arandr0x

I have something on the order of 20m^3 worth of clothes. I'm seriously weirded out by how none of the "fashion tech" companies do anything regarding appropriate outfits for the weather conditions. 50% of my outfit choosing time is spent figuring out whether fleece works for 0C-but-windy, what the right number of layers is for stuffy public transit, breezy outside, and chilly office AC, and whether something is at risk of majorly embarrassing malfunction if I run. I don't need an AI to have taste for me (thanks but I have it we can't all be clueless-and-nerdy...), I need it to have fast, appropriate decision-making in case my original plan falls through because of surprise snowfall.

You're welcome to make a startup based on that idea ;) up here in Canada where we have real seasons I'll find you some great test users!

(Although I've been to the Bay Area and it's not without weather challenges)

What is your company size? If you're hiring sales reps (multiple) and customer support (multiple) you've got to be more than 30? Because at less than that just use personal referrals.

How elite are you talking? Is it a case where you're doing <X> and you want to hire (this one guy at Facebook who invented X)? Or just "really good devs"? This makes a difference. For key people targeted poaching may work (it will cost you more than normal hiring of 1 person, but probably not even 3x more, and if it's a truly key position you may need the one expert on the subject). If it's a more general position, but you just want someone smart enough, you can try asking your top 30% or so employees to ask all their friends if they're looking, or if the 3 or so people they or those friends would judge to be their best ex-coworkers are looking. You need a referral from someone who's worked with the person at some point, to ascertain their work (not social) performance, but it doesn't need to be a 1st degree referral, because your employees' immediate network, regardless if they're a fit for you, are probably pretty smart.

If location is an issue (you're not in a metropolis and your location is not known for tech) contact the local university's career services department.

I have very weak visualization but I have some (4-5) images I can render in my head (stills I've seen plus one from imagination), which I think aphantasics can't do, and if I'm reading specific descriptions and take enough time, I can call up a still or part of a still as well. (It's never several frames and it doesn't feel like seeing from the eyes, but I can do it.)

My other senses are not as affected, I have perfect tactile recall, I can recall and imagine plenty of smells and tastes as well. I have elaborate tactile fantasies when I want to distract myself. No visuals.

I don't think it's actually different from aphantasics but I've had vivid dream-visuals (including being able to literally read in a dream, seeing every character, hearing every word in the low subvocalized reading-voice, being caught up in the story) and visual hallucinations.

I can draw (from sight or imagination) things I can't "see in my mind's eye" just like I often compose music that doesn't play in my head. When drawing, my hands move to create the drawing on the paper that represents the concept I want to show, even though I am not seeing it; I "just know" how to move, even though I can't exactly visualize what to do, like you probably "just know" how to drive even though you couldn't make a full 3D model of your car and the surrounding space.

It actually gives me more reward from drawing than most people, because what I access when drawing (seeing what I imagine with my eye) most people can do without the hard part of learning how to draw. For me drawing is the only way, my sketches are the only existence of some of these things I've thought of.

I have no visual memory, but my tactile memory is excellent, so I remember my loved ones' arms, the texture of their hair, that sort of thing.

What you're saying isn't rational but it's 100% true. People's relationships aren't part of a market; rather the economy is placing constraints on their relationships. People work further from their homes so they don't have evening hobbies. People don't live close to their parents so single moms and dads are busy with childcare vs meeting each other. That sort of thing.

This was the career I wanted, but I'm not willing to work in academia. I actually have a biochem degree and 10 years of work experience as a software engineer. The point should be rephrased : "We need cheap programmers in biology and biomedical research in San Diego and Boston to blindly obey senior cancer researchers with fat pockets, and we can't afford the market rate for a good programmer or data scientist in those two arguably very pricey locales, and we don't want to hire remote workers, even though the job is desk-based. Ideally they should be willing to be graduate students, that's easier on the budget."

the analogy with "listen to music" is not "read the code" it's "use the program" but definitely composing and playing don't use at all the same skills as programming. For example it's easy for me to see where a bug is but when I compose music, I hear something sounds wrong, I don't know if it's "un-harmonious wrong" or "interesting wrong" and a piece of music doesn't "work" for me the same on 1st listen, 3rd listen, etc... whereas a program is by essence repeatable. And as a result I don't really attempt to "fix" wrong music if I feel I went wrong with an idea I just make a new one. Whereas with code I was debugging from the start, even when I was new and unconfident.

