arandr0x

I can't imagine why college campuses and other places where vulnerable people live don't already do license plate tracking. (OTOH, I think organized crime already knows how to circumvent it, and petty criminals often don't drive, don't drive with plates, or don't drive their own cars. But there is still a range of usefulness for e.g. stalking.)

> I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata

I don't see the use in sufficiently cosmopolitan cities, which are the only places with the camera density to do this. I think there's a better case for (using audio recordings) predicting social circles, because close associates tend to pick up both tonal patterns and vocabulary patterns.

I never got "bad" caffeine side effects (like cardiac ones) or even much wakefulness, and I think the article's idea that 400mg is somehow the "max" is hilarious. That's not even a little chatty.

I did end up cutting down in the sense that my life got healthier; where before it was easy to be in front of the computer sipping coffee or running from one staircase to another really fast literally all day, I got more things to do in my life that required time investment and reduced my intake from drinking coffee (and often espresso) sunup to midnight literally refilling cups the minute they were empty to about 8 or 9 cups a day. I discovered to my great surprise that I had never had social anxiety and didn't tolerate alcohol as well as I thought, and also that a lot more people in my life that I had known 1) noticed, 2) thought I had a problem and 3) did not find it funny.

I can't really cut it out now because I don't really think there's an alternative I'd like that isn't worse, but the improvement was there and the worst part is I would never have guessed it before. Like, I thought that stuff was all my personality. And the relationship stuff also was a major difference; in the sense that I was constantly complaining about not having a support system but also not leaving myself time for other people or allowing myself to feel "natural" pleasure from interaction with people.

But also I think it's pretty okay to drink coffee (eat cookies, play video games, whatever your poison of choice is). I don't see why so many people are trying to entirely "cut it out". All your habits that have become expected constants of your life, and not pleasurable luxuries, should be subject to scrutiny though. Do you need daily coffee (cookies, video games, whatever)? What do your loved ones think of that? Have you ever thought of doing a new activity, but decided against it because your ritual seemed more comforting?

The above situation seems to happen at work, and it's unusual for people with personality disorders to simultaneously have major breaks with reality at work and be undiagnosed long-term. It's odd that it's the first interpretation you are choosing to address (by calling somebody else condescending to boot), although yes, the proper reaction to people with issues that severe is backing away slowly, so it's worth being said to cover all the bases.

You have no idea what they do or don't understand because all you have to go on is a noisy model of their mind in yours.

You need to focus on facts, actions and consequences. They don't understand how it works (your explanation) THEREFORE they question things that you thought had been put to rest? Ask them what would their opinion be IF (factual thing they're mistaken on) was true. Sometimes people do not disagree with you on facts; but their emotions can't let them agree on courses of action. Often you can direct people (with questions) towards verbalizing exactly what you wanted to tell them in the first place.

They don't understand how it works (your explanation) THEREFORE they are saying falsehoods about it to others? Correct the facts one by one as they come by, their model will self-update eventually. That comes standard with the human being firmware.

They don't understand how it works (your explanation) THEREFORE they are making assumptions or having expectations of your own work that are wrong? Kindly redirect by asking what factually they think is wrong with this part of your work, and what they think can be done about it, and who they think is the right person to do it. (I am being vague because you don't specify if the person is your superior, but if not, you can be more forceful in wording)

There is a chance you are in fact misinterpreting their words, because of incompatible jargon, either of you sucking at communication, or irreconcilable difference of interests.

I've once taken a 5-hour pre-interview test that actually took me from "eh why not" about the company to them being my first choice. My other offers were from companies that did not have at-home tests. I thought the particular at-home test was relevant to the job I would be doing, it (and the job) were in a language that I found during the test much more fun than the language I was working in at the time, and I found it in general a very appetizing job teaser.

Although yeah, I spend my evenings with my partner, and I was working extra hours at my real job, and it was a test you had only a few days to complete, so I had to pull an all-nighter for it.

It has a lot less real-world value if the AI is not capable of debugging the software in future conditions, or explain why it made it the way it made it. I would love for the "writing programs into existence" parts to be automated, but it does make further investigation costlier (since the human investigating also does have to get acquainted with the patterns in the code).

I do think there would be value in machine-written code if it made code in general more alike, so that you don't have to relearn the weird tricks any new writer could have chosen to use.

I was about to write a negative, sarcastic comment agreeing with you but (despite being absolutely sober) was suddenly filled with acceptance and understanding for my fellow humans and decided against it.

