cleandreams

I've done my own (failed) startup and was 1st employee at a successful one, among other startup experiences. I agree that this is wrongheaded:

> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving.

I believe you pulled the plug a few months early because of this. But your startup was unsuccessful because you ran out of money while toiling in a market niche with well established dominant players and you did not have enough value add. That was where you needed more due diligence.

It's simple and very hard. You need to build a product customers want.

I agree with you on the unique highs of the start up life. Great, horrible, great, horrible. The successful startup was one of the peak experiences of my life.

As a non-cheater I thought this was hilarious. It could be on tv. I thought the prof handled it very well. Recently I was invited to a discord for a calculus class. I didn't join. I wonder if cheating was going on.

Firefox use, same.

If you are with a really good company (I know people at microsoft who had this) you can get a very senior person to meet with you regularly as a mentor. YOU need a mentor. You are giving a lot. I think it's possible you need to work for a better company or at a division that is better in your current company.

I have a my own way of working while lying down: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D74N22/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

This has a great feature that I can go from lying down to using the same desk standing up.

This works for me for comfort and for back issues. I do yoga twice a day so I am not infirm or compromised in any way. Part of that may be because I alternate with using the desk as a standing desk and a lying desk.

Unfortunately this is not a feature but a bug, and the worst kind, a bug at the language design level:

Basically, Julia tries very hard to make composability work, even if the authors of the packages that you're composing don't know anything about each other. That's a critical feature that makes Julia as powerful as it is, but of course you can easily end up with situations where one or the other package is making implicit assumptions that are not documented (because the author didn't think the assumptions were important in the context of their own package) and you end up with correctness issues.

My story: My startup failed and I was 30K in debt. It took way too long to get to that point. My first job after that was at an unfunded startup that ran out of money (to pay me).

Pretty dismal. However I learned some things from the startup that I didn't appreciate at the time. One was grit, another was being able to strategize about a variety of business problems, another was humility, and I also honed my quick learning skills.

These ended up, over a few years, landing me a plum startup job, a FAANG job, and a funded retirement.

The big picture is always out of sight. If you keep learning and stay humble but stubborn (don't give up) it will work out reasonably well. I still think I stayed to long on my startup adventure but I am not stressing about it.

Really interesting. Sorry for your experience but I'm glad I read this. At my last job I became overwhelmed and now in retrospect I can see I developed attention issues. I just could not focus. I have had great focus over decades long career but it got worn away.

Some of that is that my manager actually sabotaged me. I think the problem is that I am a terrific coder and he is not. He had driven away 3 engineers (from the company, not the project) before me in a little over a year, so believe me. I could actually not get a paid copy of the debugger tool although I was the highest ranked engineer on the project!! I was working on the free version where I had to make a new account or something every few hours!! Wow, I cannot believe I didn't understand the signal there. (He later got demoted from people management.)

The other thing that I intensely dislike in the current tech world is the constant interrupt mode from the tools, slack and teams. I think that causes focus to deteriorate over time although I am not aware of any studies. It causes anxiety to flow freely through organizations and I don't think people are aware of the downsides to that.

I also had major stresses in my personal life. Family issues. I just could not focus anymore and took early retirement. What I have been doing is Machine Learning courses. I think I want to do my own research projects. The good news is my focus problems, a year later, are GONE. The stock market dive may force me back to work but I hope not, not right away. I was a principal at one of the biggies so I did very well for awhile and with a little luck it could last the rest of my life and then some (for the kid).

He speaks of "the magnitude of the attendant change in social structure: a movement from national toward international social organization."

This can't work because it is not associated with growing prosperity in developed world but rampant inequality, the decline of good jobs for the non college educated, and growing resentment about this. Particularly in America, labor has been crushed.

The substitution of "international" for "national" elites has worsened the problem and made the resentment worse not better. Because there is a material basis for the discontent it is indeed likely that we will fall apart.

America is full of terrible jobs now. Just terrible. There has been a degradation of job quality with outsourcing, amazon, you name it. This may be why nurses don't leave.

>IT systems that they have to use were designed by people who have not talked with the workers who use them. They may have been designed with laws and compliance in mind. Nurses aren't the people who choose or pay for these systems. But, they use them a lot (maybe the most) and it's obvious they weren't taken into account when designing the UX. It's maddening for them. This one is big for product designers. Often we listen to the people who pay for it and miss out on the people who actually have to use it.

