It's very short and not at all in-depth, but this was my favorite comment. It was one of the greatest troll shutdowns I've ever seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
In that thread the pg - cperciva exchange is exemplary. cperciva is concise and blunt, someone else suggests softening his delivery, and pg replies "actually, if someone is wrong about math you probably should tell him so."
The best part is, he ended up being justified in his self confidence. He was talking about his company Tarsnap, which still seems to be going strong 13 years later, and now has Stripe as a customer.
Dammit, now feel like a complete idiot for my mess of a bash script that creates symlinks all over the place. I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning.
For me, it's this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.
The comment is interesting because it's such an exception. This community is almost fatally optimistic and has blind spots where skepticism and criticism could be. Our website should have the X-files "I want to believe" poster as the HTML background.
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.
One of the things I look for when getting into a new venture, investment, etc is that most people don’t understand how it would succeed. If I have a deep, realistic understanding of how it will work, that’s all I need. Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does, but you know they will all see your reality as the truth with time.
> Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does
Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.
Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.
So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.
Another way to think about it is that no product is ubiquitously liked by the entire population. One important part of developing a new product is figuring out who your target audience is. Their feedback is likely relevant to you, but the feedback from someone who'd never use it anyway can probably be taken with a grain of salt. It's very common for people to think that, for something to be successful, everyone must appreciate it. However, that's not true. For instance, there are lots of things I don't see the point of (like tiktok or instagram); yet, they're very successful products. I'm just not the target audience.
That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.
In defense of the commenter, there’s a follow up the next day acknowledging Drew’s points and wishing him the best luck. I had always read the first comment only.
Predates HN, but the famous Slashdot review of the first iPod is one of those “moments in history” events when nobody really had any inkling of the coming change
Like "640k is enough for everybody", the iPod review isn't as bad as it seems in retrospect. It's a review of the first version of the iPod, which was Mac only and actually wasn't a great product yet. It was a few years and 2 versions later that they had a design breakthrough and started selling a lot of units. I don't think a reviewer should get dragged for not knowing that a product would be vastly improved a few versions later.
I think there's some comments from me here or on reddit (can't recall) where I'm telling the founders of github that their idea is stupid. I underestimated the needs of the open source community, but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
> I still don't understand why it's such a successful business
From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.
- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).
- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.
- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do
-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.
- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.
>but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.
I get the idea of SaaS version control I just didn't see how they would be competitive. It wasn't virgin territory. I also thought got would lose to Mercurial.
There are a confluence of factors behind Mercurial's and svn's losses for git to emerge as the dominant SCM tool.
I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
Yeah, I read the bestcomments on the weekend, to see what I may have missed in the last week. But I've no idea what the time frame those are under. Having a selectable time frame would be nice. Like, not just: past week, past month, past year, etc. But more like oct/2013-dec/2013, though that would not be as 'clean'.
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
Thanks for sharing this. Right now I'm burnt out beyond words, having delivered a phase of a huge project, followed by upper management actions that make me feel extremely devalued and dehumanized.
I've already written a list of personal development tasks for the three weeks' leave ahead - I need to up-skill, then find a new employer - which I'll restructure into little wins.
Take a break, you must. I know it always feels like you can’t, but you can’t keep working, you will snap.
Programmers are hard to replace, it hard to find a good one, and it takes time to ramp up a new one with a codebase. You have more negotiating power than you think.
Your comment struck me because I have been in that position before, and I know it really really hurts. But you gotta look out for yourself. Please take a week or two off
For a second I thought I wrote this comment, then I realized I didn't, but it's just so familiar.
The burnt out feeling is coming mainly from the feeling of how much prep is required to switch jobs even. I'm just hoping the promotion actually comes through and I don't need to but at the same time I'm preparing now so that 6 months from now I can leave on a dime if I want.
> Right now I'm burnt out beyond words, having delivered a phase of a huge project, followed by upper management actions that make me feel extremely devalued and dehumanized
I quit over something like this. Best decision of my life. I was the lowest paid engineer, I won/led/only person that worked on a major contract (20% of revenue) and they said I was bold for asking for a promotion that would put me equal pay with people that brought in no contracts. Don't work for toxic management. It just isn't worth it. It takes a huge toll on your mental health and honestly no money is worth that. I was burnt out for over a year after that experience. I learned that when applying for positions you should also be interviewing your manager. That's become one of my top criteria.
You should prob just completely take a break during the 3 weeks. Go hiking, biking, etc and let your brain rewire so that you're not in a flight or fight mode. Something like "just walking hard for 5 hours gets me to the top of the mountain" and then you'll be so fresh after 3 weeks of that. Work won't seem as stressful or important in life.
It's amazing what a bit of exercise and a head clear of problems to solve can do for you. In my experience, it's unfortunately the case(for me at least) that the harder and longer you push before you burnout scales linearly with the length of the break you'll need to take in order to recover.
I learned this lesson the hard way and ended having to take a multiple year hiatus from even looking at a text editor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in a way a form of PTSD; for a long while, even thinking about programming elevated my heart rate. I ended up working as a bike mechanic during that time away, and the combination of a low stakes environment and working with my hands did my mental health a lot of good.
Damn crazy. Why did that happen? Moderate burnout situation that went on for way too long? Or intense burnout in a few months?
Yeah I mean going off of the great burnout comment before, it's that the negative mental pathways are being carved super deep every day by your continued effort -> failure (or perceived failure by you or manager).
I wonder if mushrooms/acid/mdma can help cure professional burnout faster?
How's being a bike mechanic money-wise? If you have a solid amount of capital built up from grinding as a soft engr, that could be a nice segway for a time.
> Damn crazy. Why did that happen? Moderate burnout situation that went on for way too long? Or intense burnout in a few months?
