This [0] comment and discussion under it about how non technical businesses are very rarely run by technical people, and how if you apply your technical skills to such a business it can be a force multiplier.
Well, it so happened that my partner had started a small sourdough bakery the year before. I was thinking about investing in it. This comment provided some of the inspiration and now a few years later we're both working on it full time, we have three cafe branches, one production facility, 25 staff, thinking about opening another branch in a neighboring city. Our skills complement each other - she's great at baking and HR, I'm better at developing business processes, managing the tooling, researching equipment, making sure things are properly documented. We're both crap at marketing, but somehow we get by!
My old career as a graphics dev feels like a distant memory, but I do keep my skills sharp and might go back to it in the future.
It has by no means been an easy ride for me, I am forced to juggle a ton of jobs and many of them are way outside my comfort zone. But at the same time, I'm creating something in the real world, and providing employment for 25 people, whom I do my best to make sure are treated well and given a decent place to work. This feels far more impactful than my graphics work ever was.
6 weeks before my son turned 4, I read a post here recommending the book 'Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons'.
Since three months after his 4th birthday, he's been an avid reader, which has unlocked opportunities for joy/entertainment and for curiosity/learning.
Reading has also increased his spoken vocabulary. I know because a couple of times I've heard him use a word correctly but pronounce it incorrectly.
made an account just to add to this. I did this workbook with my son the summer between K and 1st. every night we did a single lesson and his teachers were flabbergasted as he breezed through the spelling and reading curriculum for the entire year in the first month. the rest of the year he was allowed to choose books from the library while the others did assigned readings and he’s reading somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade level without any additional “study.”
the book provides a literal script for the parent to read, like inline code comments, which took a lot of the overhead out of it on my side. heart melting hearing him say his favorite gift/summer memory was “my dad teaching me to read!”
A number of posts made me realise the ratio of comment to post is toxic unless you understand yourself very clearly.
I now routinely delete posts on reflection, and I post a lot less than I used to, and I try to find interesting material to submit instead because I feel it is better to encourage input by being "productive" for want of a better word, than to fall into a semi constant sin of sniping, devils-advocating, well-actually..ing.
I'm not saying it made me happier, but I am certainly happer than I used to be. I have also applied this promiscuously across other social media (yes, this is one) online.
No particular post. I like HN's grab-bag aspect, there's something for everyone. Peeking your interest about things you hadn't heard of before, or get a new angle on something.
Beats all the "Trump did X, popstar married gf" crap out there.
I personally know somebody who posted in 'who wants to be hired' and was picked by good Samaritan here on HN. This changed my perspective, I was sceptical anybody on hiring side reads the 'who wants to be hired'. I started to read them after this happened (I'm not on hiring side but I share posts that catch eye)
I won't find the post, but the advice I read here that worked for me was something like : "If you want to do a project and are scared of the size, just start and see how far you can go".
This really lifted the pressure off. It doesn't matter if it doesn't work in the end, just see how far you can go. It's really simple.
This allowed me to launch a product, make a few thousand bucks from it, and then fold it, cause it wasn't such a good idea.
This same advice allowed me to finish the 1st version of a screenplay I wanted to write. I am in the 2nd version now. We'll see where it goes.
It rings more true than ever. The really important computing nowadays is all done on the GPU; the CPU is little more than a front-end processor. Furthermore, with AI and LLMs we're rapidly converging on a future where programming won't even resemble programming as we know it. If you're young and talented, the time to get ahead of the game is NOW. I am no longer young, so I will probably be one of the ones left behind.
I'm not young but I'm optimistic about the future :) when horses were replaced by cars, bunch of new industries was created. I wholeheartedly believe we will see this happen with code generation.
On a side note I like writing code, I think I'm not alone. Who knows, maye ol'good internet will be reborn?
"The purpose of charity is to end the need for charity"
IIRC, paraphrasing a quote from u/chubot, or someone very much like them.
My personal prime motivator is something like:
Help people help themselves.
And help those who can't.
And yet I largely remain unquestioningly committed to most social services (private, public, personal).
If I'm really devoted to feeding the hungry, for instance, I should always remember the proper goal is to end hunger (outright).
Even if that goal is unattainable. Maybe because that goal is unattainable. Which leads to a deeper inspection of the root causes, moral foundations, social context, etc.
It's just so easy to get caught up in the immediate necessity and lose site of root causes.
- I was most influenced by HN threads on books. I read dozens of books based on HN recommendations. This tangibly, concretely changed my life in a small way. I found authors like Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Hofstadter, etc. from HN. I am forever thankful. Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it thoroughly changed my life (as one element, not the sole thing). Just search "ask hn books", ans you will see ~30/40 threads with high quality recommendations.
