SL61

The enrollment numbers are probably for majors, i.e. enrollment count of 5 for the French program means there are 5 students majoring in French. The vast majority of students taking French classes would be taking them for general education requirements (or whatever WVU calls that), or due to other degree programs requiring a language class, or as electives.

At my alma mater, the Philosophy department had something like 10 majors, but the whole department was kept afloat by the Nursing College's requirement for their students to take an ethics class. The philosophy professors would teach a few high-level philosophy courses to tiny classes, and then several massive ethics seminars with hundreds of nursing students.

I've been on here for a decade. Back in the day, HN really gave off a sense that most users were aspiring entrepreneurs, with a lot more discussion about YC, et al.

I'm American, but I know someone who seems to fit the definition of hikikomori (not just NEET), and it's been interesting to talk with him over the years.

He lives just down the road from me, but we haven't met in person since high school. We only chat over Discord. Any attempt to meet up somewhere, even if he initially seems semi-receptive, is shot down with an excuse. He lives in his childhood bedroom in his parents' house, where he plays video games 12+ hours a day and sleeps the rest of the time. As far as I can tell, he leaves the house when his parents drag him along on trips, but otherwise has no connection to the outside world. His parents are lower-middle class, so this is a huge strain on them and I get the impression that there's some tension going on as he approaches 30.

We started off having a lot in common - I struggled to find a job out of high school, but I put effort into finding one and after several years I have a decent career path. He was shocked when I mentioned that I'd started a job, and he assumed that my parents had forced me to get one. I thought it was really interesting that his mind went there first.

When I lightly approach the topic of employment, it's 50/50 whether he offers an excuse for not having a job (usually depression and/or anxiety) or just says he thinks having a job would suck. It's like he simultaneously believes he's not capable of holding down a job, and also that he just prefers playing video games all day over working. And when I think about the types of jobs that would hire a guy in his late 20s who's never had a job before (grocery store bagger? fast food?), it's a bit understandable.

I think hikikomorism, or at least our Western version of it, comes from an inability to approach some of the leaps of early adulthood. Getting your first job, moving out, going to college, etc. all involve going out of your comfort zone and diving into something unfamiliar and scary, and it seems like these people are absolutely terrified of leaving their comfort zones.

The guy I know definitely wants out, but it just seems insurmountable to him.

I've seen this on a site that I built for a freelance client a couple years ago. At first they only indexed the homepage and some sporadic articles. Eventually one specific article was linked on an .edu website, and now that article is reliably indexed as well.

If I manually request that they index a page, it always succeeds and shows up on Google within a few days, but the page gets pruned from the index within a month or two.

The weird thing is that within the past couple years I've also seen unwanted indexing, e.g. low-spec staging servers getting wrecked by Google crawler traffic. I don't think the "no automatic indexing" treatment is standard for every site, so there must be something that triggers it, but I've spent a long time unsuccessfully trying to pin down the cause.

I had a similar experienced as a kid in the 2000s, though not quite as strict as yours.

My group of school friends would talk in person at school and then hop on a Call of Duty lobby when they got home, or chat on Facebook/SMS. Without internet or a cell phone, I was only present for a small portion of the their conversations and activities. Someone might post something funny or shocking on Facebook and everyone would be talking about it at school the next day. Sometimes people would continue a conversation that had started online the night before, and I had to either sit quietly or ask someone to fill me in (with mixed results). The result of all this is that I never quite formed bonds with that group, I was always on the periphery, the guy who hung out with them at school.

I assume all of that is more intense today than it was circa 2010.

The "keep your kids off social media" advice only works if a lot of other parents do the same, and if you live in an area where kids can easily visit each other in person.

The consequential factor isn't whether it's true, but the fact that a lot of people believe it. It's an attitude I hear from most of my peers, in and out of tech. What happens when a lot of the people who keep society running half-ass their jobs because they believe effort won't be rewarded?

> This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.

It still does. Just think of a movie or show and search for it, and they'll probably have it, although they seem to be missing the occasional season.

I think the DVD site would still be popular if more people were aware of the size of its catalog. Most probably assume it has the same catalog as the streaming service.

I would agree with this if the issue were movies or games, but most people know that you can Google "[book title] pdf" and get a free copy. The small file sizes mean that piracy sites don't need to rely on torrents and can just offer a direct download. I frequently see piracy sites in search results just from searching the title of a book. The barrier to pirating a book is extremely low.

We had remedial classes at my university, with the same test-score-based selection system. Everyone had to take two English classes: ENG 101 and ENG 102.

Students with very low SAT/ACT scores in reading/writing needed to take ENG 50-something before moving on to 101 and 102. Students with high test scores could take an Honors version of ENG 101 that also fulfilled the requirements for 102 (so they would only need to take one class).