Basically a combination of both. I was at a medium sized startup fresh out of college, and I was the only one working on a completely new project using a language nobody else at the company used (I was doing NLP stuff in python). There was no code review and next to no mentorship, and every other developer was working in Java/Scala, so they had almost no clue what exactly I was working on. Early on I was actually able to deliver on pretty much everything asked of me, and had one of the models I had trained being used in production within six months. It was this terrible combination of me feeling completely out of my depth, yet everyone else only sees that I'm delivering, so thinks I have everything under control.
I knew very little python or machine learning when I started, but was able to get fairly competent in the problem domain quickly. But as things progressed, my severe lack of experience in developing a large project started to slow progress down and take a toll on me. I felt like I had to keep up the pace I had set expectations with early on, so I just started working longer and longer hours trying to meet deadlines that probably didn't matter anyways. Near the end I was secretly working nights and weekends because I had this mentality that If I didn't someone was eventually going to find out that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty classic imposter syndrome fueled by perfectionism.
> How's being a bike mechanic money-wise?
Haha, not good. At a shop that pays well, it's around $20/hour after base pay plus commission. It was a nice change of pace though. It made me enough where I didn't have to use too much of my savings. I quit soon after Covid started and have been doing some portfolio projects and brushing up on my interview skills.
This makes a lot of sense, and chimes with my gut feel based approach of following up a long and difficult bit of work with some quick wins or bug fixes before thinking about starting anything else big.
Ha! Same here. But don’t stop at 34. I had it at 40. Found it because of that post. They say I could have walked with it for much longer as it was the extremely slow one (there are at least two types). No side effects further; just a tiny lump.
I don’t think so. Early in this context means “less than 1cm”. Males need to check themselves every 6 months to one year. The standard check is a triplex still the urologist. Additionally, I would add that it’s a good practice to use a bank sperm while young. You never know what is going to happen in the future.
When you are in your thirties, get a colonoscopy. Screen for cancer. The screening isn’t very accurate unfortunately, it’s easy to miss. But it still way better than nothing.
* Mine was discovered super super early, on a scan related for something else
* This was actually so early that it didn’t make sense to operate. The main treatment for testicular cancer is orchiectomy, i.e. total removal of testicle
* If you find a lump, it is by definition much bigger than mine was, and the above doesn’t apply. But if you find a marginal, tiny spot on an incidental ultrasound, ask a doctor about what sizes are risky and consider a second opinion.
* I had something called a frozen section sample. They take the testicle out of the body, but leave it attached. They quickly biopsy part of it. If cancer, remove. If not cancer, put back in. I had this, it was cancer, but I’m nonetheless glad I did. My lesion was so small even then that it plausibly wasn’t cancer
* I had a seminoma. They grow slow, and are benign. It took three years to have a notable changes. If yours is growing faster than that, the odds are much higher it is cancer and a worse kind. Most benign masses are stable and tiny.
* Bank sperm before the operation! You may find fertility significantly impaired. My FSH went through the roof after the operation and my sperm count is like 0.01% of normal. Probably still viable with IVF, but almost zero. I likely had viable sperm before based on the normal fsh
Please don’t be pigheaded about this with your doctor. I did have cancer after all. But I plausibly didn’t, and my urologist recommended waiting + a frozen section sample. This is common in big centers for incidental detection, less common in hospitals that don’t see too many orchiectomies.
I was once told, “as long as you check regularly you’ll know it when you find it.”
I’ve also been told it’s very hard and dense feeing. Sometimes rough feeling.
I think this helps a lot but it sure feels like insufficient training.
This also gave me an app idea. I have very mole-y skin. Doctor said to keep an eye on new ones of significant size. I have a terrible memory. Maybe I need an app that I can snap photos of my major moles and it will tell me if future photos match or are possibly new, based on my mole constellations as pattern matching.
One of my favorites is a super-long one by a user named bane, about three solutions to speeding up computing: (1) "high" (more RAM, CPU), (2) "wide" (more machines), and (3) "deep" (refactoring), which is what he recommends first. More than once he has rewritten something that was running slowly even on the latest and greatest architectures (perhaps partially because of that), to running on a single machine, even an old personal computer. He reminds us that a modern computer, with its solid-state drives, gigabytes of memory, and multicore gigahertz processors, can take on many large problems, if you just stoop to give the problem a decent amount of attention first, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739
Reminds me of this recent comment on Chuck Moore, of Forth fame, building his own technology stack right down the hardware and squeezing it for performance.
He does not claim to introduce the concepts of horizontal and vertical scaling. He mentions them only to immediately discourage them: "Lots of people make the mistake of thinking there's only two vectors you can go to improve performance, high or wide. [...] There's a third direction you can go, I call it 'going deep'." Like I said, it's a long post, so I tried my best to summarize it and then linked to it.
Interesting it also involves graph processing, which Bane's comment did. The point is that distributed graph processing frameworks were mostly parallelizing their own overhead, not solving the problem, which could be done on a single machine!
My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.
For things that take a long time, timing is essentially random. The world is chaotic. Had I known everyone and their dog would be locked down in their houses for months on end, I would have built something to cater to them. But of course, there is no way to know. I find it amusing that just before the pandemic there was a thread on HN talking about overvalued unicorns and Zoom was up near the top of the list. What would need to happen to make Zoom a household name, people asked?
To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.
Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.
> Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good.
My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.
Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.
The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?
FWIW, the quote about money on the ground initially comes from a critique on the efficient market hypothesis, not commentary on the nature of ideas. So it's expected for there to be analogical disconnect here.
For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."
Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.
Furthermore, I've seen it used in the context of hidden transaction costs in the markets. For example, you see security A trading at $100 on exchange X but $105 on exchange Y. You think "free money!" but on closer examination exchange Y charges $5.01 to transact. These are totally nonsensical numbers, but they do extend to the analogy on ideas.
All the times I have seen $100 on the road, it has turned out to be an advertisement i.e. fake. 50% of the time I have found money on the road, it has been my own.
