I don't have any advice, either technologically or socially. I have what I think solutions are but society doesn't like my solutions, and we live in a society.
1. Maybe read some Pessimist philosophers. I find solace in cosmic entropy. I don't believe in a literal God, but Mainlander's idea of pandeism where god killed itself and the cosmos is his "rotting body" helps me gain a cosmic spin on things.
2. The older I get the more I realize humans are really dumb people. Capable of some amazing things, and yes, "wisdom of the crowd" can be right at times, but it can be very very very wrong. And "really smart people" who lead the charge can really fuck shit up. Technologically. Socially. And more.
3. If it helps, I literally just added a filter to ublock for hacker news to strip out Startup and AI keywords, it's not the best filter (I could probably remove some non-capitalized words)
But here:
# top (title / url)
news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(AI|ai|GPT|gpt|ChatGPT|MCP|OpenAI|grok|copilot|ollama|claude|gemini|bard|deepseek|blockchain|siri|anthropic|deepmind|Claude|DeepSeek|BitNet|LLM|Llama|ML|AlphaGo|Startup|StartUp|YCombinator|Cursor)/):upward(tr)
this might help reduce at least having to see it, and get back to what you WANT to see.
I want to see actual coding and language theory and os stuff. But 1/3 of the content here is AI now, and it's a huge turn off. It's noise to me, so having a filter to get what I WANT out of this site, is better than me turning it off completely.
I wish I had an answer for you in terms of mental state, I don't think there's a way out of this rut, and I think it's only going to get worse from here, and the pollyannas wanting you to pretend like nothings wrong... Well. IMO that's why we're here. Ignorant of history (actual history not the pop history everyone gets in school) and I don't mean this from one perspective or another. I've read Fascist literature, Capitalist Literature and Communist Literature. I've seen scenes play out on all sides that I despair from.
I don't mean to bring you down, but the best I've got is the above (and maybe microdosing psilocybin which helped me yesterday. I was stuck in a mental pit, and 666 mg psilocybin chocolate bars helped lift me just enough so I was able to see with clarity, give me the serotonin boost I needed and step back and observe the "snakes"/selves all writhing - negative aspects of myself, why they exist, how I anchor myself to angst, because it is a grounding. If I have no angst, I have nothing in this world but chaos.
Angst ist meine heimat. But being able to step outside and see what it is and why and how... I don't say you should do that, psychedelics are not for everyone, and they can fuck some people up, and some people get the wrong ideas from them (looks at the hippie->fascist pipeline).
------
Speaking of coding, and finding reasons to do it - I'm continually fighting my own ADHD tendencies to make some really dumb stupid little projects that don't matter to anyone, but to me, to say "I COULD DO THIS". I will never get rich off it. I will never even make money off it, but to know I was creative. That is about the best I got.
One little ember flickering before it dies off with the rest of the charred husk of this planet.
I can’t test type narrowing right now, but I suspect that (“age” in obj) or a similar hasOwn() etc wouldn’t narrow it to just (type) in neither of these languages. It is correct to write “age?” under your assumption, e.g. for settings objects, but sometimes a property is or must be always there.
Maybe the reason is that this distinction creates an unnecessary complexity at matching semi-optional types together, because programs do not usually care about exists/defined distinction.
I wrote this FAANG interview guide a while ago after doing the LC grind and interviewing a bunch of places. I email it to people when they ask me about getting into FAANG. Note that Blind, while useful, is very toxic:
These are the best tools for finding out what compensation actually is at these places. I know enough people in these companies to know these numbers are accurate. Keep in mind these numbers often include stock appreciation. You can filter to new offers to get numbers that exclude stock appreciation.
1. Leetcode (LC)
FAANG+ interviews always involve solving programming problems in real time. The best place to practice is Leetcode.
Buy a yearlong Leetcode premium subscription and do all the modules listed here, in no particular order, but skip decision trees and machine learning: https://leetcode.com/explore/learn/
A lot of these problems are on the modules linked previously, so you will only have 30-40 new problems here
Next, do random problems until you "see through the matrix." Focus on medium level problems. Try to do something like 35% easy, 50% medium, 15% hard. If you can't find the optimal solution to a problem, "upsolve" by reading a bit of the solution and trying again. If you still can't get it, copy the code of the solution and study it. Then erase it and try to solve it from memory. Periodically go back over solved problems and re-solve them while taking notes. Your goal should be to solve two random LC mediums in ~35 minutes. Solve problems out loud to simulate communicating your thoughts to an interviewer.