The problem was that the overall bell curve was so low. The students in remedial courses tended to be extremely low performers - learning disabilities, serious issues at home, or older adults who hadn't been in an academic environment in decades. Those students' writing would have basic grammatical and structural issues leading to unreadability, and ENG 50 was focused on teaching them how to form a sentence or techniques to memorize spelling. There were some downright heroic ENG 50 professors, but the students who made it into ENG 101 had passed a very low bar.

I don't know if the standardized tests have become easier over time. I took the ACT a couple times in 2014 and 2015 but I don't really remember it.

I forgot to mention in my original comment - I graduated in 2020.

In most of my classes, the professors were just happy to get a paper with proper spelling/grammar and some degree of coherence. Strength of argumentation might be the difference between an A- and an A.

For context, I graduated in 2020.

Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes.

Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.

Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.

Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.

Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!

It's the same for me: the eureka moment happens when I'm not consciously thinking of the problem at all, and often I'm fully engaged in an unrelated activity.

Some places I've experienced sudden insight for a technical problem:

* playing a video game on Saturday evening

* briefly awake at 3am to use the bathroom

* shopping for tea kettles on Amazon

* reading aloud in a writer's group

The idea just pops into my head, sometimes throwing me off the task I'm actually focused on. I assume there's a subconscious portion of my brain still calculating the problem even when I don't realize it, but I can see why some people believe their insights come from a higher power.

I've found it to be important to optimize your diet for satiation, too. If you eat a lot of junk food, it's going to be a struggle to keep to 1500 calories.

A good meal for weight loss, in my experience, is a modest portion of a lean protein (e.g. fish or chicken), a large vegetable portion, and a small amount of carbs (maybe toast or a roll). A lot of my meals are based on that formula and it keeps me full until the next meal for maybe half the calories of a burger and fries.

My plan was to lose weight without thinking about it too much - just adjusting my habits instead of counting calories every day; weighing in occasionally and tweaking my routine based on results. It's been successful so far.

Yeah, I live in an area that straddles the line between the midwest and the south, and I haven't seen anything like this. Same for the QR-code-only menus that the internet has been complaining about lately.

I'm sure that if one local restaurant implemented this they wouldn't last long, but if a lot of local restaurants started doing it at the same time, they'd probably get away with it. Maybe they're all waiting for someone else to take the plunge.

The idea is that a search feature leads to harassment or spam. You could, for example, search for your favorite politician's name and hurl insults at anyone who criticizes them.

A lot of Mastodon users want Mastodon's #1 priority as a platform to be harassment prevention, even if it requires major compromises in usability.

(Another example of this is the lack of a quote-tweet (quote-toot) feature.)

Ironically, the community's response to the author of this blog post when he debuted his search tool could probably qualify as harassment - he was absolutely walloped on there.

A while back I thought about making a chat room website that only allows entry if it's between midnight and 5am in the user's time zone. I was a night owl at the time and liked the idea of making the middle of the night a bit less lonely.

I ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to keep it secure and prevent spam for what amounted to a small idea, but I've been secretly hoping someone else comes up with it someday.

Depending on what you liked about The Secret History, you might enjoy The Goldfinch from the same author.

It has the same basic concept of wealthy, pretentious young adults making bad choices, but it's set in NYC and Las Vegas instead of a rural liberal arts college. It's written 20 years after TSH and it's quite a bit more polished, for better or worse.

I haven't played Victoria 3 yet, so it's possible they've addressed my concerns in it.

Are there companies that expect their developers to keep up with the latest developments so aggressively? At my job, things like Remix/Deno/Turbopack make the water-cooler conversations, but we only use established tools for projects. I think it would take several years for me to fall behind if I simply ignored new frameworks and tools.

As a longtime Paradox player, I have a similar issue with their recent games.

They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame.

Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.

Not a senior but I was in your position just last year. (Yes, 9 years after making my HN account...)

Pick a specialty like a hobby or field of study and aim most of your projects toward it. Connect with people in that speciality on Twitter or by contributing to their GitHub repos. The ideal niche will have enough people to get you a good number of connections, but few enough people that you're not lost in the noise.

Spend more time building things than applying for jobs. Most people advocate blasting out a wide spread of low-effort applications, but I don't think it works as well for self-taught developers. You need a good portfolio of original, high-quality projects that you can explain in depth, and well-target applications and cover letters.

Any kind of paid work is better than personal projects. Think about people you know and people you knew in the recent past, and ask yourself who might want some kind of freelance work. You don't have to charge a lot - if they pay you, it goes into your "Freelance Experience" resume section and now you have professional experience.

Craigslist is basically unusable in my area if you're selling something. 90%+ of the people who respond to you will express interest, chat about the item, set up a time to meet, and then no-show and ghost you. I don't know what they're getting out of it. It's not worth the time for me to go through 5-6 of those people for everything I want to sell.

Maybe Facebook, etc., have this problem too, but I gave up on selling things locally. These days I just try to pass things on to friends and family.

