He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment implies.
I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it.
If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
The funny thing about growing older is that we change, and the things that were once "I'd rather be dead than not do this" just naturally fade away, and other new exciting things take their place.
I say thus not to dampen your enthusiasm, but rather to encourage you to enjoy it to the maximum while it lasts.
Everything has a season and in that season it can seem terribly important. Perhaps an activity, or a favorite sports team, or a group of friends.
Some of that remains forever, some of it gets deferred as other things happen. It's part of life, we grow, we change, the world around us changes.
It's not that the drive is lost, it's just that it manifests in different ways, different activities, different challenges.
When you see a post like yours in 30 years time, remember this moment, and raise a glass :)
I’m going to gently pile on to the sibling comment here, and note that the “hacking” we find interesting should and does change over time. I used to spend time hacking PDP-11 assembly code to make games. That got old, and if I play a game now it’s purchased. The stuff I hack on now is more like applied math.
This is all good and natural, if it’s organic and not growing it’s probably not alive.
Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts) in other people's blogs' comment sections.
Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too — using the "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the people already participating in this existing discussion will understand as contributing to that discussion."
In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because
the statement they're making requires context, and that context is only provided by reading the posts the statement is replying to / commenting on.
Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called a hyperlink that could be used to add context just as well... but what there is not, is any kind of established etiquette that encourages people to do that. (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far more relevant these days...)
Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" / "quote" actions (intended for engaging with the post/comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the post/comment, or with your reply nested under the post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in your new post. I wonder why...
"...but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) ... "
On Usenet, if you were altering the general SUBJECT of a post, you'd reply to a comment BY PREPENDING the NEW TITLE/SUMMARY of your post to the PREVIOUS TITLE of the post to indicate that you HAD changed the GENERAL SUBJECT of the post to something else AND end your NEW TITLE with "Was..." to prefix the previous title, e.g. "Hackintosh is Almost Dead" => "My Changing Hobby Habits Was: Hackintosh is Almost Dead"
On the contrary, I was relating the article to my own experience. The thrust of the article was explaining the end of an age.
I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it is the natural way of things. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh, but don't mourn it.
People are asking how the fact that you make more money now is evidence of that. That's your natural ending, but it's not evidence of a natural ending.
HN community selects for these kinds of posts, in the same way that subreddits like /r/amitheasshole love overwrought girlfriend-is-evil stories.
Most often the highest rated posts on HN are from 40+ year olds who don't discuss the post at hand, they'll post a hyper-specific nostalgic story from their youth on something that is tangentially related to the post.
In fact, the older the better. If your childhood anecdote is from the 70s or 80s you're a god.
Apologies for changing the subject, but aside from real world experience (which I have and am getting at work), is there a resource of similar quality for more intermediate/advanced Python programmers? I always feel like there's a big chunk of the language or stdlib I do not know.
Whenever a new version is released, I read its What's New documentation.
Beyond that, I like to read source code, both for the stdlib and popular third-party packages. This advice generally applies when I'm learning any new language or re-familiarizing myself with one, not just Python.
I really enjoyed Fluent Python a while back as an intermediate book.
Python official docs are not completely horrible, but compared to most other popular languages (Kotlin, Scala, Rust, Go at least), the Python official docs are kind of meh.
I suppose Python docs beat C and C++ which do not have official docs besides the spec. (not counting K&R and Bjarne's books).
Also I guess Javascript does not have official docs (ie MDN is not official)
I have bought this book for every friend learning python for work purposes, really fleshes a lot out that's not taught implicitly. The data model stuff is really useful.
Humble Bundle had some nice collections on Python for many uses. For in general, I remember that Serious Python and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python were both good.
* Practices of the Python Pro (https://www.manning.com/books/practices-of-the-python-pro) — learn to design professional-level, clean, easily maintainable software at scale, includes examples for software development best practices
* Advanced Python Mastery (https://github.com/dabeaz-course/python-mastery) — exercise-driven course on Advanced Python Programming that was battle-tested several hundred times on the corporate-training circuit for more than a decade
That's the point. Try it out for a month, get overwhelmed by your expenses, then cut back as you learn about them. After that month, turn the email notifications off and make a habit of checking the website every day or every so often.
This sounds better in theory than practice. When it comes to apps, I'm a privacy maximalist, turning off all the ad tracking and that I can, and a notification minimalist, turning off every notification that is not something that needs immediate attention or at least action within a short timeframe.
But my settings are changed out from under me constantly. So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets categorized differently in my brain where I think we are naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a false sense of security and the friction is sometimes purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how the same explanation and justification can be used in the opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal thing.
I do still believe that there should be a __legal__ requirement that users must verify and approve any price change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer protection. I do not think it is in the public interest for companies to be able to employ strategies which are intentionally designed to trick the public and/or customers. While I appreciate you laying our your strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions to problematic behaviors.