This!! I had a friend who retired early because she was literally being worked to death. A big part of that is the hours she spent after hours trying to deal with the new IT system.

I just left my dentist because they kept pushing braces on me (invisalign). I am over 60. The old dentist didn't do these things. The new dentist was hard sell. They also wanted to replace a crown that was fine. I found a dentist with a less invasive approach (and associated with the local dental school). I think there is a problem with dental care. You have 1 dentist and it's hard to verify what they say.

It's not just conservatives who are banned, it's also gender critical feminists, or anyone who questions "trans women are women". GC feminists are often quite left in their politics. The other thing that has happened is lots of threats aimed at GC feminists that DON'T get deleted. The mods find these do not violate twitter standards.

A trust is better than a will. The saving grace is that my parents selected a trustee for their trust who was trustworthy. He also did things extremely slowly because he was terrified my awful half sisters would sue him. My half sisters, no surprise, have terrible judgment in many areas of life, and this was one, so the trouble they started was not likely to end with the result they wanted. They have greed though, so they went for it. If there hadn't been a good trustee I would not have had the will to resist. A couple of things I learned: get your own lawyer. That is important! The best investment of your money. Otherwise no one is interested in your opinion. Also, your parents should set up a trust rather than just a will. If your parents don't know someone who would make a good trustee, just get a bank. They have departments that specialize in this. In a way a bank is better. A bank will not be terrified that the nut job narcissist inheritor might sue them; they have deep pockets.

One more thing. The way things went down totally shocked me. I was a child of my mother's second marriage and I learned the hard way that my half sibs had always resented me. Now that I know that, things about my family make more sense. My feeling is, if you at all feel your sibs may resent you because life gave you luck / looks / smarts / a better father / you name it, proceed with caution.

I have half siblings like this, who tried to take the family house from me after my father (their stepfather) died. That is, they tried to take my share of it; the will split everything equally. We split the family things up into thirds and they were caught trying to steal from my share. Crazy making it was. So much gas lighting. We are now estranged. TBH even seeing their picture upsets me.

I've reached different performance levels in different environments. It's a bit embarrassing to see how the environment impacts me. When I feel the confidence and encouragement of others, my capacities increase and I out perform, and when I don't, I sort of 'shut down.' I suspect it is because I grew up in a verbally abusive household and I go numb. That is what it is, and experience has shown me I can't just snap my fingers and get over it. It's okay to require a positive environment. It's okay to change jobs to get it. BTW I have reached high engineer ranks at FANGs. I have also noticed that when the environment is negative and I am working hard, I reach burnout more quickly.

This is distressing but not surprising. What is aggravating is that sometimes this is not even unintentional. For cats, there is the Scottish Fold. The very thing that makes them considered cute is a painful disease. The perpetuation of this breed is really a comment on human... what? Vanity? Cruelty? It's disgusting.

This from an Australian animal welfare group https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/what-are-the-health-p...

The Scottish Fold breed of cat is a very popular pet in the USA, due to its affectionate and gentle nature and distinctive appearance. These cats have flattened ears that fold forward and downward, sitting like a cap and giving the quaint look of an owl. This ear fold is the result of a natural genetic mutation first observed in a farm kitten in Scotland in 1961. The tightly folded ears do not appear to be any more prone to infections than those of cats with upright ears. However, this unique ear shape is caused by an underlying defect in the formation of cartilage, which would normally retain the ears in a normal shape.

This inherited cartilage defect (also known as Scottish Fold disease, or Osteochondrodysplasia) causes other deformities throughout the body and is a dominant trait, meaning all kittens in the litter will be affected. The disease is evident on x-rays of cats from as young as 7 weeks of age. Serious abnormalities in joints and bone growth lead to arthritis (painful, swollen joints), short, abnormally thick and inflexible tails, spinal abnormalities and short, stiff legs. The welfare impacts are severe in terms of pain and inability to perform natural behaviours, as these cats can be lame, walk with an abnormal gait, can be reluctant to engage in normal movements such as walking or jumping, and can even become completely crippled.