Consider using Python as your interview language if you are comfortable enough with it. It's faster than Java for writing. Some places will have you run the code, others it will be a glorified whiteboard, so don't use the run button as a crutch. Around two weeks before your interview, start doing company tagged problems like: https://leetcode.com/company/doordash/
Start doing this part first and grind it hard. It might take 3 months, it might take a year. It takes as long as it takes until you think you can crush it.
2. System Design
The system design interview tests your ability to piece together components to build an entire product or feature. A typical question is something like "design a URL shortener that serves 1B requests per day." You will need to choose database/pubsub/caching technologies appropriate to the problem, describe DB schemas, caching strategies, partitioning/replication schemes, design APIs, etc.
Also FAANG level engineering blogs. Uber/Doordash/Netflix/Facebook. Tech talks on Cassandra/Kafka and stuff like that.
Videos are the best last minute prep before interviews for design.
3. Applying
Get referrals wherever you can. Most places will ignore you unless you have them. I applied to probably 25+ companies and got rejects or ignored for all but Uber, AirBnB and LinkedIn. Places I had referrals to I scored onsites for 100% of the time, including places that rejected me before a referral. You can get them referrals off of Blind, but you probably also have people in your network in FANG and top tier companies. People will be motivated to refer since referral bonuses are usually large.
4. Interviewing
The process is recruiter call -> "phone screen" (do an LC problem on Hackerrank on a zoom call) -> "onsite" which is 5 hours of zoom...usually 2 coding, 1 behavioral (maybe a small coding question as well), 1 design.
Do mock interviews with friends/colleagues for LC problems. I would totally be willing to do mocks with you when you are ready. I had 3 different people give me a total of 6 mock interviews. You can also pay for this with different companies like interviewing.io or randoms off Blind. I can give you the contact info of the guy from Uber who did the system design mock with me as well. He is super super good. It's much harder to find mock interviewers for system design.
Also for interviews you can interview over 2-3 days after 3pm PST to avoid taking time off work. Recruiters will let you push back interviews for any reason multiple times, especially if it's for more interview prep, so if you aren't where you want to be before one, it's totally fine to ask for more time.
5. Negotiating
You should try to get all your interviews lined up very close together to get competing offers, which can increase your offer by a lot.
<head>
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><b>2023.02.20</b></p>
<p>This is the first paragraph.</p>
<p>This is the second.</p>
</body>
Save that as "blogpost.htm" somewhere a web server can see it.
Add stylesheets and so on as you get more comfortable, but it really is that simple. All that matters in the long run is what you put between the <p> tags.
For a period of a few months a couple years back, I was extremely worried about my house being broken into while I was asleep. Eventually it got bad enough to effect be seriously effecting my sleep. I would stay up late worried about it until I basically couldn't stay up anymore.
One of the things that helped me the most was sitting down and thinking, if I was going to break into someone's house, would I choose this one?
There ended up being a lot of reasons not to break into my house. We always kept our front and rear porch lights on. We had houses extremely close by on both sides, so the chances of being seen are much higher than if you broke into one of the houses at the edge of our little neighborhood. We had two larger dogs that would definitely bark if anyone unfamiliar so much as walked by. There were much larger and nicer houses nearby to break into instead.
This thought experiment didn't put the irrational part of my brain to rest immediately, but it did help considerably with the anxiety. Eventually my anxiety went away entirely - I think it was being caused by the fact that I was out of work at the time and facing a lot of stress trying to find a job. It just happened to manifest as an irrational fear of break ins.
Anyways, I recommend anyone suffering from excessive anxiety talk to a professional about it. However, it can take a long time to get an appointment depending on where you live, so I would recommend my strategy as an interim measure while you wait.
For what it's worth, I've also had a phobia of spiders my entire life and have recently been applying a similar technique to fix it. Watching videos of spiders on the internet, especially videos of people handling spiders, has decreased the anxiety I experience around them significantly. I can even kill them by myself now, instead of freezing up and asking my wife to do it. I hope to keep working on it until I feel comfortable enough to either not kill them and just let them be, or to transport them outside.