People usually become Senior Engineers in their late 20s, if not mid 20s. It's the fakest job title in the industry. The majority of Senior Engineers are probably age 28-40 - common ages to have young children.
"Senior" really just means "this person is not straight out of college." It doesn't actually mean senior in the same way that Intel and AMD's "2nm process" technology does not actually correspond to any physical dimension on the die. It just means you have some type of experience.
I was laid of January 2023 and looking back, it was decided in late November/early December. I even remember a managers/CTO-only meeting during an engineering-wide offsite that reeked of secrecy/sketchiness.
All YC and VC-types care about is that the companies they either invest in or are associated with get a fat check from an acquisition or IPO. After that, they can fail for all they care.
More so the latter. Additionally, more and more students assume that getting the college degree is just a requirement for employment and that they don't need to actually learn anything.
I think there are two distinct groups in play here. And, I would argue, always have been.
The first group are out to get the degree. That bit of paper that gets you your first job. After that your job experience gets you the second job, and so on.
This is probably the larger group, and likely most of the material recognises this, and in some cases optimizes for it.
The second much smaller group are people wanting to get educated, in the sense of understanding the root fundamentals. They suck the marrow, determined to explore the nooks and cranies. They never ask "will this be in the exam?" (Ironically this group often do poorly in exams because they're too busy learning.)
Threads like this one happen when one group encounters the other, perhaps for the first time. If your goal is to learn then cheating is only fooling you. If your goal is to pass, well, there are multiple ways to do that.
I'll challenge the point that people who actually want to learn do worse on tests. I've been to two schools for a total of 6 years so far, through 3 different undergraduate degrees with differing students. The people who were interested in the material more than their future job invariably do much better. The kids that just want the job don't try too hard to learn any single thing, they don't learn the fundamentals, they don't learn auxiliaries, they get crushed on exams. Kids who really want to learn go learn those things in their spare time and then crush the exams. There is the occasional student who spends their entire college career learning things outside of the material covered by their courses and then do somewhat poorly on their exams, but almost always those people are just learning the skills to get some other job that doesn't align with their degree title too well. they're just a different kind of job first-gimme paper people, they might make an app, or build a company, but most of them don't even try.
All of these people are fine, regular human beings. But i have literally never experienced a colleague do bad on a test because they were "learning too much". My degrees of experience are computer science, mathematics, and physics though so the people who want to keep learning have to be pretty strong students to make it into the master and doctorate programs they want.
I've definitely gone off and studied the wrong thing and learned a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the test and done poorly on it as a result. Didn't stop me from getting a degree, but skipping ahead a few chapters and learning that instead and then failing a test on the chapters you skipped is what "learning too much" looks like.
When I wanted to learn I’d try to understand the fundamentals. How things interact and get a good understanding of relationships between concepts. When I wanted a good grade I’d drill problems for hours on end till I could flawlessly execute the steps required. Completely different study patterns for different outcomes
I imagine that in some cases they're not exactly wrong. It's become ridiculous with all the credentialing. Between that and the interview process, they might as well just make people take a formal IQ evaluation instead. It'd save a lot of time and money.
People see a lot of corruption and decay in our organizations too. I don't know if corruption has actually increased or not, but how often do we hear about some executive who's failing by every metric getting a pay raise? It's easy for students to justify cheating with stories like that.
This is a trend because it's an incredibly successful business model and most gamers want new content delivered monthly or so. They might not like the company or pricing, but Gaas/live service is popular for a reason.
There's also plenty of new games that are "one and done" outside of patches, probably more than ever.
I know what you mean about BIFL culture. IMHO r/buyitforlife is full of people who clearly seem to be jumping through hoops in order to justify some pretty expensive and overkill purchases they've already got their heart set on.
But that is not the angle I'm thinking from.
I did not see Jansports lasting people ten years when I was in school.
If anything... there's probably some generation gap stuff going on here. $50 Jansports did not typically last people that long when I went to school. But they also made us carry way more heavy-ass books than today I think.
My solution to heavy-ass books was to re-bind individual chapters in 50¢ report covers after paying a copy shop about $2/book to cut out and three-hole punch the pages, and only carry the chapters I was actively using, which easily fit in a vertical messenger bag designed for small laptops.
That's, uh, not exactly universally applicable is it?
Or have they finally quashed the used book market entirely? Most fellow college/uni students valued getting a few bucks back for their books at the end of a semester.
Also this obviously can't work for primary school students who can't destroy their books at will.
Also, more to the point: I suspect that the environmental impact of this "BIFL" leather bag absolutely dwarfs the impact of multiple nylon bags so I did not have some BIFL-y agenda... =)
