Ask HN: Do anyone get anxiety from following Hacker News?

no follow stuff in HN, only in twitter, fb or quora

Huh? There's a lot of things everywhere. Not just in tech. It seems like you're taking fomo quite seriously. I suggest that you just stop giving a shit. Or maybe resign yourself to the fact that you've been working in software for almost 20 years and all of the stuff that doesn't concern you actually doesn't concern you.

I think the key is to focus and prioritize whatever you want or need in life. I actually find a lot of the content on HN to be uninteresting and maybe click on one or two links a week. I’ve also landed on this state after an 8 year career where I feel pretty good about what I know already and that I can learn what I need to learn. Over my life, I’ve learned a lot of stuff in many different fields; I don’t limit myself to tech. For example, I love cooking, making music, drawing, and reading about and practicing mental health.

If I find something I genuinely want to learn, it’s just a matter of spending focused time learning it. I also believe it’s important to know when to cut off an interest that is no longer serving you. While discipline is important to push through discomfort and overcome adversity, it’s really silly to be wholly invested in a topic or hobby that brings you no value in life. That value can be monetary or happiness or growth. But it’s important to know that you don’t have to know everything and it’s really silly to do so. There will always be something you don’t know.

For you, maybe ask yourself why do you want to know all these things? Maybe you can identify if they serve you in a way. Of those that you believe will make your life better, spend 30 minutes every day or every other day learning from the ground up about the topic. Maybe put it into practice, or just take a course on it. Regularly reflect on if this is what you want to be doing, if your making meaningful progress towards whatever goal you have, and celebrate your successes!

I no longer suffer from FOMO because I now know that to a first approximation I've missed out on everything.

I suspect that's true of most people whether or not they believe it.

But it's only a suspicion.

Good luck.

i've heard chomsky and others talk about how our knowledge of physics is so sophisticated now as compared to 50 or 80 years ago, that you have to have a PhD to even begin to understand how to talk about it intelligently.

i feel like a lot of other computing-related concepts are approaching that same level of sophistication.

i've usually been pretty good at not worrying about true understanding of various technologies, so the fact that i can't explain ai well, or that most ai is not even capable of offering an explanation of how they make their own decisions, is not so anxiety-producing to me (tho, parts of ai, and explainability, are real problems).

but i do get anxious from constantly reading headlines from various substacks and other clickbaity and attention-seeking entities about how some new tech has basically already ended life on earth so we might as well just give up.

i'm anxious enough already with real threats to the world -- nukes, global warming, social media, inequality/fascism/authoritarianism, etc.

You're never going to be able to follow everything. I only click on a few posts a day. I get what you mean tho. I'm usually frustrated at the fact that there's only 24 hrs in a day.

The four topics you list are all high BS topics. I mean:

𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 —- the main use case is separating fools from their money. Missing out on that one is one of the best things that can happen to you.

𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐦 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 —- people starting writing papers on this around 1998 when I got my physics PhD. You could not get a postdoc in it at that time. It got fashionable maybe 10 years later. I am sure there are some people getting tenure in it right now but in 10 years it might be remembered as just another field that ran its course and had better days and it may get a reputation, just as chaos and fractals got in the 1990s as something you just could not make a career in. Sure there will be ‘quantum supremacy’ for particular problems (maybe even that box that is the McGuffin in Sneakers) but you are not going to be using a quantum web server to host your content.

𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 —- I hear ‘data is the new oil’ and I think of an oil tanker spill like the Exxon Valdez or maybe like Spider-Man, ‘with big data becomes big responsibility’. I think how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is so good because they collect better data: they give you a very limited set of choices so the data collect is meaningful. When YouTube shows you 30 links on the other hand you can come to no conclusion that the viewer didn’t like those things.

Data is a big part of everything we do in computing. In plain ordinary boring applications development the most important thing is getting your data structures straight. There is a whole art of online transaction processing and the arts of doing analytics after the fact or in real time.

𝐌𝐋 —- data is the currency of ML. If you have a real problem to solve and real test and training data you can do ok with basic algorithms out of scikit-learn. If you don’t have appropriate data you can dream about the latest algorithms and accomplish nothing. You need to know the basics of linear algebra and statistics: the courses you take as a math major are great.

Like most other things there is a part of the field which is almost eternal (I think about things Yan LeCun wrote about 20 years ago almost every day and think ‘Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade’ can turn a failing project into one that succeeds even though it was written before deep networks.) and other parts that are ephemeral. For work I did a lot with LSTM networks for text, then it was CNN networks, those have been forgotten almost because transformers can do things that would be difficult or impossible without attention. Personally I am really interested in those radiance field algorithms for scene synthesis, I haven’t done a project yet but it was clear early on that the algorithms would get much more efficient and that has been happening the whole time I’ve been watching from the sidelines.

There are ‘data scientists’ who do quantitative marketing with a lot of smak and pow and get paid really well because they really can increase revenue 850% in two years. They don’t necessarily know a lot about algorithms. If you were working in the field as a scientist you would be one of the people who writes one of the 20 papers on radiance fields a week that would never get a second vote on HN, but as a practitioner you can master the basics and solve real problems for fun and profit.