Dear HN, this person's got it. Hacker ethic is about finding the hidden ways in things, it's about not letting the world tell you what to do, it's definitely not about playing monkey tricks for money treats. Also, being a hacker is about fun. Fun, interestingly, is like, what happens when you don't have to force/trick/"hack" yourself into doing something. It's pretty great. If you're forgoing it for more volume of code then, maybe consider talking to someone about your goals and fears? Introspection and the ears of well-meaning people can do wonders for productivity, since nothing will let you do things quite like doing the right thing.

When you're young and lonely and clueless many unhealthy/unsustainable things can make you happy. Happy isn't the be-all, end-all of how work should be structured. Many people regret making tradeoffs they were once quite happy to be making.

The worst case scenario for rich kids, regardless what they do, is so much better than the average scenario for "average to bad public school" kids that it makes no difference exactly if your friends play chess, golf, or, like the ones at my private school, mostly do drugs and buy stuff with their mother's credit card.

Kids at average to bad public schools never meet people who own investment properties, don't learn how to pitch ideas, and don't treat their bank and insurance companies with the careless veneer of superiority that convinces them that whatever has happened to you is merely bad luck, a challenge on the way of better things, versus proof of your moral and genetic worthiness. Kids at average public schools think they can fail, and not merely that the world can fail them. Kids at average public schools think it matters that they be good, and not merely surround themselves with people and circumstances that are good to them.

How is software unique in this? Tons of museums around the world are visited by the kids of people who make 100k a year even though the average worker there is an unpaid intern. Do you read any news? Listen to NPR podcasts? I think NPR does pay interns, but they don't pay them millions of listeners * 50min a week of listener time * $60 an hour of average listener earnings.

What about science? If you ever benefitted from a genetic screening for any disease, your doctor made anywhere between $100 and $400 an hour, and the graduate student who discovered the function of that gene $10 an hour if you're accounting for his tuition credit. Who tells these students to stop spending 60 hours a week at the lab and start using their skills doing something people will pay for, like develop a no-palm-oil no-aspartame but-still-addictive Mars bar for 25c unit cost?

People will accept less money in exchange for doing something meaningful, like sitting in their basement painting stuff rich people will speculate on for millions of dollars after their death, or campaigning for a rich lawyer who already makes 200k and will get a good bonus post-election because he has the right party colors.

If you could literally sell meaning to people for less friction than those alternatives they'd eat it up. And they'd spend their time making money to spend it on your meaning-making money-sucking machine.

Because that's all money is for: be exchanged for things that make your life not suck. And this exchange tends to bear transaction costs.

In the 90s we thought open-source was countercultural. It was something you did to be part of a community, to be elite, to show those big dummies at Microsoft you didn't need them.

Today it's something you do to show Microsoft they need you, because today Bill Gates is the world's nicest old man, big companies are safer than the state, and nobody needs any individual person anymore.

It's happened with many other things. For example, early in the last century, journalism was something you did because you didn't want the powers that be to be the only ones heard, and today, well. In the 70s, popular culture was something you engaged with because you didn't want money to be the end-all of your life, and today, well.

It doesn't make open source (or writing or talking about music you like) a bad thing. It's just eventually adults who have money adopt things you like and adulthood and money change people. And when that happens it's not necessarily a loss. Counterculture becomes mainstream after it's _won_. In a lot of ways Linux won, and it _is_ on most people's daily computers today, even though that computer doesn't have a keyboard.

I wish I knew a kid today like I was then, though. A kid that doesn't want mainstream stuff, a kid who thinks we've all got it wrong, a kid who could tell me I don't get it. Because I'm sure I don't "get it" the way adults didn't get it in the 90s: I just don't know what "it" is anymore.

For food at least I think it may be somewhat amenable to some of the newer fingerprinting techniques (e.g. using DNA microarrays). I've been wondering why origin/content/quality validation for food based on actual biological science doesn't exist for years. I did biochemistry for undergrad, and some of those labs could be done in the average RV kitchen, and others could be packaged into test kits.

I don't think I'm your target audience. I like thinking about what to wear. (I'm female so maybe HN will forgive me for being a bad technologist stereotype in this way)

What I would want would be if I stumbled out of bed, said "where the (expletive) is my warm but super short dress" and Tony Stark's butler made it fly out of under the five cardboard boxes it has somehow fallen behind and went "Dear lady, it is freezing outside. Would you like cheeky printed tights or lace ones with this? Your favorite leather jacket is probably piled up under your Macbook."