There is no cure for this progressive condition. Cats who develop arthritis need long term pain relief, which can have undesirable side effects, and dietary supplements to slow its development. In a small number of cases, surgery or radiotherapy has been effective in slowing the progression of the disease. Those with severe disease are often suffering immensely and require euthanasia, sometimes early in life.

Due to the crippling deformities evident in this breed, it was excluded from the Cat Fancy of Great Britain as a recognised breed in 1974 and was also banned by the Fédération Internationale Féline. Breeders in the USA persisted...

They also pulled the question, which made assumptions that have turned out to be wrong:

"It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?"

This question assumes the issue at Wi Spa was caused by transphobia. It turns out that the flasher at Wi Spa was a sex offender of long standing. When the Guardian covered the issue originally they were entirely wrong. They wrote about it as if the original issue was that the women who complained were motivated by transphobia.

It is interesting that Judith Butler has not complained about being censored. Maybe she would want to revise her answer since the facts it relied on are incorrect.

Anecdote. I used to work for Microsoft from the Bay Area and I was up in Seattle once for a business trip when I took an Uber somewhere. I struck up a conversation, "I bet you drive a lot of Microsoft employees around." The driver said, "Yeah. Also Amazon." I asked him if he observed any differences between these two groups. "Yeah," he said. "The Amazon employees are often crying."

I am a member of a discriminated against minority in tech and I find this level of wokeness appalling. We will sometimes politically disagree with our co-workers and I don't want to have to argue with them. It's dreary and demoralizing. Most of the time there is no change in views as a result and frankly, it's not worth my time. That said, it's very problematic to go into this controversy because one of the senior management team said white supremacy does not exist. That is troubling because for employees who have been impacted by white supremacy, the amount of pain this obliviousness causes can be nearly unbearable. This exodus was a self-inflicted wound. It's a bad mistake to treat a topic which causes so much pain in this arrogant and dismissive way. So sorry Basecamp, but you really deserve the trouble you are in.

Companies care a lot about perseverance and track record. You should stay at jobs for at least 2 years. Also, leaving college as a freshman does not look good; that is an inadequate education for tech. You are not going to get a good job with so little education (there are rare exceptions but you don't sound like one). If you need a cheap school, do that. I have a computer science degree from a cheap state school and I have worked at the best and biggest companies. You have to stop making excuses and stop focusing on being rejected. Focus on doing the work of preparation. Get busy. You can do it. IMHO you will never get a good tech job with so little education -- go back to school and get loans. Also I got a good internship from one of my professor's.

Possibly she violated policy by sending internal emails to an ex-employee. That is fireable offense, yes. But this whole avalanche of incidents at google is still ugly and appears to be out of control. A bad look for google. Has anyone over there heard of damage control? Did it need to get this bad? At some level this situation must have been enabled by really clueless management. Or, it could just be the reality that google's use of user data is basically unethical and cannot coexist with a real AI Ethics team. It kinda looks like that.

I've worked at several of the big whale tech companies in their prime (like, now) and this story shocked me to my shoes. Maybe I have been sheltered. And this may be random and pointless but I was tired enough of google selling my data that my next phone was going to be an IPhone but after reading this I ... just can't.

This meaningful whitespace thing in python is dreck. Hate it. I am not a python hater; this is from experience on projects (though this is now less of a problem because of IDE help). I like python and I choose it for my personal projects. I will probably use this.

I just bought a system 76 ubuntu native build with 64gb ram and 12 cores. It cost a little over 2K. It was not over priced. There is a demand for these machines in AI and data science. They are not going away.

A member of the 'doomsday cult' here. From the West Coast, I see global warming out my window in the form of unprecedented wildfire, in part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Denial doesn't fix this problem.

I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.

I have totally blown interviews and also done very well. To me, the interview is a distinct skill set. You have to treat it as it's own thing. What matters is practice, practice. Not a little bit. Say 6 weeks. Then you are ready to slay. When I haven't done that I've been rattled and done poorly.

I think this will make the extremely expensive cities (e.g. SF, NYC) less attractive. Why not live in a quiet pretty place to raise kids and save on the commute. Life in SF has been kind of crazy over the last 5 years. It could use a downgrade.

Vitamin D is under studied because it cannot be patented (my doctor told me).