really does only pursue business opportunities that it thinks lead to better health outcomes, so I don't have to worry (much) about all our data being used for advertising or worse. There's a strong culture around privacy, security, and only using data as consented.

As listed on the careers page we have openings on all teams and for all offices, but I'm specifically leading a small team of Rails backend engineers in Santa Barbara who work on "bridge" services that talk to 3rd party APIs, primarily for data ingestion. I'd love to talk to someone with 2+ years of backend experience in or interested in relocating to Santa Barbara. The company in general is very remote friendly and I'd consider adding remote to this team for the right candidate, but more likely at this time a remote Rails engineer would fit in best on one of our other Rails backend teams.

I'm happy to field and route general inquiries about other roles and teams, but again especially looking for a Rails engineer who'd enjoy working on critical data ingestion and related services. jkimmel at evidation dot com

Given the frequency of articles from citylab and similar i tend to assume HN has a lot of cyclists. And given that it's HN, a lot of people who pin a large part of their lives, earning potential, and identity on their smarts, and thus who fear traumatic head injury.

I'll agree with you though -- I too tend to assume that everything on the internet is an advertisement.

I come back a lot to the parable of "who's to say what's good or bad?" (one telling of which can be found here: https://thepowerofthrift.com/whos-to-say-whats-good-or-bad/ )

My more specific take: As a human of generally European-ish descent born in the United States, the wave of extinctions that gave land-dominance to mammals, the likely genocide of closely related hominids by the homo-sapiens, the ecological changes putatively caused by the first wave of human occupants including all the extinctions of large land animals on this continent, the subsequent genocide of the first human occupants, the conflicts and wars that caused my ancestors to emigrate, ... those were all necessary conditions for the exact experiences I've had in my life.

I'm not saying I support genocide! (my ancestors are mostly all Jewish.) I'm just saying that the farther something is in the past, the more it just seems like a fact of history, no matter how miserable and wrenching it was for all the organisms that lived through it.

We have no way of knowing what we're really creating, and it may well be that we're creating a hundred thousand years of extinctions and inhospitable weather which will be more difficult to live through for our descendants than the conditions we were born into. We may be radically shrinking our own natural habitat. We may be paving the way for a different dominant organism. We may be living in an era that future humans will give as much thought to as we give to the years 1000-1100 C.E. Who knows! and in the long game, the thousands and millions of years perspective, who's to say what's good or bad?

The article points to housing as one of the largest factors of raising a child, and mentions healthcare as well.

To my very limited understanding, we calculate inflation from some fixed [per comments below: not entirely fixed] index of consumer goods prices [per comments below: which include some notional aggregate of rent].

Is it possible that instead of saying "The cost of children, housing, healthcare, and education have risen sharply" we should instead be saying "Inflation has increased substantially more than previously calculated because the price of a loaf of bread has been fixed by subsidies"?

Are you saying that "high" COL means a house costs $500k? in my limited experience, you're off by 1.5-3x.

The house I spent my teenaged years in was purchased for less than 100k and will still sell today for less than 100k. I think my mom would get her money back, and maybe some appreciation, but the sale price of that home will reflect the dwindling economy of the town and region it's in.

In contrast, the house for sale a quarter mile from my current apartment is listed at 2.4 million. It's a little bit larger than my mom's, but the plot of land is probably a little smaller (big house, small yard vs. post WW2 development full of ranch houses with yards big enough for kids to run around and play in).

The town my mom's in isn't a food desert, but I can get an order of magnitude more variety of produce, substantially fresher (for most of year -- during the local late summer and harvest season she can get fresh, local, cheap produce).

And similarly, the town my mom still lives in isn't a dead economy, but there's no way i'm getting a tech job with an office within bicycling distance of her house, whereas from my current apartment i can bicycle to a few dozen local technology employers.

Also I'm currently willing to pay a premium for good weather.

One of the things the article names is the challenges caused by snow, ice, etc. I realize I'm in the minority, but I actually think there's lots of conditions that we shouldn't be driving in -- conditions where the obscured lines of sight, slipperiness of the road, etc, actually mean that we should either be off the road entirely, or traveling at speeds far far below normal. I know this happens, but I honestly believe that it should be far more common -- so common that it would likely take a chunk out of the economy.