I'm not the person you replied to but:

1. I search for a topic and pick out a video that seems interesting.

2. I remember the names of the few YouTubers I like, and I look them up once in a while.

I do actually have a YT account and I'm subscribed to some people, but I rarely bother to sign in.

For me, YouTube is a platform for seeking content rather than a platform for being fed content (like HN or Twitter).

We have a couple production websites on Heroku. One is a decade-old Rails app and the other is a Rails backend for a ~3-year-old site whose frontend is hosted on Vercel.

The decade-old app is still running great. We make extensive use of the Heroku CLI and some of the addons for databases and logging. The newer one isn't so heavily integrated into Heroku's features aside from the database. It was set up by a senior dev who's given largely free rein over his projects, but otherwise the company switched to DigitalOcean for new projects several years ago.

So my job is ~75% working with DO droplets and ~25% Heroku dynos. I didn't care either way, really, because at the end of the day my priority is the actual program. But the recent blowup with Heroku's GitHub integration was really painful, especially for our old app whose deployment process was deeply integrated with our GitHub repo. Once the outage had dragged out for a couple weeks, I started advocating to my lead for a move to DigitalOcean. The only reason we haven't done it yet is that we're a consultancy so we'd need to sell our very non-technical customer on a migration.

My points are 1) I think a lot of Heroku's business in 2022 comes from large, old projects that, for various reasons, are complicated to move elsewhere, and 2) Heroku is pretty much fine for those projects, aside from the recent issues that were thankfully resolved.

The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction. On a new account with 0 followers, most people won't see you. Even if you reply to a popular tweet, most people will ignore your reply because of your low follower count.

I have two Twitter accounts: a pseudonymous one with a few hundred followers where I talk about my hobbies, and a professional one with a very low follower count where I talk about tech.

The first account is a lot of fun - I can post about something and 5-10 of my Twitter friends (people with shared interests who I only know via Twitter) will chat with me about it. The professional one is giving me the experience you're describing. A couple coworkers follow me and a few random people, but not enough of an audience for anyone to see my tweets. It feels like a waste of time.

I consider it a design flaw that Twitter makes it so hard to get your account off the ground. Sites like HN and Reddit allow you to jump in the conversation on a fresh account, but on Twitter you're just invisible. I got my first account up and running thanks to some real-life friends following me, and I can't imagine how to make my professional account stand out.

I don't think OP is the blog author. The post title is just the original title from the blog. If you follow the link and leave a comment on the blog post, the Addict himself will see it and probably respond.

I took a few English classes as electives, and it was astonishing to see the number of English students (in a third-year class) who struggled with basic grammar and composition. The majority of the students wrote at what I'd consider early high school level. I don't know why. Maybe the professors were all afraid of giving bad grades, or the freshman-level intro classes weren't filling the role they were supposed to. But those students were going into a lot of debt to coast through easy classes that don't teach them the fundamentals of their degree.

I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.

Still works here, using Firefox 84 on Ubuntu. That's pretty cool.

Looks like it uses JS to constantly update the favicon so it matches the DOOM screen.

Plato’s dialogues are mostly accessible and deal with basic philosophical questions. He was not the first philosopher, but his works are a great starting point to understanding the foundations of western philosophy. I forget the names of each one, but the series of dialogues involving Socrates’s trial and imprisonment are quick to read and thought-provoking. The best part of Plato is that he doesn’t just tell you what he thinks, he teaches you how to think critically and philosophically.

Once you’ve finished Plato, you can move onto Aristotle, particularly his Ethics.

As for “how to deal with bad things,” the Stoics are very popular now. Also check out the Epicureans. I think you should balance out these views with alternate approaches, maybe from Laozi.

After that, you may be interested in the rationalist-empiricist debate. (I’m skipping over a lot of medieval work that laid the foundations for this.) Descartes and Hume are the most readable of each group, respectively, in my experience.

If you are interested, you can move onto questions of “the meaning of life” or however you want to phrase it. A lot of this work rests on the very difficult works of Hegel and Kant, which would take a ton of time and effort to read and are probably not worth it for a non-academic. Kierkegaard is wonderful but also difficult to read. Fortunately at this stage, there are novelists who have read this stuff and put it into novels. Dostoyevsky and Camus provide a good synthesis of existential thought, coming to very different conclusions.

Everything I’ve mentioned in this comment can be read in a year or less, assuming you read at least the major one or two works from each author I’ve mentioned. At that point you won’t have an academic understanding of the field, but you’ll have a solid practical philosophical foundation for your daily life.

I never played it, but as a kid in 2009 I would go to the computer lab in the children’s section of the local library, and Roblox was absolutely huge there. I’d be sitting there doing my own thing, surrounded by 20 kids noisily playing Roblox.

It’s impressive how they’ve managed to make a game with such staying power. Especially among young children, new things tend to flare up and then die really quickly. Persisting through generations of kids is a huge accomplishment.