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burntoutfire

2,247 karma · joined September 2, 2019

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burntoutfire··on Ask HN: How do you future-proof yourself?
Become an indie, then you can work with your preferred tools from the nineties and still produce quality software (there are people like that). If you want a job, there's no escaping the tech treadmill though.
burntoutfire··on Life is not short
Games convey very simplistic ideas compared to the full extent of human thought, expressed in spoken or written form. It's usually way more washed down than cinema, which is already incredibly washed down.

Not to mention the benefit of say reading about your country's history, as opposed to the history of some ficitonal world in a video game - with history books, you're learning about the things which actually happened and have had a direct, large impact on your life and the world around you.

Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them), something that games are severely lacking (cue in people telling me about Nier Automata and one or two other story-based games which are approaching the level of a bad novel).

Most video games are spatially-oriented and are basically more sophisticated version of children playing tag, football or similar simple games focused around interactions in 3d space. And the ones that are not that, i.e. that try to be about humans and not simple spatial and temporal relationships, basically suck for the most part. It's clear that the medium is not meant for them.

burntoutfire··on Life is not short
Playing a game means mastering skills in a purely fictional world with purely fictional sets of rules and challenges. It doesn't translate into your life, expect in the most abstract way [1]. Whereas reading a newspaper, magazine or a book deepens your understanding of the world you live in.

[1] The flipside is that it can teach you bad habits as well. If the result of the game does not matter in any way, you have no incentive to try hard at it, and can just coast, turn the game off when you're frustrated etc. This is not how real-life is (coasting and difficulty avoidance don't work as well), so games can teach damaging habits. It's better in team multiplayer games, because in-game peer pressure can make you get out of your comfort zone.

burntoutfire··on Life is not short
I know someone who, while depressed was playing solitaire and one other casual game for hours every day, for months. It was definitely not healthy.
burntoutfire··on We need to make adulthood more desirable
> To be fair, yesteryears' solutions to that for the typical non-rich people were to outsource parenting to grandparents and family friends, which are still applicable now.

It's way less aplicable because people move so much. Nowadays, not many people live around (say within 1 km distance) their extended family, whereas in pre-modern times it was the absolute norm. What's more, grandparents often lived in the same house and children were raised by multiple adults and not just their parents. The burden on parents was way lower.

burntoutfire··on Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?
It's a gradual process which started at least 50 years ago. It was only recently hyped by various media and academia pundits, because it (hyping things) is how they make a living. See also: self-driving cars.
burntoutfire··on We need to make adulthood more desirable
I am actually living like that as well (I've worked maybe 10-12 of the past 20 years). Still, even when I'm between contracts, the rat race and hamster-on-a-wheel syndrome prevents me from fully relaxing. I will always worry about getting next job/contract, worry about investments etc. I'm thinking that the only way to at least partially quiet down that anxiety is to get a lot of money (at least 100% more than I realistically need) and retire on it.
burntoutfire··on We need to make adulthood more desirable
Yep, I agree. Parenting in modern world while not being wealthy just sounds terrible. It's one huge regression from how it was done before we started civilization, and especially since we started modern living (with atomic families, mass loneliness, rootlessness, jobs devoid of meaning, spending most of the day at the job instead of at the house, jobs so complex that your child can't understand them and can't learn them from you). Amenities and state help such as free kindergardens are just a drop in a bucket and will not help with falling reproduction rates in any meaningful way.
burntoutfire··on We need to make adulthood more desirable
The best thing about childhood to me was probably being worry-free. After you've done your homework or passed a test in school, there was absolutely nothing more to worry about your mind was 100% free to play and explore. Such state is practically inobtainable for people with complex office jobs such as software engineering, and even in mindless menial jobs you can be gnawed by existential doubts ("Am I wasting my life here?") which didn't torment us in childhood.
burntoutfire··on We need to make adulthood more desirable
Did you expect more free time? Judging by the parents I know, 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad.
burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
> I really don't think the PNW and coastal Poland is similar (if it's anything like Sweden). The PNW is like if the Alps had a huge coastline and almost no population to speak of. Check out Olympic National Park and remember that pictures are not the same as being there. It's breathtaking, pristine nature.

Yeah, that's what I imagine. A better, more beautiful, more pristine version of what I have at home. I'd gladly see that. But places like deserts or tropics or arctic are nothing like home, and a bit like traveling to another planet - more interesting to see, although there may be not that much to see there after a first couple of days.

> Florida is extremely boring, the only thing it has going for it is the warm water.

Doesn't Florida still have some pristine swamps? It would be cool to see them. Also, I've just never been to a place with oppresive heat, aligators, plenty of mosquitos (in the swamps) and all the rest of it - it'd cool to experience it once, even if to swear it off for the rest of my life.

burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
> You later changed to "worth it"

I didn't change anything. I think it's clear that I passed on opportunity to go to Seattle because I didn't think it was worth it (why else would I pass on it)?

> I suspect you also realized that if you find yourself "bored" in NYC, the problem is not the city.

Where did I write that I was bored in NYC? I think it's great, but I also think it exhausts the experience of "large, dense American city built mostly in XX century" to the point where seeing another one doesn't add that much. Aren't Americans travelling to places like New Orleans or Nashville precisely because they're not like most ordinary American cities?

burntoutfire··on Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
> Of these, the following are important today: Barley, Corn, Goat grass, Millet, Oats, Rice, Sorghum, and Wheat.