For instance you're driving on the freeway and it starts to rain -- can you really reduce your speed, and/or leave an extra "car length" between the car in front of you, so that you'll still have time to stop if needed? In my experience, no one else wants to slow down, so it's safer for me to keep up with the slowest traffic than to go what I would now deem a safe speed.

I have an antique samsung flip-phone from sometime in the 2006-08 years. My carrier is T-mobile.

I had one that I used until it was really dying a couple years ago (growing blob of dead pixels in the middle of the screen, declining battery life), which I commented on during a visit home, to which my mom replied, "wait! i have the exact same phone in a drawer somewhere" ... so now i'm still using it, just, the one that she held onto for some reason.

The comments about dropped calls are true -- my phone has gotten progressively worse at being a phone in the last couple years. I wasn't sure whether it was hardware degradation or what, but I trust folks on this thread are more knowledgeable than I am and are correct that it's due to networks being phased out. To be honest I have no idea which 'G' my phone uses.

Pros: - battery lasts for most of a week between charges - is not distracting at all - I don't feel bad when I drop it - the alarm-clock feature works - most people are very kind about giving me directions if i get lost and ask them for help, after they hesitate and say "... can't you look it up on your phone?"

Cons: - not all text messages reach me - I have to manually delete texts as the phone only wants to store 30 texts at a time. - some phone conversations include redialing a few times - I don't have a camera in my pocket - I don't have a GPS in my pocket - My current employer had to buy me a cheap (no sim card / no linked google account) smartphone anyhow for 2FA apps! - distraction is more of a general habit -- i still waste plenty of my own time browsing the internet on a laptop.

I think you show that the intervention you're interested in performs not just above a passive control, but above an active control that may itself plausibly have an impact. So rather than a control that does nothing, you have a control group that does some other intervention. Of course there's still pitfalls, but my understanding is that trials showing positive effects vs. "active control" groups are often considered stronger evidence.

no matter my fitness level i've always been one of the sweatiest people i've ever met. Hasn't stopped me from cycling, and i'll echo the above sentiments: i feel more awake when i get to work and better for the rest of the day if i bike to work. I do take steps to make sure I don't smell: shower either immediately before leaving, or even better immediately on arriving when work has a shower onsite.

Dawa Tarchin Phillips -- he teaches mindfulness and leadership skills in schools and around the world.

I logged into my HN account for the first time in months just to upvote and add my agreement

I think the original grant (4-year vesting etc) must have been for around 1,000 shares. and I joined pre-IPO. but I agree it was not a large grant, even for an entry-level position. Nonetheless it's the only one I've gotten that's worth anything right now!

good - so the numbers make more sense if they have three orders of magnitude more shares than i guessed above. Thank you!

I agree that I must have misunderstood the reporting of the numbers of shares. the numbers i'm sure of are the rough number of options that i had vested after 1+ year.

Meditation -

I wouldn't say I've mastered it, but after 4+ years of study and practice including several 5-7 day retreats I can honestly say I'm far more emotionally balanced, calmer, happier, more insightful, more confident and comfortable in my own skin, better at dealing with setbacks and difficulties, ...

There's many things that call themselves meditation and as far as I can tell the majority of them are legit. I'd advocate picking one large and well established school / method and sticking with it for a few years rather than attempting a breadth-first search of the space or going into some niche branch that really just has one charismatic instructor.

I had one of those too!

I once joined a company that already had several hundred employees as an entry level software engineer. It was my least favorite job: I couldn't find a fit and I only lasted just over a year. However, during that year they IPO'd, and because I made it over the vesting cliff I was able to buy my options on my way out.

Ballpark numbers: I had 300 options at $5. post-IPO price was around $15. I did the "sell to buy" thing, so I sold roughly 100 shares to pay for buying all 300. I haven't sold the other ones yet but the stock is north of $50/share. It seems like there's less than 20k shares total in circulation. (that's like an order of magnitude less than I expected? I took "shares held(000s)" and divided by "% Own", and rounded.)

I have the impression that most of the "old-timer" employees did quite well as long as they sold their stocks at the right time: one guy spent 6+ months traveling and then took his time finding his next job, another guy thinks he might be able to retire in his '40s.

edit: as elsewhere in this thread, I also worked at a startup that failed ($0), and I've left a couple that to my knowledge are still going ($ -4k , because both times i bought options on my way out just in case they make it)