I put coins on the road for people to find, because I remember the joy of discovering a coin as a child.
Overall it works as a joke, but fails as a metaphor for me!
For those that don't get the reference, it is to this joke about 2 economists:
Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
IMO a good idea is not only one that can be successful, but also one that can be accomplished.
For example, I had the idea of mobile payments almost 20 years ago, way before smartphones. This is extremely popular today, but even if I had had the technical skill to pull it off (I didn't) this is only the kind of idea a giant company could have considered.
I think the best way to evaluate an idea is to ask if you'd use it yourself. If it solves a problem for you, there will be others that want it - nobody is unique. It's when you think you know how to solve someone else's problems that things go wrong - collaboration is important in that case.
Yes. If my friend had pitched Airbnb or Uber many years ago, I’m sure I would have dismissed them as impossibly risky. Or Snapchat as only useful in niches. Or Peloton as way overpriced compared to exercise videos on YouTube.
It can be fun to think of "new" ideas, and then search the Internet for them.
This week, I wanted a handheld device to push buttons and open doors without touching them; found several for sale (though the models without covers seem useless.)
Later I wanted a 3D support structure to fit under a mask and increase its usable surface area; found several for sale.
Isn't this a bit useless? Surgical masks aren't meant to fit well, they're meant to keep your spittle from leaving your face. N95 masks are meant to filter incoming air, and those are made to fit well.
I use the end of my key to push buttons. A shoulder shove works for pushing doors. If I have to pull occasionally I use my T-shirt to get a grip. If it were a major problem I’d use a glove.
I think I'm fairly creative, but I've only had one or two ideas that weren't reinventions of something someone else had already done. Doesn't matter what it is: software, electrical circuit, some clever mechanical thing, it's almost always already been done. Even if you look at patent grants, almost none of them are truly novel.
One of them costs too much for me to pursue. The other I'm working on as a hobby, but don't expect it to bear any fruit for a couple of years.
My main takeaway though is that an idea doesn't have to be novel for it to be a good idea. Lots of things that were tried and failed could succeed with a new approach. And lots of things that're currently successfully could be redone in a better way.
> Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
>The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
> I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
I find almost everyone intensely boring. How am I supposed to get along with people without feeling like a complete fraud?
Small talk, feigning interest in kids, in sports, in wine, in whatever useless dull, pedestrian thing a coworker is into.
I find that anyone who isn't a PhD (or could easily have been if they hadn't gone into industry) might as well be a paper shell. I can put on a mask of civility and charm when needed, but all I really want is to talk to deeply self-aware people struggling with the boundaries of human knowledge.
It's like you try to peel back a single layer of why people believe what they believe and there's nothing there. No reflection, no relevant context, no mirror provided by an intimate knowledge of history or literature ... just nothing.
Nearly every time I work up the motivation to try to really get to know someone who I think I may have judged too quickly I find religiosity, passive consumerism, an unexamined life, something so distasteful that it takes ages before I can do it again.
How do people put up with it?
tkiley
If I could go back five years and give myself some advice, I would say that "enough" is not durably satisfying. Purpose is durably satisfying. Purpose arises from constraints. Having "enough" means you lack a particular type of constraint. Thus, enough" can get in the way of developing purpose, particularly if you are somewhat undisciplined like me.
This one struck me for its tongue-in-cheek levity, credit to haroldgibbons:
My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it.
For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.
This reply to a comment about how taking an action on moral grounds might be bad for business:
> Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
> The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
I'll probably remember this quote for years to come.
I've referred to this comment a couple of times in discussions with people I've worked with. It is a great example for many problems of old code bases.
That comment still gives me nightmares. But also makes me really glad I don't work on such a codebase. Ours has some history to it, and a few areas that are a bit gnarly, but even they sound idilic in comparison.
I was going to share this myself. It's really great knowing that it stuck a chord with others.
So much to takeaway from that post. For me it is
1. Its important how you structure your code (flags and global state can wreak havoc on a program)
2. No matter how bad your code base is - it can at least be functional if you have good testing
I'm sad I can't find my favorite comment, and have actually searched for it on multiple occasions.
It wasn't a good comment, it was a bad comment — I am only sharing it on the off chance that somebody else will remember and post the link.
The discussion had veered to bicycle helmets: should they be required, is there innovation to be realized in their design, something like that.
Somebody posted some comment about definitely wanting people to have a helmet when they crash their bike and hit their head on the curb, and some other person became incensed at their evidence-free assertion that wearing a helmet would be helpful when crashing one's bike and having one's head hit the curb. The incensed party demanded links to scientifically rigorous studies, rather than some layperson's hunch, that helmet wearing would be beneficial in this particular circumstance.
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it so pithily and absurdly epitomized what is often _wrong_ with this website.
There is ~250 cycling related traffic deaths per year in the Netherlands. Some 60 of those are e-bike related.
Normalized per capita that is well above the EU average, but you shouldn't forget that we cycle a lot in the Netherlands, which means that per cycled kilometer, cycling in the Netherlands is still ridiculously safe even without helmets. It has been argued that forcing people to wear a helmet in law will reduce trips taken by bicycle and increase air pollution due to an increased number of trips taken by car (25% of ALL trips in NL are taken by bicycle, versus about 16% in Denmark, to give some comparison). And this is not even counting the psychological effect it has on car drivers and their behavior around people wearing helmets. Besides: cycling injuries and deaths are skewed heavily towards the elderly population (65+), if you're a 20-something person, statistically speaking you're more than fine not wearing a helmet in the Netherlands.
Let's not jump to conclusions here about helmets and think this stuff through before shouting 'You should wear a helmet'. It's not quite that black and white. Forcing everybody to wear helmets might very well cause more death and injury than not to. We have taken other precautions to ensure cyclist safety, such as designing our roads to protect them, and those measures make a lot more sense. You shouldn't forget that a helmet only helps a little if you are already in a bad situation (e.g. an accident), so it's much better to prevent that situation from occuring in the first place. The Youtube-channel Not Just Bikes has great explanations about how we approach those problems over here.