What about Rye?

burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
I never said that. (What I said is that, after already seeing NYC, SF and Las Vegas, I didn't expect the trip to Seatle to be worth it). Next time, please read more carefully before you start posting pointless comments.
burntoutfire··on Ask HN: How do you prepare for technical interviews in Europe for SWEs?
> You think you can just walk into a job paying $500k without some kind of rigorous interview process?

The point is, "that rigorous interview process" are just arbitrary hoops to jump through to see if you're obedient. That's their main purpose. Not to mention that, in Europe, anything above $200k is extremely rare. Many people would gladly go through borderline humiliating interviewing process for $500k, but won't do it for just $150k.

burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
Thanks for being helpful...
burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
Haven't been to Seattle so can't comment in earnest, but from that I've seen on pictures and Street View, the downtown is just your typical American large city downtown (once you've seen Manhattan, you've seen them all, they were mostly built in the same culture, architecture era and following the same urban patterns). It's essentially efficiency-driven and business-driven uglyness (or nondescriptness) that permiated XX century urbanism, at least in capitalist countries [1].

[1] In the Soviets, the cities were built on different premises, so they look very different - although the countries were so poor that, even though urban planning was excellent (ubiquitous parks, public spaces, houses built far away from busy roads etc.), the buildings themselves are drab due to resource constraints.

burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
It may be European perspective, but there are dozens of absolutely gorgeous historic cities within an hour or two of flight from where I live, so flying sixteen hours to see Seattle (where I could fly two hours to see Paris or Rome) is just a sorry proposition.
burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
I'm not sure I'd have much time to venture outside of the city. Plus, I live in climate that's similar to PNW (coastal Poland), and actually the desert surrounding Las Vegas and semi-desert Bay Area were much more interesting for me. I'd much rather go to Florida for example, as I've never experienced the tropics before.
burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
Apart from tiny tourist part of Las Vegas, are they really that different? I've walked around Las Vegas to see how the real city (not the tourist part) looks like, and it was just an endless grid of streets with condos, houses and mini-malls at intersections. Is Seattle different?
burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
> Have you perhaps considered that they're not very diverse?

This. Being a European, after seeing NYC, SF and Las Vegas, I passed on an opportunity to go for a week-long business trip to Seattle. Even though I had the time, I imagine Seattle being just mostly more of the same (an uniform, boring city consisting of XX century architecture built on a grid) and absolutely not worth the trip.

Americans speaking about large cultural differences between regions always surprise me - I often suspect they don't understand what "cultural differences" mean and instead talk about political differences.

burntoutfire··on The most livable cities
I think it's most people's version of hell. Even in Scandinavian countries, well-off people live in houses on a plot of land, not in apartments.
burntoutfire··on Ask HN: How to find companies that value deep work?
It's called a hobby or (better yet) a retirement.
burntoutfire··on The end of the world is just beginning for shipping
That is because EU has Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and other places where Western Europe partially outsourced parts of its manufacturing. It was more expensive than moving it to China, but otherwise much more convenient and less risky.
burntoutfire··on The end of the world is just beginning for shipping
> Moreover the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries taught us that focusing on the nation-state leads to widespread warfare. Better to have those nation-states in economic cooperation that leads to peace than economic competition that leads to war.

I think it has taught us the opposite? Pre WWI, the world was already very integrated and globalized, to the point that many pundits said that a large war is impossible, because it would hurt businesses everywhere too much. And yet it happened.

burntoutfire··on TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams
Every week, there is someone whose lottery ticket wins millions or tens of millions of dollars. It's not fair, but such is life - some people are just more lucky than others. The smartest thing you can do about it is to not dwell on it too much, other people's extraordinary luck does not affect your life in any way anyway.

That also applies to crypto - at any given point in time, plenty of people are investing in crazy speculative schemes. A minority of them win big, while a majority loses some or most of their money. The crypto crowd who bough 10 years ago just happened to select the right lottery ticket, while other people who at that time invested in equally far-fetched ideas (AR startups, synthetic meat, whatever crazy fad that died in the early stages before even reaching mainstream media) lost their money.

burntoutfire··on Ask HN: What do you think about title inflation?
For me, that's just a developer. A junior is someone who needs handholding, a regular developer can do their own work, while a senior has impact that goes beyond their own work (can coach juniors, make bigger decisions which affect team etc.).
burntoutfire··on TITO: Electric Argentine car
It's cheaper than the cheapest electric car available in EU, but with those specs it's barely a car and more of a large scooter with a chassis. For one thing, the safety in a crash must be horrible.

EDIT: just checked and the cheapest electric car in the EU, the Dacia Spring, has a 1 star (out of 5) in the NCAP test. Can't imagine what TITO would get.

burntoutfire··on How to Get a Job as a Software Developer in the UK After Brexit (Guide)
I'm betting that most people outside of Italy also can't tell where Verona or Orvieto or Tivoli are.
burntoutfire··on How to Get a Job as a Software Developer in the UK After Brexit (Guide)
Interestingly, I see the complete opposite. High rates for remote contracts (700, even 800 pounds per day) in London companies, but almost all of them they want to hire remotely from the UK only. I'm not sure if there's some practical reason behind it or it's just pure classism/nationalism at play.
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