If anyone hasn't watched the documentary 'Cadillac Desert' on the importance of water in the history and development of the United States Southwest, then I would highly recommend putting it on.
I use a low folding beach chair that I think my wife got at a CVS or Walgreens store (US). Sorry I don't have a model number or better photo of the whole chair. One "c" clamp is enough to hold a board in place for the laptop. I'm about 61.5 kilos / 177 cm. In a shady spot I can work comfortably for a few hours with short breaks. The low height means I can put my legs out in front of me. The board fits inside the chair when its folded so I can carry them with one hand.
My neighborhood. When we moved in we sat out front every evening, and made small talk with every single person who walked by. Some were caught off guard, some kinda just waved and moved on, but most stopped to talk.
What's interesting is that people who had lived in that neighborhood nearly 20 years together had never talked, and met for the first time as both stopped to chat at nearly the same time.
Then we started with small gifts, usually food because my wife cooks exotic things for people to try. Now we get random gifts, usually food or fruits or some flower or plant.
Now we have little get togethers inviting each other, text to ask if need anything from the store, etc. And all it took was being willing to sit outside for a couple hours each night and say hi.
At work I have a colleague that is basically a 10x software architect/engineer. You can throw anything at him and he masters it in record time. He's just in another league.
He uses pen and paper for notes and todos. Nothing else.
The other oddity is that he uses the internet read-only, except for email. Zero social media accounts, forums, no mobile apps other than the standard ones. He doesn't exist online.
I admire him. There's no need for productivity suites or "life hacks" when you keep things simple, focus, and remove all distractions.
Besides avoiding personal distractions, he's also my role model in avoiding work distractions. He commits to one or two projects and ignores everything else. He won't answer your email or chat and won't attend your meeting. He cuts through nonsense like a human laser.
More broadly, it’s an important emotional insight to realize that you are not the product of your work. You are the insight and the knowledge and the diligence and the intelligence that produced the work that was a good solution to a particular problem that existed in a particular context at a particular time. You are the person who did good work before and who can do it again.
It's called ruminating. You do have to train yourself to stop thinking of work past a certain point. It's unhealthy and doesn't make you more productive. The 9-5 actually makes it worse, because you're helpless outside office hours.
The proposed solution is to acknowledge that it's anti-productive. And if you really have to think about work, do it in a productive manner - plan out a schedule, read a book, don't feel helpless.
The reason I learned Vim in 2019 is b/c I wanted a lightweight, powerful, ubiquitous tool. I was willing to overcome the learning curve, but it took time. The most helpful advice I got was from this article https://medium.com/actualize-network/how-to-learn-vim-a-four...:
Week 1: Complete vimtutor once a day, every day
Week 2: Use Vim with minimal config, no plugins
Week 3: Use Vim with minimal plugins
Week 4: Compose Vim commands with verbs and nouns
There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format.
Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic.
EDIT: I forgot to mention https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder (the best general purpose web recorder application I have used during my previous research into archiving personal web usage)
A flying drone is a really solid idea for a Titan lander for a couple reasons:
* The surface atmosphere density is higher than Earth's (1.5 atm)
* Gravitational force is much lower (0.15g)
* We don't know a lot about the surface composition or topography, so wheels and motors represent a challenge
* Visibility may be poor, making visual navigation tricky (though that's also a problem for a flying vehicle I suppose)
I've heard people ask about "why a nuclear power source?" Saturn is 10x as far from the sun as Earth, so sunlight is about 1/100th as bright. In addition, Titan's atmosphere blocks most of that. There really isn't any other realistic option.
I think Seneca said something on the topic that meshes even better with HN and the startup way of life than this essay:
The state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations but must regulate their sleep by another’s, their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.
On a related note, I hate how that Aurelius quote is always cut off. The full quotation is, "Live every day as if it were your last: without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense." The point isn't that you should go party and have fun and not plan for the future, which the additional "without" clauses clarify. Aurelius meant that you should adopt an emotional state of peace and firm dedication. Because most people really would not party on their last day, if they knew. They would go about their business calmly, taking care of the most important priorities, making amends and sharing time with loved ones, ensuring that their affairs were in order and their conscience clean, and appreciating every detail of every moment as if it were infinitely precious. Nothing would upset them unduly because they would know nothing will affect them anymore soon.