Head injuries are more common in cars than bicycles. Before someone tells me I "must" wear a helmet when cycling, I want to see them strap on a helmet when entering a car.
I’ve been hit by a car three times when cycling (only when cycling on an e-bike, car-drivers seem to have difficulty assessing the different speeds involved). The last time, and the time that persuaded me to give up the e-bike resulted in [this](https://0x0000ff.uk/imgs/hit-by-car.png).
That top impact is my head, smashing the windscreen. The lower impact is my arm (broken in two places). The side of the car was my knee, breaking the my thigh in the process.
I was cycling along, in my cycle lane, with the right of way on a main road. A woman turning left across my path into a side road either didn’t look or didn’t see me. I had time for “Oh Shi” before the impact and the pain.
I was wearing a cycle helmet, actually one issued by my work, which is what saved my life that day. The ER nurse said a young woman had also been admitted because of a car accident that evening, but she’d only been wearing a climbing helmet. She died.
My body was broken, but I didn’t even get a bruise on my head. I remain a fan of cycle helmets.
I understand your situation, but please also understand that per cycled kilometer, the Netherlands is a lot safer than any other country. There exists no country with as big of a modal share with bicycles, and our accident rates involving bicycles are still super low. I'd love to get my hands on statistics on accidents per million kilometers or so, but it doesn't seem to be tracked anywhere for bicycles.
Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do.
I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA
It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'll be in the same ballpark. The estimations are that forcing people to wear a helmet will save about 5-20 lives a year on the Dutch roads. That'd be impressive, but the reduction in people opting for bicycles would yield a much bigger negative for the health of the people. Feel free to read through a Google Translated version of this webpage: https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/wat-vindt-de-fietsersbond...
That sounds like an awful experience. From the picture, it looks like the crumple zones on the car yielded very kindly to your momentum as well, which is incredibly fortunate. I'm glad you got out of it alive, if with some serious scratches and dings.
I'm convinced anyone who would be wearing a helmet when driving a car, and narrowly escaping death in a similar way (e.g. a racing driver who is kept alive by their helmet?) would argue much the same way in favour of helmets when driving cars. It's just more rare because we don't wear helmets when driving cars.
My uninformed guess would be that many head injuries in cars would not be helped by wearing a helmet. G-force related injuries, like whiplash, and being hit by the airbag.
It’s a hard line to draw. I remember reading a comment on HN a while ago. In it the commenter said that whenever he left the house he wore earplugs, and protective glasses. Earplugs because he got a bit of tinnitus once, and the glasses, because once he almost walked into a tree branch and almost lost an eye. He’d probably say that we should wear a helmet no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
I think our point of view is very different. Coming from a country where almost no-one cycles as a mode of transport, I view it entirely individualistically. I understand that the imperative 'should', has a far wider (even political) connotation in the context of the Netherlands.
To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest forcing people to wear helmets, by law. My thinking is simple: it is safer to wear a helmet when cycling. Therefore one _should_ wear a helmet when cycling. It’s about as easy to wear a bike helmet as it it to wear a surgical mask.
On the subject of helmets, I don’t think deaths per year is the right statistic. I’d be more interested in head injuries per year. Not all serious head injuries cause death, and not all deaths are caused by head injuries.
I do understand your point. That in a safe cycling space like The Netherlands, the risk is low enough that The safety provided by a helmet is very rarely used.
There’s a good chance that I will be living in the Netherlands in a year or so. I wonder if I’ll wear a helmet or not? (probably not). I’ve cycled a lot in my life, both on and off-road. As a child I never wore a helmet, cycling around the neighbourhood; but as an adult I always have.
Fair point, you’re entirely right in that in other countries wearing a helmet can be much more important and indeed much more of that burden is placed on the individual.
I looked into head injury statistics, but it seems like this isn’t publicly available. Multiple sources (cyclist safety advocate groups!) claim these to be low numbers though.
The problem with wearing a helmet is not that is inconvenient to wear it though. It is a storage problem at your destination. Dutch high schools often only offer small locker spaces, I doubt full size biking helmets would fit. Considering >90% of middle and high schoolers are coming to school by bicycle, that would involve carrying around a helmet all day. Ofcourse it’s not an unfixable problem for schools, but this goes for every little trip: going to a bar? Leave your helmet at your table I guess? Going to the bookstore downtown? Walk around the store awkwardly with your helmet in your hands I guess? The friction for these trips would be a lot higher with a helmet, and these are the type of trips people tend to use their bicycles for. I live about 2km from the city center of a 150 000k city. Parking is 3 euros an hour, and it takes pretty much the exact same time to get to the city center by bike as by car. I’ll take the bike any day for all trips that don’t involve my carrying a bunch of stuff back, and this is a common sentiment. We’ve got free supervised underground bicycle parking lots. It’s a no-brainer :)
If you do end up moving I’d love to hear about your experience a few months in. Maybe we’re all indoctrinated into believing cycling here is super safe when it actually isn’t, but so far my experiences cycling in other countries have been terrifying (I really wish I had a helmet using the bike-sharing system in Belfast). An outsider perspective would be very interesting.
FWIW I usually do appreciate citations/links to scientific research. Online discussions can devolve quickly and a culture that demands quality information to back up statements is more resilient to a lot of common issues with online discussions. Even if the result seems obvious, there can be a lot of interesting material in the primary source.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing. Sometimes the numbers make a very convincing case.
Take motorcycle helmets. In over 40% of motorcycle accidents, you hit the chin bar, or what's under it. It's an undeniable argument in favour of a full face helmet.
Wait, could that be me ? I had that exact conversation on HN.