Alas, I do not have a robot butler, and so I am seriously considering sticking RFID tags inside my clothing so I can have an app that tells me whether it is, in fact, hung up somewhere and I'm too sleep deprived to see it or I forgot to do laundry again.

Not a ton (I have an idea come to mind either in the night or the morning) but I easily spend 5min finding the stuff inside my closet and then an extra 3min debating if it's OK for the current weather and if I need extra layers or waterproof layers and if I own warm or waterproof things that match with my previous idea of what I want to wear.

this feels so familiar!

anyway none of those things are gonna matter in 20 years, but you probably know that. Do you have friends in tech to vent to?

You're young and this too shall pass. It's normal to feel anxious about things we are also excited for. It's a way your brain is planning for your life and trying to optimize it and, as a programmer, you probably have a brain that's pretty good at that.

If the thoughts are getting in the way of your life, for example causing you to stay curled up on the floor for more than five minutes, it's okay to redirect them. You're not going to "miss out" on your life's best decision by only allowing yourself five minutes to obsess on the future per 6-hour timebox. So, when they occur, accept the thoughts for a while, if something emerges that you think is a good plan write it down, and then after the five minutes are up get up and call a friend, do a physical activity, or put on a song you like.

If the same thoughts recur too often you can allow yourself to ditch them; tell yourself "I always think [that I can't afford a house] and it never leads to a good place!" and then make a conscious effort to think about how much you'd like to renovate a house or people in your life who have mortgages and still go on international vacations.

Above all, everyone I know who's over 25 has been there, and we're still alive. You'll be us someday.

Pretty great, but in my experience with a time where I was struggling/my boss was struggling/a coworker was struggling (different times), nobody is ever going to answer this question truthfully and everybody will think you're a threat for asking it.

list of things that in my experience may help if you suspect someone's not right:

* not eating alone

* eating at all, but the above makes it likelier

* when people give feedback that can be difficult, and instead of expecting the person to have an answer or excuse ready, build in time "off" with no f2f

* during difficult meetings or occasions where outbursts are narrowly averted, ask the person their opinion after. feeling listened to helps.

* if the problem is someone is working "too hard", 100% they kind of hate their non-work lives. They may actually also hate work but work is something predictable. Send them to a conference somewhere.

* people who have no friends will usually tell you so in exactly those words in the right circumstances. Believe them, it's a huge (huge!) contributor.

You should talk to university and business schools about this, because it sounds like it could provide more immediate feedback and be easier to grade than written case studies.

Wouldn't use books (just read papers, I liked Bioinformatics back in the day but it's a bit too math-y, generally the quality is there though). Do you mean genomics or some of the other subdomains of bioinformatics? Do you mean more for human health or ecology applications?

On a semi related note I got a biochemistry degree 10 years ago and have been writing software outside the field ever since. My partner still is in genomics so I do somewhat keep up but I definitely still love biochemistry and miss keeping up with it. So, uh, do you think you'd like to talk to someone about your projects or share good papers or something?

This guy makes several pretty clear references to needing his mom to do things like take him to Mexico and turn pages of books for him.

Does anyone think _she_ thought "hey why don't I accomplish big things" or "what do I need to sacrifice to get to where I want"? No? Was sitting in a library turning pages of books for someone part of her life ambition plan?

Accomplishing big things sometimes is getting a lot of help from your family and friends. They're not telling themselves Fight Club quotes as they're lending you money, talking you off the ledge or making you your favorite dinner every Sunday. They do it because it's the easiest thing in the world.

Maybe it's the most valuable too, even though no one, like, actually writes about it.

I have no strategy, learning just feels insanely good. Usually things I can't make sense of just get optimized away/drift into the ether and I don't care for remembering them (if it's important I will keep detailed notes of procedures, names etc at this point, but generally details/trivia don't cross my "care threshold"). <-- and honestly that is super important. It's just as much what you _don't_ learn, you know?

But things that change my understanding of a domain, let me contribute to something other people are building, or otherwise tell me how the world works?

Chances are I will spend hours non-stop talking about them relentlessly to anybody in range (or silently to myself) usually while moving, pace around so I can think faster, draw them, play around with problems that involve them, see everything in every domain as a manifestation of them for a while, and so on and so forth.

And apparently eventually it sticks. Like the first few notes of the song that was playing every morning of 8th grade or the color of grandma's roses. You can't fall in love with something for a while and then not think a little of it every time it's quiet.

Fahrenheit 451 basically called it with the whole "people in their living rooms never alone with their neighbors seeing inside through screens" part.