Similarly, you probably wouldn't want to wake up and go to an awful job. If doing your job makes the world a better place, you can justify going because you know you are building a legacy, even with your final moments. If you're passionate about it, you can justify it. If the job allows you to provide for your loved ones, you would go even on your last day.
So Jobs like many others misunderstood the quote out of context but reached the conclusion Aurelius intended anyway. And that conclusion is good advice! If you're just doing the minimum to skate by, not really thriving, you're probably selling yourself short. Unless you have some other reason for working that gives meaning to your life (e.g. kids, funding a passion project/hobby, religion), it's just not worth going to a shitty job just for the paycheck.
This is pretty much my exact setup, and I've been loving it. (the new Firefox is 99% super awesome)
The only thing I still have some configuration for is vim[0]. Mostly to make it work better with tmux and for an improved JavaScript development workflow.
A better option might be this https://syncthing.net/. I'd like to have a play and see if I can get this to sync with a backblaze bucket. Then it would do everything I want. But not for work :(. Dropbox has been certified as secure so we're allowed to use it and nothing else.
1. Maybe read some Pessimist philosophers. I find solace in cosmic entropy. I don't believe in a literal God, but Mainlander's idea of pandeism where god killed itself and the cosmos is his "rotting body" helps me gain a cosmic spin on things.
2. The older I get the more I realize humans are really dumb people. Capable of some amazing things, and yes, "wisdom of the crowd" can be right at times, but it can be very very very wrong. And "really smart people" who lead the charge can really fuck shit up. Technologically. Socially. And more.
3. If it helps, I literally just added a filter to ublock for hacker news to strip out Startup and AI keywords, it's not the best filter (I could probably remove some non-capitalized words)
But here: # top (title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(AI|ai|GPT|gpt|ChatGPT|MCP|OpenAI|grok|copilot|ollama|claude|gemini|bard|deepseek|blockchain|siri|anthropic|deepmind|Claude|DeepSeek|BitNet|LLM|Llama|ML|AlphaGo|Startup|StartUp|YCombinator|Cursor)/):upward(tr)
# bottom (stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(AI|ai|GPT|gpt|ChatGPT|MCP|OpenAI|grok|copilot|ollama|claude|gemini|bard|deepseek|blockchain|siri|anthropic|deepmind|Claude|DeepSeek|BitNet|LLM|Llama|ML|AlphaGo|Startup|StartUp|YCombinator|Cursor)/):upward(tr) + *
this might help reduce at least having to see it, and get back to what you WANT to see.
I want to see actual coding and language theory and os stuff. But 1/3 of the content here is AI now, and it's a huge turn off. It's noise to me, so having a filter to get what I WANT out of this site, is better than me turning it off completely.
I wish I had an answer for you in terms of mental state, I don't think there's a way out of this rut, and I think it's only going to get worse from here, and the pollyannas wanting you to pretend like nothings wrong... Well. IMO that's why we're here. Ignorant of history (actual history not the pop history everyone gets in school) and I don't mean this from one perspective or another. I've read Fascist literature, Capitalist Literature and Communist Literature. I've seen scenes play out on all sides that I despair from.
I don't mean to bring you down, but the best I've got is the above (and maybe microdosing psilocybin which helped me yesterday. I was stuck in a mental pit, and 666 mg psilocybin chocolate bars helped lift me just enough so I was able to see with clarity, give me the serotonin boost I needed and step back and observe the "snakes"/selves all writhing - negative aspects of myself, why they exist, how I anchor myself to angst, because it is a grounding. If I have no angst, I have nothing in this world but chaos.
Angst ist meine heimat. But being able to step outside and see what it is and why and how... I don't say you should do that, psychedelics are not for everyone, and they can fuck some people up, and some people get the wrong ideas from them (looks at the hippie->fascist pipeline).
------
Speaking of coding, and finding reasons to do it - I'm continually fighting my own ADHD tendencies to make some really dumb stupid little projects that don't matter to anyone, but to me, to say "I COULD DO THIS". I will never get rich off it. I will never even make money off it, but to know I was creative. That is about the best I got.
One little ember flickering before it dies off with the rest of the charred husk of this planet.
Sorry so long.