Your life will get less hectic as you will get used to the pace of it, and that 1-2h gap will be productive again, in about 3y or so. That's how people with kids find time for side projects.

That said, if you hate your job, change jobs. Right now no programmer should put up with being "bored out of [their] mind". Everybody's hiring. Your therapist is right. If you're not quitting you have to find it in you to be mostly engaged at work, otherwise it will destroy you from the inside.

If you like your job, but think not doing a startup is throwing away your youth, consider you definitely don't have to be young to be an entrepreneur, and plenty of people's first successful startups are when they're 45. It's not a race. Don't do a startup unless you have an idea, and you really want to pursue it.

Doctors won't prescribe enhancers just for enhancements, but all stimulants (except modafinil I guess) were OTC for at least a time, so we'd expect an enhancer (if safe) to be regulated as a supplement. Caffeine is "the one good drug" and I don't see that changing, and that's even though there are fatal overdoses on it and the side effects are pretty bad (but not psychosis bad), so it's not a terribly high bar to clear for a new compound.

It'll be interesting to see if new compounds have tolerance or withdrawal effects -- something that made you smarter for 4 hours but unable to tie your shoes for 2 days would be a non-starter, as would a smart drug that then permanently lowered your non-drug IQ and raised your chance of Alzheimer's. If anything if I remember my course on the subject correctly pretty much all psychiatric drugs have withdrawal effects that are worse or longer lasting than stimulants do, and while that's not something that would cause them to be made illegal, it would make doctors very reluctant to prescribe them "just to try" the way some have with ADD. (I also don't think a compound that has fatal withdrawals would be allowed as a food or supplement today, alcohol is pretty much grandfathered in.)

Could you share with us the "requirements" section of an average job you would feel confident applying to, one that is like the jobs you are not passing the interviews for?

You don't get repeat clients. What is your communication with the clients like? Do you have in person meetings? How long is the typical engagement? Do you work at their office or at your mom's place? Is there one client you had a good enough relationship with to ask them if you guys could get coffee together to have feedback on your operation? (Borrow from your mom money from aforementioned coffee if needed, I'm sure she wants you to have a career as much as you do)

Aside from your mom, do you have friends or romantic partners with stable office jobs to ask for advice on what could be the issue? (Don't ask the mom, moms are terrible advice givers in those situations.)

We happened to use it in most of my classes. I was studying biochemistry, and it's definitely more bio than chemistry, but it does have everything you'd need. In North America it may be one of the most popular textbooks.

But you'll need to look for the books that are being used today because I was in school 15 years ago, and a couple things have occurred since then. RNAi wasn't big when I was in school for instance even though most of the labs knew of it, CRISPR was not even on the horizon (although you can understand how it works from a typical undergrad textbook).

I'm arguing that if sex is more casualized, which it is, then partners are not "competing"; they can have sex with Man A on Monday and let Jody from Accounting have Man A on Tuesday.

The failure modes for this system are twofold: if women want sex much less than men, by a huge factor (which for casual sex may well be true) or if the most desirable men are insatiable nymphomaniacs and quite capable of finding a spot for every groupie. I'm not sure if the second part is amenable to change, but I'm sure it's possible to increase women's libido because surveys tend to indicate women have much less satisfying sexual experiences than men do, so changing that would show room from improvement.

Yeah I haven't mention this, but my theory also suggest undesirable men may be even less well served if, for some reason, more desirable men also want more sex. If so then they could easily satisfy most of the women -- even if the undesirable men don't want sex as much, sex would unlock more social benefits of "interacting with a woman semi-regularly", and now that they aren't getting any, they also lose that.

If that is the case it would be interesting to know why desirable men have such outsized libidos. Is it that they are choosing sex over other activities because it is more rewarding for them?

What I don't understand with this argument, is sex is usually a 1:1 activity that takes up a bit of time (like interviewing). Even if you have a population H (for Hottie) of men every woman would wave her panties for (doubtful but let's assume) the men in H can't possibly have sex with every woman every day. Meaning some of the women, even if they can have sex with the men in H, and it probably does affect how they view men in not-H (less well due to inferior H factor), must be spending enough time sexually frustrated to be available for not-H.

