jedrek

I think it's amazing the way we've completely sidelined physical activity - not exercise per se, but any physical activity - in our western lives. Unless you live without a car, there is no requirement for you to walk more than 1000 steps during the day. Wake up, drive to work, sit at your desk, drive to a restaurant for dinner, drive home, plop down on your couch. Rinse, repeat.

Even if you do decide to work out, it tends to be the first thing you drop when you don't have time. Or you worked late. Or you forget your gym clothes. Or you're just too exhausted to go.

We used to be active, our jobs required motion, we had to walk or cycle to work, or even take public transportation - which requires you to at least walk to the stop and back.

Now we literally sit on our asses, day in, day out, and wonder why so many people are obese.

And yet all of that absolutely pales in comparison to the legacy advantage almost exclusively white US university students have at the top Ivy League schools. But sure, go chasing the race angle fed to you by the powers that be.

> I'm about twice as fast as the average cyclist

A TDF winner then?

Weird how focused you are about being labeled 'sane' by people who don't use that label.

I did crazy stuff in my youth, I wrote code, I did nothing. I worked, I played, I wandered. I don't look back, I even lost the box of press clippings I had. I sometimes run into people from my previous interests and it's weird, because they remember me and I don't remember them.

Twenty years later, I don't really remember the parties, I don't recall the code, or the late nights out... but I still cherish the friendships I made. I can trace 90% of my career to people I met, who introduced me to others, who introduced me to others. You can't make those connections at 40 or 50, you can always learn another language then. The world is full of coders who have horrible jobs, because they are poor at interpersonal relations. They're a skill like any other, and 17 is a perfect age to work on them.

Generally, I agree with bittermang: don't waste your youth on github. Live your youth, it's not "the greatest time of your life" like some people say, but it is a singularly unique time of socially accepted irresponsibility. Work on your social skills, they will pay off down the road a lot more than learning C. Learn to listen, to be kind, work on your empathy.

Now, if you must spend your time coding, don't do Upwork, don't do freelance. Instead, solve problems for people who don't realize they had problems to solve. Talk to your friends, parents, grandparents, find out what bugs them in their day to day life. Observe what they do and think of how they could optimize it.

Help them by creating tools to solve their problems. That's what programming is - telling computers how to help us solve problems. To code isn't the goal, the solution is. If you figure that out, figure out some skills in that area, you're ahead of 95% of the people coming out of CS schools who still think the point of their 4 years degree is to optimize a sort routine.

The time and energy cost of being social rises massively as you grow older. It's hard to make close friends in your 30s, very hard in your 40s and older.

Those early friendships and social contacts are extremely useful in later adulthood. Be it support, advice, whatever. They're also a great gateway into meeting more people in an unguarded setting, like a dinner party. It's easy to make friends when you have friends, it's much harder when you don't know anybody.

The greatest advantages of being a teenager are the free time, possibilities, and lack of responsibility. There are hobbies I had in my youth that I literally could not pull off with a wife and child. I don't care how understanding and loving my wife is, me deciding I'm going to take off for two weeks to hitchhike across Europe by leaving a short note is not going to fly.

Sports, guitar, motorcycles... they're not teen hobbies, they're shit adults to do feel like we're still alive. To feel the way teens feel lying in the grass on a warm day and not giving a damn.

But where are the profits? Uber is already subsidizing rides, while cabs and cab companies have to turn profits. Trying to build loyalty with points just increases Uber's costs, as they can't push that off onto drivers. Retaining customers and increasing ridership by increasing loss per trip is not a sustainable model.

Ride services are completely different from airlines, if only because the capital outlay is incomparable. You could run a ride sharing business and get two hundred drivers driving around New York by December for 250k. That won't even pay for a single flight crew for a year, much less a plane to put them in.

It's interesting how so many people want government to be run like a business while hating it most when it runs like a business. Business is opaque, secretive, with no oversight and loyalty only to the bottom line. Well run government institutions are none of these things.

The way adults say no to alcohol, cigarettes, sex, procrastination, and using their smartphones?

Are you serious? If you saw anybody under 42 they didn't do shit to fight against Communism, as they were 16 years old - TOPS - during the first free elections.

Maybe they didn't seem happy because Eastern Europeans don't walk around with fake smiles on their faces.

I love how you throw around the term "qualified" as though it were set in stone. Like one person is obviously more qualified than the other, as though these people are 100m sprinters whose performance is measured within a fraction of a hundredth of a second.