If you have the money to work full time on a personal project you have the time to sign up for a conference or three on the kind of scientific topic you like. Ideally, pick one near your home/in the closest metropolis.

Once there you can apply the following no-social-skills-needed guide to making contacts at a conference.

1. Watch the keynote.

2. After the keynote, walk up to pretty much anybody. Ask the following questions: "Do you think (keynote title) is a major area for (conference subject matter)?" and almost regardless of what they answer, you can follow up with "oh, really? Is what you're studying related to (keynote subject)?". Those two questions are enough to make virtually any academic launch in a paragraph-long exposé. Usually by the 6th conversation you have along those lines, you'll have a good summary of which subjects are considered important right now. If the person looks like they like you or are invested in talking about their topic, you can follow up by giving your contact info and saying you're interested in them sending you a paper on the subject they talked about (one of theirs if applicable).

3. There will be designated poster sessions. The posters are giant sheets of papers with young people in front of them. Walk up to a young person standing in front of a poster that doesn't look that slick but where the subject matter interests you (slick posters are from bigger labs where you are less likely to have an impact). Ask the person what they do, how long they've been doing it for, how big is their lab, and what's the most time-consuming step in their research right now.

4. If anyone asks you what you do, say you're an expert in (your computing area, web apps, cloud, data analysis, whatever) and interested in the intersection of (your area) and (conference name). Some of the people will say they think (your area) would be great for (their subfield) because of (super niche stuff you wouldn't have thought of). Grab their contact info so you can have a 1:1 meeting with them later where they find you a research subject.

Follow up by having email conversations with a few of the people. If a grad student looks like they can use your help, ask for an intro to the PI. Eventually you'll walk your way into a (possibly paid) research project. It's that simple. Thank you for caring about your world and its future.

People greatly enjoy feeling like they made a worthwhile sacrifice and giving up coffee is an easier achievement than running a half-marathon (though that one is also a popular cause of returning wives and Powerball wins).

Anyway, I'm like you, and actually once said "I have no caffeine sensitivity LIKE AT ALL", and then I cut down from "last coffee before dawn" to "around 1.5L" and the amount of psychological side effects I stopped having did change my life (no Powerball involved). At the time, of course, I would have called such side effects "that's just me". So, mileage varying. And some people are super sensitive to that somewhat racing adrenaline feeling, even though it is not actually dangerous.

Chicory's a pretty good impossible burger equivalent. Not sure on its carcinogenic status though.

> Although some participants in the study drank 25 cups a day, the average intake among the highest coffee consumption group was five cups a day

There's an obvious sampling bias, where if Joyful Joe is happily guzzling his 25 cups a day, he's probably not fighting weird heartbeats and trouble breathing the whole time, whereas Jittery Jim has one cup and talks the ears off his local beleaguered 7-11 worker and has to be dragged out by security only to spend the night awake in bed chewing every loose bit and bob off his own fingers.

Also, IIRC when people say people with heart conditions shouldn't drink coffee they mean "because stimulant overdoses screw up the heart's electrical rhythms and can turn not-so-good oopsies into fatal oopsies" and not "because you'll have a heart attack in 50 years". Heart attacks in 50 years are, however, a good reason to keep away from the delicious cookies you are probably disappearing into your hungry feeding tube washed down with a milk-and-sugar mixture sold at a huge markup because it contains 0.5g of plant material painstakingly harvested by faraway children, but definitely not 25 times a day, because no one's that rich.

> The research also showed that moderate and heavy coffee drinkers were most likely to be male, smoke and consume alcohol regularly

Oh, well, they're dying of heart disease either way, might as well have fun doing it.

This is kinda cynical, but get older, no one pays 25 year olds in France a wage that will support an apt in Paris because they reserve it for people with families.

THOUGH, I have heard some good things about the usual big names (Google, Facebook, whatever) and you can get some sweet work conditions in the public (or very near to public) sector.

In contracting the big differentiator seems to be working for yourself vs being sold by a company, so go to more meetups, try getting freelance jobs on your own. I don't know anything about the regulatory environment for such but it's supposed to have gotten easier in recent years.

this is super interesting, I had similar experiences. Except I am still happier having loved and lost.

Can I ask how old you are?

What about art? I draw and play music, and every moment feels like I'm 5 again then.

Pick a company that is in your industry or uses your business domain AND microservices. Alternately, if you have a specific deep skill (databases, Java performance, AI, whatever), apply to a company that needs those, and also uses microservices. Most companies won't care that you meet 70% and not 100% of the skills they list on the posting.