I was the one asking for studies (and my previous comment was sthg like "helmets should be mandatory" then I was told "do you realize it increases injuries ?" then I ask for proof) and the reasoning in the studies was that making helmets mandatory decreased car drivers' attention to cyclists making them less cautious around them, resulting in more serious injuries.
Strangely neither can I find those comments at the time.
I have the fuzzy memory that it was about a bikes around Sydney or Australia but HN comments tend to derail from the initial submission so I can't be sure.
It might be increasing injuries the same way helmets did when they were introduced during the first world war. All those head injuries would have been fatalities. Instead their wearers survived and their head injuries were recorded.
Hmm I am not sure! To be honest, I have spent the time since posting my comment above googling for the post... but no luck yet.
The problem is, I think I myself might not have even commented in the thread, so it is hard to search for... anyway, I think it is unlikely to be you, because I wouldn't have laughed at a demand for evidence if it was about legislating a helmet mandate (sure better have real evidence in that case!) but it was more like "I crashed and hit my head on the curb, thank god I was wearing a helmet!").
(I myself mainly get around Tokyo on my VanMoof X2 ebike and almost never wear a helmet...)
You've motivated me to keep searching for the comment now, though... ;-)
That is not the comment I was referring to — sounds reasonable to me!
(The comment I am looking for also started rather emotionally, something like "Ugh I hate — HATE — when people... (make assumptions like this without evidence, something something)". And then possibly invoked the names of a couple of logical fallacies.
(T_T) I thought I'd be able to find it with the double "hate", but I can't... it was some years ago too, at least 4-5, so I am probably mis-remembering.
> I am always annoyed with articles promoting safe cycling when illustrating pictures show cyclists without helmets or any other form of protective gears.
> In Belgium there is a small movement promoting bikes and there are all kind of hipsters, bobo and 50 years old grey hair vegan on fake vintage bikes riding without helmets and without any sense of road conduct. Good bikers wearing yellow jackets and helmets are really rare ; I am beginning to think the formers are ruining the latters's image.
I’m going to hit you in the head with a bat, do you a) wear a helmet b) don’t ware a helmet c) there’s no scientific evidence so I’ll toss a coin.
Btw. Here’s a vaguely related discussion on a seemingly paradoxical feature of helmets which I find interesting cause this yes might go against our intuitions in some cases.
Was this on the article that was about the complicated nature of do helmets make people safe? For hints to people searching I remember it was something about drivers acting differently around people with helmets and non-helmeted cyclists (I don't think the article made hard assertions of what was safer, but boy did the comments. It definitely suggested you should wear one). What I do remember is that the comment section was a complete and utter shit show with people saying cyclists deserve to get hit by cars (but isn't that always true for comment sections including cyclists?)
No, although I remember that thread, too, since I am an e-bike enthusiast and evangelist (not for work or anything, I just love e-bikes and am always advocating that people try them).
I think the funny comment I am trying to find occurred in a thread that wasn't even about bikes or helmets though, it was just off on some little tangent.
No, no, I like HN, and have derived a great deal of value from it over the past 15 years or so (even made meatspace friends from it; the HN Tokyo meetup basically became my entire social life after I had kids).
That comment is one of my favorites because it was funny... it was "soooooo Hacker News". It might only have been so funny because I've spent so much time on HN over the years.
I don't really use any other websites like this (reddit or whatever). HN is a kind of unique thing for me.
That kind of thing just proves how important intuition is in framing an argument. People have a baseline and expect evidence when something goes against that baseline. But different people have completely different baselines.
The other common area for this is nuclear power (is it easy?) and climate change (is it fragile?). At the heart of those debates are deeper philosophical questions that have little to do with science. But it is always easier to throw around stats than grapple with that.
Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
The most useful idea I've found so far for thinking about work and career comes from Dawkins. He points out that money is just an abstract mechanism for managing reciprocal altruism. As a knock on to that idea, we're programmed to crave those relationships and to build a deep and rich network of friends through them.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Yes, you could view it as a trap VC lays for bright young minds since success is likely for the VC with a hundred investments and unlikely for the individual. But then, not everyone is wired to work for others. And sometimes you personally need to scratch that entrepreneur itch before you can fathom joining staff meetings. Glad we live in a world where cperciva could decide their own path.
I'm pretty sure he also made a ton of money on it, since lots of YC startups like Stripe were early customers. I don't think any of them had time to migrate off tarsnap (not to mention they don't need to). They probably just accumulated a bunch of data and tarsnap grew as Stripe did, which I imagine was very lucrative.
The parent to my comment pointed to a most remarkable piece of internet lore, but it was really about your argument against taking VC. A very quick look showed that you did exactly what you said you were going to do, with probably the exact result you indicated. I pointed to TarSnap because that was the result, and it seemed important to the story. Success? Sure, exactly as planned, but what about the audience of your original argument, those that said to go for big venture investment? Surely they still exist here. What do they think? However, if the story is to be a guidepost for others, it's really about what you think about your story, and so I think anybody following can be grateful that you've closed the loop on this. I realize that you could have interpreted this as some kind of personal slight, and a few did on your behalf, but it's obvious that you think differently, and your lack of offense is very telling of your satisfaction. So really you've answered in two ways. For my part, I don't think that gifted people necessarily owe 'us' their highest altruistic purpose. Maybe that is between them and whatever higher power they believe in, or not. But we at least hope that others also respond to aspirational attention with some kind of honesty, even if we can't possibly understand. Thank you.
It's a trap if it's not for you, not what you want to do, not your interests. Whose business is it to solve millennium problems? Certainly not yours to decide for others. I think he does with his life what he chooses, and you do with yours what you choose. What are you doing with your life? I don't think you intended to be arrogant here, but the premise is that someone who has talent is required or expected to solve the world's problems. Not so. I think it's none of your business what someone else does with their life, anymore than it's mine to judge what you've done with yours or expect you to fulfill society's or the world's expectations. And the dude is still a genius, not was.