One thing I try to remember is that HN is a place where a lot of people from the same broad area hang out. There are math Phds here who know nothing about Bash, veteran sys admins who don't know anything about the Node event loop, regular old devs like myself who know nothing about quantum cryptography - but we're all coming over here, posting links and chatting away and tripping over each other's areas of expertise which were literally years in the making.

I think you’re asking about the anxiety from keeping up with tech news in general?

Definitely. You spend a couple of years learning new tech and methodologies and then the industry moves on and you’re behind on something different.

Ai is going to rock our world. I personally don’t know what to grab hold of to keep from getting tossed overboard during the coming storm.

Great time to start an ai company though, if you can get financing. If you’d like to fund me, I have video game related ideas I’d pursue if I could ^^

This will seem unrelated, but I’ve often heard people complain about going to the gym: “I hate going to the gym because everyone else is so beautiful and I’m out of shape”. But distorts the reality that most people don’t go to the gym. And the people at the gym the most are the ones that mostly build their lives around it.

So following the HN community too closely can stir feelings of insecurity and inferiority and the imposter syndrome. And yeah, I feel it sometimes, too. :-)

I ran a successful web agency and only focused on WordPress, Ruby and vanilla JS. It’s possible to ignore 99% of technology and just focus on the 1% that adds value to the problems you’re interested in.

I would dabble in many other domains like AI, blockchain, other languages, etc. to test out their effectiveness, but the best advice I have is to focus on your problem first and then find a technical solution that solves that problem. If you start with the technology first and then go looking for a problem, it’s not as effective IMO.

Yep, felt the same.

I cope by reminding myself that I shouldn't compare my personal knowledge with the combined knowledge of a community - multiple people here are knowledgeable about and post about different areas

You can only process so much information at a time. I like to think of my brain like a garage. If it's dirty and unorganized, it will be impossible to fit a car in, let alone another piece of junk. But as you start to clean and organize it, it's easier to take in new things.

The best way of coping is a JOMO (joy of missing out) and moderation. You don't need to know everything and you surely don't need to spend all your time trying to. It's okay to not know. That's the beauty of life.

There's really no need to keep up with the "bleeding edge" of technology. Most of our real advances come from papers that are 30 or 40 years old. The AI/ML/etc. space is only apparently moving rapidly because of the "hotness" of the subject, and a lot of it is an application searching for a problem.

I've been in this space since 1995, and I've learned that most of the things that pass by simply don't interest me. I don't really keep up with JS/CSS/HTML stuff any more, since it's a saturated space in a work sense. I focus on the back end exclusively, where things move in much slower, provable steps.

you are observing the things you dont know, thats a good thing.

some of these things, are things you wont ever need to know, but observation is enrichment.

part of a critical knowledge base is allocation of effort toward things you need to know for progress, and indexing those things you dont need to know right now.

You’re only 18 I could barely write a bash script then

Maybe it is perspective. You can't know everything.

I'm here for the smart(er) people with experience in different areas. The thing that makes you anxious is the reason I enjoy being here.

A lot of the trends people get fixated on tend to fade away in a few months. It takes some time to get used to focusing on “boring” tech that builds better projects (php and Postgres come to mind as very viable solutions for development even in 2022). Clients love boring tech because you’re not sitting around explaining to them why something broke because you built it with cutting edge TrendTech.

Crypto seems to have outlived its utility as a way to get rich quick. ML is still just a technique to average out giant datasets to find/generate things based on trends (these things work on training data after all and not from a true blank slate). Quantum computing is a long way off and the most practical way it’ll affect most people here is making our encryption keys too simple and some new quantum resistant version will be needed.

Just watch chatGPT - in 6 months, it’ll feel like a distant memory here! And people will be raving about some new JS/wasm thing instead

I made this comment a couple years ago:

> Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting. [0]

0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23448835

Yes but for me it comes from the articles about environmental destruction. Not just climate but also the myriad other ways we’re making spaceship earth unlivable for our children and other creatures that share it with us.

I wish I could filter these out and just stick to the technology.

My personal definition of a senior engineer is "a person who noticed that they already forgot some things they used to know by heart".

You can't know everything and you can't keep up with this firehose of new knowledge that is published every day.

Most of that is not relevant to your field anyway - whatever it might be, so you don't actually have to know any of it.

I mean, you're free to take it all in, but don't expect anyone to quiz you on it in a professional environment.

Do you have a sense of what specific anxiety you feel? Maybe not (and that’s ok) but to me that’s the more interesting question.

I could imagine fears about job security, maybe some sense of falling behind? A simple fear missing of missing out on all the fun in specific sub-fields?

We have such a large field in general, I don’t think anyone can know it all, but that can be something to celebrate too. Never a dull moment :)

If you want to feel relieved you could try reading the comments section when some topic you know stuff about is posted.

If anything I feel depressed from the lack of critical thought considering that buzzwor-y platitudes that dominate the front page.

Not really surprising considering the vast majority of people here seem to have probably not received higher education (university/college) in regards to STEM. I didn’t think this was the case before I joined though.