- MOOCs recommended on HN threads are fantastic. I spent hundreds of hours on MOOCs recommended here. Same goes for textbooks. Other people’s lists I found posted here are also great. Like Mark Saroufim, Susan Rigetti, etc. I now have a really high threshold quality for tech/math books. I read SICP, Little Schemer, Steven Strogatz among many great books. There are threads on tech books, MOOCs, especially those posted during pandemics.
- I learned about the fast.ai MOOC here, and projects I did from the MOOC helped me land my first Deep Learning job. I was a Physics undergrad.
- There is higher quality of discourse where the standard is high. This put things into perspective, and made me much more confident and capable. Like, just learning a new language in a week- if you think this is normal to most people who do software, you are wrong.
- HN posts links to direct judgements, court filings, papers, etc. Now for all areas of my life, I look for the direct source- read new laws, past tax treaties, papers etc. I prefer it over reading blogs or newpaper reports.
- HN is actually diverse. I, for the first time in my life, encountered sane Right Wing here on HN. I am from India, and all American social media were biased towards one direction, and the RW discourse was kind of eh, not smart. Maybe Quora had a small faction of smart RW. Having smart RW sources to read and learn from makes me a well-rounded person. English is not my first language, and I jumped into social media without any supervision when I was 13. So, take that into account. All American social media was a particular side's echo-chamber. That was eyebrow raising and squint-demanding from even a 16 yo me.
- I see many on HN working with electronics, Math, AI as hobbies/side projects. That has directly inspired me to do the same in my life.
- There are a lot of people here who have families, a home, focus on friends, a job/business- helps me striving towards those. Before, there was a distorted view of consumer/hedonism/activism focused adult life focused on money, extremely strong opinions, bragging about achievements, etc. From the outside HN might seem like a startup/money focused forum for a certain "kind", but it has the highest concentration of diverse smart people in my experience. No other forum has so many meditators, electronics-tinkerer-for-fun, Math-obsessed-for-fun, etc. I started meditating ~4 years back based on a comment that recommended Mind Illuminated book. HN played an important role in my coming-of-age.
This [0] comment and discussion under it about how non technical businesses are very rarely run by technical people, and how if you apply your technical skills to such a business it can be a force multiplier.
Well, it so happened that my partner had started a small sourdough bakery the year before. I was thinking about investing in it. This comment provided some of the inspiration and now a few years later we're both working on it full time, we have three cafe branches, one production facility, 25 staff, thinking about opening another branch in a neighboring city. Our skills complement each other - she's great at baking and HR, I'm better at developing business processes, managing the tooling, researching equipment, making sure things are properly documented. We're both crap at marketing, but somehow we get by!
My old career as a graphics dev feels like a distant memory, but I do keep my skills sharp and might go back to it in the future.
It has by no means been an easy ride for me, I am forced to juggle a ton of jobs and many of them are way outside my comfort zone. But at the same time, I'm creating something in the real world, and providing employment for 25 people, whom I do my best to make sure are treated well and given a decent place to work. This feels far more impactful than my graphics work ever was.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099409
6 weeks before my son turned 4, I read a post here recommending the book 'Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons'.
Since three months after his 4th birthday, he's been an avid reader, which has unlocked opportunities for joy/entertainment and for curiosity/learning.
Reading has also increased his spoken vocabulary. I know because a couple of times I've heard him use a word correctly but pronounce it incorrectly.
made an account just to add to this. I did this workbook with my son the summer between K and 1st. every night we did a single lesson and his teachers were flabbergasted as he breezed through the spelling and reading curriculum for the entire year in the first month. the rest of the year he was allowed to choose books from the library while the others did assigned readings and he’s reading somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade level without any additional “study.”
the book provides a literal script for the parent to read, like inline code comments, which took a lot of the overhead out of it on my side. heart melting hearing him say his favorite gift/summer memory was “my dad teaching me to read!”
Derek Sivers Below Average
https://sive.rs/below-average
A number of posts made me realise the ratio of comment to post is toxic unless you understand yourself very clearly.
I now routinely delete posts on reflection, and I post a lot less than I used to, and I try to find interesting material to submit instead because I feel it is better to encourage input by being "productive" for want of a better word, than to fall into a semi constant sin of sniping, devils-advocating, well-actually..ing.
I'm not saying it made me happier, but I am certainly happer than I used to be. I have also applied this promiscuously across other social media (yes, this is one) online.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813
This post changed my view on how UI/UX of AI tools should be. It also somehow triggered "the urge to build something" inside me.
No particular post. I like HN's grab-bag aspect, there's something for everyone. Peeking your interest about things you hadn't heard of before, or get a new angle on something.