246 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.
Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.
Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.
So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.
That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
https://www.lifewire.com/number-of-ipods-sold-all-time-19995...
From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.
- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).
- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.
- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do
-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.
- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.
It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.
I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
Thanks for your interest!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449
Edit: anybody want to suggest any other lists for the lists list?
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618
Programmers are hard to replace, it hard to find a good one, and it takes time to ramp up a new one with a codebase. You have more negotiating power than you think.
Your comment struck me because I have been in that position before, and I know it really really hurts. But you gotta look out for yourself. Please take a week or two off
That assumes that their manager (1) is aware of how hard it is to find a good programmer, and (2) is rational.
The burnt out feeling is coming mainly from the feeling of how much prep is required to switch jobs even. I'm just hoping the promotion actually comes through and I don't need to but at the same time I'm preparing now so that 6 months from now I can leave on a dime if I want.
I quit over something like this. Best decision of my life. I was the lowest paid engineer, I won/led/only person that worked on a major contract (20% of revenue) and they said I was bold for asking for a promotion that would put me equal pay with people that brought in no contracts. Don't work for toxic management. It just isn't worth it. It takes a huge toll on your mental health and honestly no money is worth that. I was burnt out for over a year after that experience. I learned that when applying for positions you should also be interviewing your manager. That's become one of my top criteria.
I learned this lesson the hard way and ended having to take a multiple year hiatus from even looking at a text editor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in a way a form of PTSD; for a long while, even thinking about programming elevated my heart rate. I ended up working as a bike mechanic during that time away, and the combination of a low stakes environment and working with my hands did my mental health a lot of good.
Yeah I mean going off of the great burnout comment before, it's that the negative mental pathways are being carved super deep every day by your continued effort -> failure (or perceived failure by you or manager).
I wonder if mushrooms/acid/mdma can help cure professional burnout faster?
How's being a bike mechanic money-wise? If you have a solid amount of capital built up from grinding as a soft engr, that could be a nice segway for a time.
Basically a combination of both. I was at a medium sized startup fresh out of college, and I was the only one working on a completely new project using a language nobody else at the company used (I was doing NLP stuff in python). There was no code review and next to no mentorship, and every other developer was working in Java/Scala, so they had almost no clue what exactly I was working on. Early on I was actually able to deliver on pretty much everything asked of me, and had one of the models I had trained being used in production within six months. It was this terrible combination of me feeling completely out of my depth, yet everyone else only sees that I'm delivering, so thinks I have everything under control.
I knew very little python or machine learning when I started, but was able to get fairly competent in the problem domain quickly. But as things progressed, my severe lack of experience in developing a large project started to slow progress down and take a toll on me. I felt like I had to keep up the pace I had set expectations with early on, so I just started working longer and longer hours trying to meet deadlines that probably didn't matter anyways. Near the end I was secretly working nights and weekends because I had this mentality that If I didn't someone was eventually going to find out that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty classic imposter syndrome fueled by perfectionism.
> How's being a bike mechanic money-wise?
Haha, not good. At a shop that pays well, it's around $20/hour after base pay plus commission. It was a nice change of pace though. It made me enough where I didn't have to use too much of my savings. I quit soon after Covid started and have been doing some portfolio projects and brushing up on my interview skills.
So I did, found a lump, and because I found it early it was removed with no further issue. So that's definitely one of my favorite comments!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120102
* Mine was discovered super super early, on a scan related for something else
* This was actually so early that it didn’t make sense to operate. The main treatment for testicular cancer is orchiectomy, i.e. total removal of testicle
* If you find a lump, it is by definition much bigger than mine was, and the above doesn’t apply. But if you find a marginal, tiny spot on an incidental ultrasound, ask a doctor about what sizes are risky and consider a second opinion.
* I had something called a frozen section sample. They take the testicle out of the body, but leave it attached. They quickly biopsy part of it. If cancer, remove. If not cancer, put back in. I had this, it was cancer, but I’m nonetheless glad I did. My lesion was so small even then that it plausibly wasn’t cancer
* I had a seminoma. They grow slow, and are benign. It took three years to have a notable changes. If yours is growing faster than that, the odds are much higher it is cancer and a worse kind. Most benign masses are stable and tiny.
* Bank sperm before the operation! You may find fertility significantly impaired. My FSH went through the roof after the operation and my sperm count is like 0.01% of normal. Probably still viable with IVF, but almost zero. I likely had viable sperm before based on the normal fsh
Please don’t be pigheaded about this with your doctor. I did have cancer after all. But I plausibly didn’t, and my urologist recommended waiting + a frozen section sample. This is common in big centers for incidental detection, less common in hospitals that don’t see too many orchiectomies.
I’ve also been told it’s very hard and dense feeing. Sometimes rough feeling.
I think this helps a lot but it sure feels like insufficient training.
This also gave me an app idea. I have very mole-y skin. Doctor said to keep an eye on new ones of significant size. I have a terrible memory. Maybe I need an app that I can snap photos of my major moles and it will tell me if future photos match or are possibly new, based on my mole constellations as pattern matching.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469625
You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.
–Paul Barham
Scalability! But at what COST?
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...
http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/02/...
Interesting it also involves graph processing, which Bane's comment did. The point is that distributed graph processing frameworks were mostly parallelizing their own overhead, not solving the problem, which could be done on a single machine!
My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.
For things that take a long time, timing is essentially random. The world is chaotic. Had I known everyone and their dog would be locked down in their houses for months on end, I would have built something to cater to them. But of course, there is no way to know. I find it amusing that just before the pandemic there was a thread on HN talking about overvalued unicorns and Zoom was up near the top of the list. What would need to happen to make Zoom a household name, people asked?
To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.
Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.
My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.
The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?
For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."
I put coins on the road for people to find, because I remember the joy of discovering a coin as a child.