We're treating highly educated specialists tasked with delivering highly complex, variable and nuanced output like 19th century factory workers. How many hundreds of books have been published on just the question of measuring employee productivity, yet for the sake of this conversation we toss terms like "more qualified" around like they are law.

Eating ramen noodles made home ownership more affordable for you.

Everybody has always cared about status and appearances, even if that appearance was the appearance of not caring about status.

I got my start with React doing a "React for people who know jQuery" thing that taught me how to structure a site, props, state. Almost 3 years later and almost all my personal work is in React.

Are they afraid that a new CEO will come in and actually demand the company start losing less money?

That is bullshit. At $20k a in Warsaw (75k PLN/year, 6250/month), your take home is about 5000. The absolutely cheapest houses, run down shitholes from the communist era with few windows and lots of stairs, cost at least 600k in the city limits. That's your entire salary for 10 years just to cover the capital. With a 30 year mortgage you'd be paying half your salary.

It's been a long time since I've made less than $20k and I do well, but I have a 25 year mortgage on a flat, much less a house.

Every time people make fun of luxury products I wonder what cars they're driving: 20 year old clunkers? What shirts they're wearing: $5 for a 10 pack off Ali Express? Burlap sacks? Are they typing on $5 cheap unbranded keyboards? Of course not.

Hell, their computers probably cost twice what most people would be willing to pay, even though 90% of the time, they're doing little more than surfing the web and checking emails. But since it's something they're interested in, luxury is justified.

I installed Yosemite on a Mac Pro from 2009 and it ran like a champ, the only thing that was slow was video transcoding. Stop with the FUD.

> I've had less trouble with drivers than I had with Linux.

My hackintosh (currently on my second one, it's a 2012 i5 machine) has less stability and driver issues than Windows 10 on the same hardware.

I've been to management seminars where they downplay the importance of money, saying that employees are mostly motivated by other factors. Then I talk to my co-workers, the ones that are quitting, and about half of them leave because they've been working for 2+ years without a raise.

I worked at a company where a company decided to introduce a new management program (LEAN) into one department. That 16 person department saw 18 people leave during my 6 months at the company, and only three of the original team was there when I left. That is to say, five people started work after I showed up and left, before I quit to be a WFH dad.

And yet, nobody blamed the brass or the people implementing the LEAN program.

In normal conversation, I'd be 100% sure this is sarcasm.

On HN it's 50/50.

A lot of people call those prisons "dorms" and they say that prisoners live in better conditions than a lot of people outside of prison.

And yet, they don't make the jump to the idea that maybe people shouldn't be living in worse conditions.

The logical conclusion of a regulation-free system is of corporations large enough to destroy competition before it starts.

> freedom to contract is always a good thing

Hardly. Freedom to contract would be a good thing if we could assume that the sides stand on more or less equal footing, which is almost unheard of in the case of corporations and people.

All the Polish IT jobs groups I'm on (iOS dev + JS mostly) require a salary range. If nothing else, it's useful to see where we need to be while hiring.

Also, it's a legal requirement in Austria to post the salary.

To be fair, your watch can be replaced by a well crafted stick and dial combo.

So true. I'm sitting in an ad agency right now and I see at least half a dozen laptops and desktops abandoned on shelves.

How is decoding code words not substantive?

I think people have a massively idolized view of home appliances from the 1950s and 60s. Most men knew how to fix their appliances, because those appliances regularly broke. My grandfather lived til his death with the washing machine he bought in 1968, and it required him to fix something about once a year.

To say they were somewhat less efficient than modern ones is an understatement - I replaced a late 1960s, 3.5ft fridge in this flat when I moved it. The old one would barely make ice. My new fridge is not only 7ft tall with a freezer that hits -32C, it does so with the same power draw as the old one. It's not perfect, I had to get it fixed once - the freezer coolant started leaking. But that was a $60 fix, and otherwise, it's been going strong for almost 15 years. It also cost $500 - which is similar to what it would have cost in 1970, with the caveat that these numbers are not adjusted for inflation. That $500 in 1970 is equivalent to $2300 in 2002, when I bought it.

I have a washing machine of similar vintage, and I'd like to get a new one... but I'm waiting for it to break. No luck. It's been going strong with a single repair, and it only cost $220, or a little more than the Kenmore washer I found in the 1970 Sears catalog for $190.

The truth is even if we accept that these goods are inferior, it's because we as consumers made them that way. We'd rather buy 3 appliances over 30 years than pay 3x as much up front, then hold on to it and service it for that time.