Beats all the "Trump did X, popstar married gf" crap out there.
I personally know somebody who posted in 'who wants to be hired' and was picked by good Samaritan here on HN. This changed my perspective, I was sceptical anybody on hiring side reads the 'who wants to be hired'. I started to read them after this happened (I'm not on hiring side but I share posts that catch eye)
The most inspiring post I've seen here is SketchLab (2022).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294388
I know why, but it’s too personal to say it here. But I can say that it’s on the same list I have Skecthpad (1963) in.
I won't find the post, but the advice I read here that worked for me was something like : "If you want to do a project and are scared of the size, just start and see how far you can go".
This really lifted the pressure off. It doesn't matter if it doesn't work in the end, just see how far you can go. It's really simple.
This allowed me to launch a product, make a few thousand bucks from it, and then fold it, cause it wasn't such a good idea.
This same advice allowed me to finish the 1st version of a screenplay I wanted to write. I am in the 2nd version now. We'll see where it goes.
This comment by hoppityboppity pretty much changed my whole perspective on things and made me realize I've pretty much wasted my professional life:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920
It rings more true than ever. The really important computing nowadays is all done on the GPU; the CPU is little more than a front-end processor. Furthermore, with AI and LLMs we're rapidly converging on a future where programming won't even resemble programming as we know it. If you're young and talented, the time to get ahead of the game is NOW. I am no longer young, so I will probably be one of the ones left behind.
I'm not young but I'm optimistic about the future :) when horses were replaced by cars, bunch of new industries was created. I wholeheartedly believe we will see this happen with code generation.
On a side note I like writing code, I think I'm not alone. Who knows, maye ol'good internet will be reborn?
"The purpose of charity is to end the need for charity"
IIRC, paraphrasing a quote from u/chubot, or someone very much like them.
My personal prime motivator is something like:
And yet I largely remain unquestioningly committed to most social services (private, public, personal).If I'm really devoted to feeding the hungry, for instance, I should always remember the proper goal is to end hunger (outright).
Even if that goal is unattainable. Maybe because that goal is unattainable. Which leads to a deeper inspection of the root causes, moral foundations, social context, etc.
It's just so easy to get caught up in the immediate necessity and lose site of root causes.
- I was most influenced by HN threads on books. I read dozens of books based on HN recommendations. This tangibly, concretely changed my life in a small way. I found authors like Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Hofstadter, etc. from HN. I am forever thankful. Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it thoroughly changed my life (as one element, not the sole thing). Just search "ask hn books", ans you will see ~30/40 threads with high quality recommendations.
- MOOCs recommended on HN threads are fantastic. I spent hundreds of hours on MOOCs recommended here. Same goes for textbooks. Other people’s lists I found posted here are also great. Like Mark Saroufim, Susan Rigetti, etc. I now have a really high threshold quality for tech/math books. I read SICP, Little Schemer, Steven Strogatz among many great books. There are threads on tech books, MOOCs, especially those posted during pandemics.
- I learned about the fast.ai MOOC here, and projects I did from the MOOC helped me land my first Deep Learning job. I was a Physics undergrad.
- There is higher quality of discourse where the standard is high. This put things into perspective, and made me much more confident and capable. Like, just learning a new language in a week- if you think this is normal to most people who do software, you are wrong.
- HN posts links to direct judgements, court filings, papers, etc. Now for all areas of my life, I look for the direct source- read new laws, past tax treaties, papers etc. I prefer it over reading blogs or newpaper reports.
- HN is actually diverse. I, for the first time in my life, encountered sane Right Wing here on HN. I am from India, and all American social media were biased towards one direction, and the RW discourse was kind of eh, not smart. Maybe Quora had a small faction of smart RW. Having smart RW sources to read and learn from makes me a well-rounded person. English is not my first language, and I jumped into social media without any supervision when I was 13. So, take that into account. All American social media was a particular side's echo-chamber. That was eyebrow raising and squint-demanding from even a 16 yo me.
- I see many on HN working with electronics, Math, AI as hobbies/side projects. That has directly inspired me to do the same in my life.
- There are a lot of people here who have families, a home, focus on friends, a job/business- helps me striving towards those. Before, there was a distorted view of consumer/hedonism/activism focused adult life focused on money, extremely strong opinions, bragging about achievements, etc. From the outside HN might seem like a startup/money focused forum for a certain "kind", but it has the highest concentration of diverse smart people in my experience. No other forum has so many meditators, electronics-tinkerer-for-fun, Math-obsessed-for-fun, etc. I started meditating ~4 years back based on a comment that recommended Mind Illuminated book. HN played an important role in my coming-of-age.
Thank you, HN!