Overall it works as a joke, but fails as a metaphor for me!
Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
For example, I had the idea of mobile payments almost 20 years ago, way before smartphones. This is extremely popular today, but even if I had had the technical skill to pull it off (I didn't) this is only the kind of idea a giant company could have considered.
Good ideas are not universally good.
This week, I wanted a handheld device to push buttons and open doors without touching them; found several for sale (though the models without covers seem useless.)
Later I wanted a 3D support structure to fit under a mask and increase its usable surface area; found several for sale.
Wow, I also thought about this idea.
For those who are interested in something like this, you can search for "frame for face mask" on Amazon...
*I have no affiliation to the site or map, just remembered a colleague showed me
My main takeaway though is that an idea doesn't have to be novel for it to be a good idea. Lots of things that were tried and failed could succeed with a new approach. And lots of things that're currently successfully could be redone in a better way.
https://www.businessinsider.com/peloton-founder-ceo-john-fol...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104
Followed closely by 'tzs on Missile Command:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228350
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Ms9oq...
> Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
>The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
> I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=jakelazaroff&comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449
My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it.
For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397272
On Catering to the privacy crowd- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123463
Users of peanut butter shouldn't have to think about whether it contains glass and razors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20634128
On Telegram seven years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949814
Indian Govt blocks a PHP project for terrorism and anti national content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8820378
On Show HN:Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Did you win the putnam? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
> Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
> The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
I'll probably remember this quote for years to come.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534277
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21711221
I've referred to this comment a couple of times in discussions with people I've worked with. It is a great example for many problems of old code bases.
So much to takeaway from that post. For me it is 1. Its important how you structure your code (flags and global state can wreak havoc on a program) 2. No matter how bad your code base is - it can at least be functional if you have good testing
It wasn't a good comment, it was a bad comment — I am only sharing it on the off chance that somebody else will remember and post the link.
The discussion had veered to bicycle helmets: should they be required, is there innovation to be realized in their design, something like that.
Somebody posted some comment about definitely wanting people to have a helmet when they crash their bike and hit their head on the curb, and some other person became incensed at their evidence-free assertion that wearing a helmet would be helpful when crashing one's bike and having one's head hit the curb. The incensed party demanded links to scientifically rigorous studies, rather than some layperson's hunch, that helmet wearing would be beneficial in this particular circumstance.
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it so pithily and absurdly epitomized what is often _wrong_ with this website.
Normalized per capita that is well above the EU average, but you shouldn't forget that we cycle a lot in the Netherlands, which means that per cycled kilometer, cycling in the Netherlands is still ridiculously safe even without helmets. It has been argued that forcing people to wear a helmet in law will reduce trips taken by bicycle and increase air pollution due to an increased number of trips taken by car (25% of ALL trips in NL are taken by bicycle, versus about 16% in Denmark, to give some comparison). And this is not even counting the psychological effect it has on car drivers and their behavior around people wearing helmets. Besides: cycling injuries and deaths are skewed heavily towards the elderly population (65+), if you're a 20-something person, statistically speaking you're more than fine not wearing a helmet in the Netherlands.
Let's not jump to conclusions here about helmets and think this stuff through before shouting 'You should wear a helmet'. It's not quite that black and white. Forcing everybody to wear helmets might very well cause more death and injury than not to. We have taken other precautions to ensure cyclist safety, such as designing our roads to protect them, and those measures make a lot more sense. You shouldn't forget that a helmet only helps a little if you are already in a bad situation (e.g. an accident), so it's much better to prevent that situation from occuring in the first place. The Youtube-channel Not Just Bikes has great explanations about how we approach those problems over here.
That top impact is my head, smashing the windscreen. The lower impact is my arm (broken in two places). The side of the car was my knee, breaking the my thigh in the process.
I was cycling along, in my cycle lane, with the right of way on a main road. A woman turning left across my path into a side road either didn’t look or didn’t see me. I had time for “Oh Shi” before the impact and the pain.
I was wearing a cycle helmet, actually one issued by my work, which is what saved my life that day. The ER nurse said a young woman had also been admitted because of a car accident that evening, but she’d only been wearing a climbing helmet. She died.
My body was broken, but I didn’t even get a bruise on my head. I remain a fan of cycle helmets.
Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do.
I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA
It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'll be in the same ballpark. The estimations are that forcing people to wear a helmet will save about 5-20 lives a year on the Dutch roads. That'd be impressive, but the reduction in people opting for bicycles would yield a much bigger negative for the health of the people. Feel free to read through a Google Translated version of this webpage: https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/wat-vindt-de-fietsersbond...
I'm convinced anyone who would be wearing a helmet when driving a car, and narrowly escaping death in a similar way (e.g. a racing driver who is kept alive by their helmet?) would argue much the same way in favour of helmets when driving cars. It's just more rare because we don't wear helmets when driving cars.
What do you think of that line of reasoning?
It’s a hard line to draw. I remember reading a comment on HN a while ago. In it the commenter said that whenever he left the house he wore earplugs, and protective glasses. Earplugs because he got a bit of tinnitus once, and the glasses, because once he almost walked into a tree branch and almost lost an eye. He’d probably say that we should wear a helmet no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest forcing people to wear helmets, by law. My thinking is simple: it is safer to wear a helmet when cycling. Therefore one _should_ wear a helmet when cycling. It’s about as easy to wear a bike helmet as it it to wear a surgical mask.
On the subject of helmets, I don’t think deaths per year is the right statistic. I’d be more interested in head injuries per year. Not all serious head injuries cause death, and not all deaths are caused by head injuries.
I do understand your point. That in a safe cycling space like The Netherlands, the risk is low enough that The safety provided by a helmet is very rarely used.
There’s a good chance that I will be living in the Netherlands in a year or so. I wonder if I’ll wear a helmet or not? (probably not). I’ve cycled a lot in my life, both on and off-road. As a child I never wore a helmet, cycling around the neighbourhood; but as an adult I always have.