Indeed, if you look at sex not as a matching problem between males and females, but as an event distribution, then let's say "desirable men" want sex at a rate of K events per week and all women want sex at a rate of J events per week. Let's say the population has 10 desirable men, 90 undesirable men, and 100 women. In the past where the desirable men were married off, they had sex avg(K,J) times per week, for a total of 10xavg(K,J) events involving a desirable man, leaving 90xavg(K,J) events involving an undesirable man.

Let's say now all those people move in the new, "casual" world. The desirable men can have sex to their heart's content: K times per week. The undesirables must use the remaining times that a woman in the population would like to have sex but the desirables are satiated: 100xJ-10xK. Now, if 100xJ - 10xK > 90xK, so if men and women want sex roughly as many times, or if women want more, undesirable men are not really negatively affected. Indeed they have more variety under the new system.

However if J = 0.5xK, then roughly half the undesirables are unsatisfied, or they're all unsatisfied half the time, which does feel like a step down. Anecdotally I don't think it's the case that 50% of less desirable dudes are just not having sex, but let's say it's 10, or 20%, that's believable. It would mean women want sex slightly less than men -- 10 or 20% less. Note that the 10 or 20% not having sex aren't necessarily less desirable than the other undesirables, just less lucky.

Clearly a solution for the leftover guys is obvious: They must increase all women's libido past the points where the hotties can satiate it.

(Obvious caveats: silly analysis, doesn't model gay people, assume libido is constant or normally distributed across populations, assume partners for every event are independent, etc)

Of these I only know about genetics/biology. You need an undergrad level textbook (I used Stryer's but you can usually get assigned textbooks from the course pages for the intro courses of your desired field at the tier 1 university of your choice) to skim through and a research assistant position in a related lab(volunteer is fine). The textbook will let you ask people already in the field questions without sounding like you're a lost Ancient Roman, and the assistant position will provide an environment in which people are constantly telling you tidbits about the field that will eventually let you read papers.

Once you can read and understand a paper and present it to your peers and they recognize you as a peer, you "know enough" about the field to contribute to it, and you don't actually need to pay for the degree to get there. But it might take decades anyway.

I think same applies to AI except in AI the lab can be an industry lab and the textbook can be 1st year calculus and linear algebra + a MOOC.

Eh, that is strange. I do feel happy and energized from productive work (even "house work" or "a hard day's work" that's not inherently creative) but I've never felt like an entirely different person after having produced a nice piece of code, or stopped feeling physical pain, things like that. (And I do like feeling "energized" more than "high" in general so I'm definitely not knocking productive work here, but people who try to argue that doing something productive is some kind of transcendental euphoric experience need to stop smoking the ink of their Tim Ferriss books)

120 is an "uncomfortable" heart rate though; you'd feel it at rest, it would somewhat get in the way of concentrating or sleeping. (Although it's easy to dismiss as resulting from anxiety or infection.)

I'm also a reader, and in my experience devs who don't feel comfortable with reading (most of them) tend to get better information flow through talking, unfortunately they're about as likely to be shy as other devs and sometimes don't get a lot of professional development because of this.

Get in the habit of talking to them about code casually. ("Have you seen the X library", "I implemented another splay tree today, whoah!") I also send juniors youtube links unless they've expressed they don't like video, there's now a bunch of solid technical content there, better than books in terms of being up to date I would say.

A ton of people watch videos sped up 1.75x or 2x, and young people often are in the "classroom" mindset that everything where they are a passive receiver is made of gold and benefit from being explicitly told they can skip parts, watch vids out of order, speed up and then slow down, etc. This may help conserve his time.

That makes sense. I've never spent my life savings but I did behave in a way that was both way out of character and quite shameful once as a result of an inconvenient flight schedule. It's weird how people speak of sleep deprivation as, well, not exactly healthy, but not downright dangerous. I guess that's how they talked about cigarettes back in the day too.

Perhaps there need to be more pushback from us tech workers when we hear about, e.g., all night hackathons or polyphasic microsleep experiments or the need for nap rooms in offices to compensate for all those 2am coding sessions or something. That some people definitely experience adverse effects where the consequences can be hard to control and some people's lives can be literally wrecked by the thing.

But the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the population is like, 1% right? So if you have disturbed sleep in that sense (sleep 4-5h for weeks on end, but feel alert and well-rested) it is still quite unlikely to be due to undiagnosed bipolar? (vs needing less sleep naturally, using too much coffee, blue light, whatever)

Honestly for me it's mood dependent. Feel good during the day -> enjoy staying up literally pacing till 2AM. Feel like an unmotivated lump that can't do anything -> sweet, sweet oblivion.

