tharne

I don't think that's a sidetrack at all. It's unfortunate that the midlife crisis (particularly for men) has been so thoroughly ridiculed by the intellectual classes and the entertainment industry.

It's natural and, I would say, healthy to become more reflective when you come to realize that you've lived more years already than you're going to live in the future.

And having some activities that give meaning and joy to someone just in and of themselves is an important part of living well. Like you, I've found myself bothered by hobbies I put down years before out of a feeling that I wasn't good enough, didn't have the time, etc. Good on you for getting back to both golf and piano!

Lately I've been trying to get away from anything involving a screen outside of work. At the moment I'm spending a lot of time cooking and working on basic repair projects around the house. Once it gets warmer, I'll transition to things like camping, gardening, and fishing. I've also wanted to get into bow hunting, but it's not popular in my area so I haven't found anyone to go with.

The short answer is, "Yes".

The longer answer is that outside of a few niche manufacturers like Framework, System76, or MNT, the trend seems to be away from having a true "personal computer" toward having an iPad-like device that connects to the internet and some sort of app store where you're sold services. It's sad, but I think the era of personal computing is well into its twilight.

You really think more people rage-commenting on clickbait news articles makes the world better? The parent commenter is right. We should be spending our time on the people and relationships near to us in the real world, not junk on Facebook.

There’s nothing to debate. This is the way these folks have been operating for decades. Why change now?

I can’t figure out why there isn’t more mainstream pushback against this sort of research. This seems like the sort of thing where we should move slowly with and debate before just plowing ahead - though I suppose that’s never stopped us before.

With that attitude, it's not shocking you have a retention problem.

I recently started using fastmail and am generally please with it. The only downside is that it's based in Australia, a country who's hatred of privacy would make even the NSA blush.

You can do this with any email. What's your point? The reason for the rise of email providers advertising encrypted email is because PGP is a pain for most people to use and never saw widespread adaption among regular users.

This is a good move, but I think the domain name for Tutanota needs to be simpler still, or at least more English-friendly if they want marketshare in the anglosphere.

I used Tutanota for a bit. Great product,all around better than protonmail from technical and usability standpoint, but I stopped using it.

Why? You don't realize how often you give out your email over the phone or to someone verbally. "Tutanota" is simply way too easy to screw up. Tootanota? Tutanoda? two-ta-what??? Even when there wasn't a struggle passing this along to someone, I'd always be worried that they wrote it down incorrectly.

I know I could get my own domain, but still, the default email should offer a domain that's easy to spell (e.g. proton.me).

You’re presupposing every problem has a nice solution. This is almost certainly false

> 2. Why are 90% of emacs frameworks trying to make it into vi??

A lot of people want the power of emacs without the RSI that so often goes with it :)

> The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs.

They can easily produce enough doctors, they just don't. A couple of reasons for this: schools inflate the amount of education required so they they can make more money and doctors go along with it (and a crazy amount of licensing requirements) to prop wages up by keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.

You could be an ICU nurse with 20+ years of experiences. Want to make a jumpt to becoming a doctor? You have to start ALL the way from the beginning of med school as if you an 23 year-old humanities major who decided to go to med school. Your 2 decades of hands-on medical experience counts for exactly nothing in the eyes of medical schools and certification boards. Does anyone really believe this is a good way to run things?

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

You clearly don't have a deep understanding of what doctors and teachers do.

> If I recall correctly, California has a high amount of welcomed immigration. Would that not continue to balance increase the population even if people leave?

Only up to a point. Immigrants don't want to deal with prohibitively expensive housing any more than anyone else. They may settle in California initially, but a lot of immigrants end up moving to other states with more affordable housing once they get established.

> Surely you all know it bothers a good amount at least some of your colleagues

Quiet switches for the office, clicky switches for home. Not exactly a hard problem to solve :)

Mechanical keyboard user here. Most of us use mechanical keyboards because they're a lot more fun to type on. That's it. Because if you're not having fun, what's the point?

> Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.

If you want a full conversation history then use something like email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a plethora of async options.

Fair enough.

> Name one thing that Python can do that Rust/Julia/Crystal/etc can't

This is honesty very 1990's brained, based on the idea that compute power is expensive and constrained.

All Turing complete languages can theoretically do the same things. That doesn't make them equally useful across all domains.

As long as developer hours are much cheaper than compute hours, we're going to be doing certain types of work in high level scripting languages.

The fact that Rust boosters need to write blogs about why we should all use Rust for use case XYZ is an autmoatic tell that Rust isn't that great for use case XYZ.

Python didn't become the Lingua Franca of Data Science and Analytics because people on Reddit, Hacker News, the blogosphere etc, pushed Python and wrote presuasive pieces on why it was so awesome (there was some of this, but absolutely nothing compared to the cult of Rust). It suceeded becasue it turned out to be a very good tool for that particular job.

I don't know about others on HN, but the constant push for "Write everything in Rust" has really turned me off from the language. I know it's petty, but I now tend to associate Rust with being nagged and harangued.

Most schools now offer free prep classes, and every school library (and public library) has more study materials than you could ever need.

> At least eventually everything will be rewritten in Rust I guess.

This is the new "Year of the Linux Desktop".

> In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.

Great book. I read it after it was so enthusiastically endorsed here on HN. A lot of people said it was worth reading just to take in the excellent technical writing style of Brian Kernighan.

I would offer a strong second to that.

> I still use awk and sed semi regularly. I haven’t used Perl in over a decade.

Same. Awk and Sed are delightful little tools that have aged exceptionally well.

> For a start it doesn't have a decent answer to Perl or Ruby's one-liners.

This is by design. Readability is core to the design and philosophy of python. One liners are cool and fun to write, but trying to decipher someone else's incredibly dense bash or perl one-liner is absolutely awful.

Intellectual junk food like this is exactly why those in academic/PhD circles have lost the trust and respect of most of mainstream society.

You are one of the few people in the world who has a job that allows you to research whatever tricky or interesting problem you want; and you choose to nitpick a childrens' television show?

> Seems more like a distraction from the real issue and evidence of the connection between retail crime and poverty.

Except for the fact that most poor people don't engage in this kind of behavior. And frankly, to imply that people in poverty have no agency is paternalistic to say the least. We all have the capacity to discern right from wrong. If we choose to do bad things to others, that's on us, not anyone or anything else.

> I'm way more afraid of falling homeless and into that spiral of despair than any possible person with a gun.

Said the person who's clearly never had a gun pulled on them.

> It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

It's not dissimilar at all, just significantly faster and now in the hands of anyone with a laptop.