I looked into head injury statistics, but it seems like this isn’t publicly available. Multiple sources (cyclist safety advocate groups!) claim these to be low numbers though.
The problem with wearing a helmet is not that is inconvenient to wear it though. It is a storage problem at your destination. Dutch high schools often only offer small locker spaces, I doubt full size biking helmets would fit. Considering >90% of middle and high schoolers are coming to school by bicycle, that would involve carrying around a helmet all day. Ofcourse it’s not an unfixable problem for schools, but this goes for every little trip: going to a bar? Leave your helmet at your table I guess? Going to the bookstore downtown? Walk around the store awkwardly with your helmet in your hands I guess? The friction for these trips would be a lot higher with a helmet, and these are the type of trips people tend to use their bicycles for. I live about 2km from the city center of a 150 000k city. Parking is 3 euros an hour, and it takes pretty much the exact same time to get to the city center by bike as by car. I’ll take the bike any day for all trips that don’t involve my carrying a bunch of stuff back, and this is a common sentiment. We’ve got free supervised underground bicycle parking lots. It’s a no-brainer :)
If you do end up moving I’d love to hear about your experience a few months in. Maybe we’re all indoctrinated into believing cycling here is super safe when it actually isn’t, but so far my experiences cycling in other countries have been terrifying (I really wish I had a helmet using the bike-sharing system in Belfast). An outsider perspective would be very interesting.
Take motorcycle helmets. In over 40% of motorcycle accidents, you hit the chin bar, or what's under it. It's an undeniable argument in favour of a full face helmet.
Strangely neither can I find those comments at the time.
I have the fuzzy memory that it was about a bikes around Sydney or Australia but HN comments tend to derail from the initial submission so I can't be sure.
edit: found it ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4262081
The problem is, I think I myself might not have even commented in the thread, so it is hard to search for... anyway, I think it is unlikely to be you, because I wouldn't have laughed at a demand for evidence if it was about legislating a helmet mandate (sure better have real evidence in that case!) but it was more like "I crashed and hit my head on the curb, thank god I was wearing a helmet!").
(I myself mainly get around Tokyo on my VanMoof X2 ebike and almost never wear a helmet...)
You've motivated me to keep searching for the comment now, though... ;-)
(The comment I am looking for also started rather emotionally, something like "Ugh I hate — HATE — when people... (make assumptions like this without evidence, something something)". And then possibly invoked the names of a couple of logical fallacies.
(T_T) I thought I'd be able to find it with the double "hate", but I can't... it was some years ago too, at least 4-5, so I am probably mis-remembering.
> I am always annoyed with articles promoting safe cycling when illustrating pictures show cyclists without helmets or any other form of protective gears.
> In Belgium there is a small movement promoting bikes and there are all kind of hipsters, bobo and 50 years old grey hair vegan on fake vintage bikes riding without helmets and without any sense of road conduct. Good bikers wearing yellow jackets and helmets are really rare ; I am beginning to think the formers are ruining the latters's image.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261122
I’m going to hit you in the head with a bat, do you a) wear a helmet b) don’t ware a helmet c) there’s no scientific evidence so I’ll toss a coin.
Btw. Here’s a vaguely related discussion on a seemingly paradoxical feature of helmets which I find interesting cause this yes might go against our intuitions in some cases.
https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-bike-helmet-paradox
I think the funny comment I am trying to find occurred in a thread that wasn't even about bikes or helmets though, it was just off on some little tangent.
Do you have other places that you prefer?
What would you say HN should change to become a better place?
That comment is one of my favorites because it was funny... it was "soooooo Hacker News". It might only have been so funny because I've spent so much time on HN over the years.
I don't really use any other websites like this (reddit or whatever). HN is a kind of unique thing for me.
> Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
> Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
The other common area for this is nuclear power (is it easy?) and climate change (is it fragile?). At the heart of those debates are deeper philosophical questions that have little to do with science. But it is always easier to throw around stats than grapple with that.
I think a huge part of our problem in the current historical moment is our lack of awareness of this fact, and it's a big part of why so many people are dissatisfied with their work and the state of social projects, including their view of the ways in which genius is employed.
To your point, I think the problem is not so much with entrepreneurship itself, but with the fact that it's filled in for all of the other decaying forms of altruism in modern society. The rewards for doing some deep scientific work (in the form of respect and prestige) have slowly decreased along with the rise of anti-intellectualism, while the rewards of entrepreneurship have skyrocketed (or at least appear to have from the vantage point of the average person). The new pop image of the "genius" is Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, not some guy plugging away at equations in Cambridge. Those people still exist, obviously, but the cultural respect and the other forms of value they're compensated with have decreased dramatically.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
Depends on your goals, eh?
"If all you wanted was money you could just rob a bank."
The parent to my comment pointed to a most remarkable piece of internet lore, but it was really about your argument against taking VC. A very quick look showed that you did exactly what you said you were going to do, with probably the exact result you indicated. I pointed to TarSnap because that was the result, and it seemed important to the story. Success? Sure, exactly as planned, but what about the audience of your original argument, those that said to go for big venture investment? Surely they still exist here. What do they think? However, if the story is to be a guidepost for others, it's really about what you think about your story, and so I think anybody following can be grateful that you've closed the loop on this. I realize that you could have interpreted this as some kind of personal slight, and a few did on your behalf, but it's obvious that you think differently, and your lack of offense is very telling of your satisfaction. So really you've answered in two ways. For my part, I don't think that gifted people necessarily owe 'us' their highest altruistic purpose. Maybe that is between them and whatever higher power they believe in, or not. But we at least hope that others also respond to aspirational attention with some kind of honesty, even if we can't possibly understand. Thank you.
Semantic error. Like using past tense to describe someone you met once long ago and otherwise know nothing about.