I guess that's related to what another commenter said, that essentially we stay up because it's more fun than the alternative. One thing that works for me as a result is focusing on dreams or stories I tell myself at bedtime to generate fun dreams. Another thing is give myself a goal where bedtime is somehow the reward (I will fold all the laundry and bake cookies, but then I have earned going to sleep) and it will make me feel like going to sleep is desirable even if in actuality laundry and cookies sounded much better.

There may be a fear element that also affects adults -- some time ago, I was at a work party at a bar in a major city. (Nice bar, ritzy area) Everybody else either came in groups by car or had a hotel within walking distance; mine's quite a way out. Shortly past midnight I'm tired of watching people act stupid and tell folks I'm walking back (alone). Most of them were surprised I was willing to do that!

But in my youth, also in a major city, I'd walk back from the movies or wherever with other kids around 1-2am all the time. You had to know which areas were lit and not stare strangers straight in the eye, but that's kinda normal, and certainly no one then felt walking was inherently dangerous. What world do we live in that a bunch of semi drunk adults can't handle the night for 2 miles?

No wonder their kids are spending their lives' quietest hours in front of a screen if that's the risk tolerance calibration of the parents.

It's easier for care teams in this situation to speak to one person. I suppose your wife (if she felt up to the task) could have asked if your brother needed relief, but 21 hours in an emergency is a very long time and being the only one on deck for 21 hours is a very stressful circumstance.

That kind of self-teaching worked for me for junk food (for which I have told myself since childhood would make me nauseous) but not coffee (for which I have mostly been telling myself it would make me warm and happy, which it does). Now I have been low-key trying to, if not quit coffee, at least make myself able to stop after a while.

I've tried telling myself coffee would make my heart hurt/race uncomfortably (as an added bonus, it actually does after a while). But mostly thinking about coffee makes me want more coffee, even if it's negative.

I've tried redirecting my good feelings to something else by telling myself exercise would make me feel warm, good and alert. It works. Now I exercise AND drink too much coffee. OTOH I've never had problems motivating myself to exercise (which I do daily) so I guess... partial win?

I'm an introvert who kind of likes people (but get drained a few hours after spending time talking) and my go-to has been tons of coffee. (when I was younger booze was good too, for social situations, not client meetings, but I had the same issue with social stuff generally)

So how addictive is exercise exactly? If you're exercising, past the point where you feel physical hurt, because it makes you feel immediately more alert (or straight up euphoric depending), is it dangerous? It's usually attested that too much of one specific kind of exercise (e.g. running) can have problems for certain muscles and joints but I'm not finding a lot on the dangers (if any) of more diverse exercise (where you keep moving with elevated heart rate for a long, sustained, time period, but don't do the same movements every day or every hour in a single day).

It's not unlikely that people who are successful have adverse childhoods (even when the adversity is not directly related to the activity of their success unlike yours) because it's a lot easier to survive the sheer terror of being 1) a child and 2) reminded that you have neither power nor security day in and day out with the dopamine rush of being the very, very best at something. It builds resilience.

But I don't think we should change how we reward these kids, because in a number of cases that reward keeps them alive, and outcomes from adverse childhood experiences that are not obsessive competitiveness and huge success in a specific area are typically much, much worse.

Yes "normal" people often have trouble seeing this (& it's frustrating as a suffering kid, that adults who are very much not suffering are using your story and taking pride in your accomplishment, as though it's theirs also, not knowing what you narrowly escaped to get there), but it may bring worse outcomes if they did (for example I would never tell my child that Little Johnny is better at basketball than they are because they play every night till 10 because that's all they have to do until their mom gets home and on the courts no one beats them up, even if it's true, because I'm not confident that my "normal" kid would use the information in a way that's wise and kind).

I did, but TBH, I think that makes me (and most of HN) part of the economic class cities want to keep out of their culture, and I don't blame them.

This is exactly true. Any tips how to identify companies that welcome this during interviews? (Or companies that don't.)

I wouldn't have considered myself as having "hubris" but I have a kind of semi-wild enthusiasm for being able to do things that people have reacted badly to before for exactly the reason you said. I'm not sure how to signal to companies "my deal is I want to do things; I will more or less literally jump off my seat to assist anyone and no job is beneath me and I will stay up and work 16 hours straight if I screw something up; but I'm not really good at hearing no".