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jesuscripton HoloKit relaunched, $129 AR Headset accessory for iPhone

This is not the form factor that will change the paradigm. The smartphone was. I agree with you that if you had your face slammed against a Gameboy as an adult in the 90s, people would have judged you. That changed real fast, but it had to be the right product/form.

Whoever gets the AR glasses that look like glasses out first wins the game.

jesuscripton HoloKit relaunched, $129 AR Headset accessory for iPhone

Form factor for AR is literally like nuclear fusion at the moment. I don’t know when they are going to get it looking like normal fucking glasses, but until then, no one is going outside with this shit.

They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.

VR headsets are getting smaller at least:

https://en.shiftall.net/products/meganex

I would suspect Apple will never release something that isn’t as small as that.

jesuscripton Tell HN: Farewell letter of M. Hosseini – executed 01.02.2023 by I.R. of Iran

Freedom from you bro, freedom from people like you.

jesuscripton Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

You're actually presenting this as an excuse for racism against Indians? Holy shit.

I am not presenting it as an excuse, I am presenting it as a probable reason for it. It’s like if a historian explains to you the Treaty of Versailles and all you take away from it is that I’m presenting an excuse for Nazism and WW2. It is merely an explanation for what fermented the situation, not a justification. It’s up you to accept the reality or not.

I don’t think it’s racism. It’s resentment. No one likes an undercutter.

Take it for what it’s worth, that’s the reason you are seeing all the anti Indian tech worker vibes here.

jesuscripton Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

It’s left over resentment over Indians being cheaper for the sake of being cheaper. It’s a more economic resentment than a racial one.

I personally don’t think this dynamic is as true anymore because Indians can command market rate globally and are going to have to compete less on undercutting price.

jesuscripton Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

I doubt it. If they only hire themselves, eventually they will have to compete with each other. That’s when the gloves come off and they’ll hire whoever to beat the other Indian.

The Indian on Indian war is inevitable. How do you think they got hired in the first place? Some white executive beat another white executive by cutting costs by offshoring.

jesuscripton Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

It’s not that insignificant. It’s still a minority group that is getting to the top without specific diversity mandates. Hiring an Indian “because diversity” was never a thing. There wasn’t ever a huge social push to “get more Indians into leadership”. I guess one of those Indians even became PM of Britain, the empire that colonized them. Pretty interesting stuff.

Good job Indians, not sure how y’all did it.

jesuscripton Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

Can you explain what makes them good at it?

I’m guessing be a grade A yes-man has a lot to do with it.

jesuscripton Ask HN: How to navigate negative thoughts about starting a career late?

It’s not invalid. That particular counter argument you reused has been overused. We live in a relative world. Sometimes you do have to realize your perspective is off when you over internalize and take a narrow view of just your own predicament.

When you over emphasize your own situation without considering what the average situation is like, you exit reality based thinking and enter fantasy world. In fantasy world you operate with fantasy expectations, and since it is a fantastical expectation, when you don’t achieve it in the real world you enter misery.

One must stay grounded, and finding just where the ground is from the air requires you to look beyond your own cockpit. Check the measurements, find the horizon line, look for buildings and yes, other people on the ground.

jesuscripton Antidepressants are over-prescribed, but genuinely help some patients

I’d look to addicts and alcoholics that turn sober. Their feedback loops are way out of whack from years of drug/alcohol abuse. Yes, you do return to normal. It’s just that addicts and alcoholics cause so much social and legal issues that they bottom out of their psychological issues in a more serious way.

If you are on a drug cocktail that mostly doesn’t let you fuck up your entire life, there will be no major turning point to snap you out of it. Clinically, this is a massive success. They are keeping people from being a complete disaster. However, the opposite of “not a complete disaster” isn’t necessarily “tremendously peaceful and happy life”. It can truly be the murky middle.

It can go on forever in those cases.

jesuscripton Antidepressants are over-prescribed, but genuinely help some patients

This sounds like the correct way for these things to be utilized. In your case, you were approaching a bottom so in so many words, you were at the end of the line and the only way to go was up (if you wanted out of the predicament).

Where the prescriptions fail imho is with people that are nowhere close to bottoming out. They are in the murky middle and then get a bunch of scripts. They are not near destitution, so their prescriptions end up being perpetual. Taking antidepressants and other medication, and then going to therapy for years constantly talking about how much it sucks to be depressed about this and that means you are on a pathological treadmill. In sports, a “treadmill” team is good enough for the playoffs, not good enough to win a championship, not bad enough to get a top 5 draft pick that could change the whole team. They are stuck in the middle. Eventually treadmill teams realize they need to bottom out and trade most of their team so they can suck for a few years and rebuild with great draft picks (the crappier you are the, the better draft picks you get).

Bottoming out is, for better or worse, one of the most effective methods of snapping people out of an addiction.

I think it is underutilized when it comes to other issues. If you say your life sucks, then lose the job, lose the money, lose the friends, get homeless, and sleep out in the cold. Then if the natural will to live a better life doesn’t kick in, we’ll hospitalize you in a mental institution. Then we’ll try the medication. I’m pretty sure for most people, especially this demo of privileged tech workers, will at some point realize “hey my life ain’t that bad”.

In Tech we call this “fail fast”. Test your theory on how much you think your life sucks by making it suck even more, and test it quickly. Then you’ll get your perspective.

jesuscripton Ask HN: How to navigate negative thoughts about starting a career late?

I’m only saying it like this because I’ve been through this neurotic phase. It’s a soul leech. At one point I overthought so much that I literally laid in bed in fear for days. It took awhile to snap out of it and realize what a pointless exercise it is. I literally had to tell the voice in my head “shut the living fuck up”.

That voice in my head ran me for many years and one of the ways of turning it off is to literally press the off button on it.

You can certainly find out why that voice exists, it’s a combination of internal and external factors. Regardless, it doesn’t deserve as much time as most of us give it. We all try to rehabilitate that voice, but what we all end up learning is that it’s a one dimensional character in your head. It was never meant to be “saved” (my argument against trying to use therapy to change that voice). It’s best to not give the voice a voice.

So when I’m telling you to stop whining, it’s me talking to that voice you have in your head. You didn’t write this post, that voice did. And I don’t respect that voice in me, or in anyone else and have no problem talking down to it.

I mean, that’s the way it treats you right? That’s the way it treated me. So treat it the same.

jesuscripton Ask HN: Is Gartner worth the time and money for startups?

What exactly are you trying to buy from them?

jesuscripton Ask HN: How to navigate negative thoughts about starting a career late?

You’ll just have to get over it and do the best you can. HN cannot keep giving posts like this soft advice, especially when so many of you are no where in the realm of teenage years anymore. Even if you were in your early 20s, I’d advise you to not sit around and analyze “the feels”. Everyone’s gotta grow up at some point.

Do your best to be a bit more resolute. Everyone is anxious in life about something.

I can tell you for a fact there is someone your age or younger with a family and mortgage and a career change to think about. There’s probably someone your exact age whose entire career got derailed for any number of factors, wondering if they’ll get another go at it. But here you are wondering if your brain will stop working in a few years, or if you will ever get to write a movie.

You can write your movie right now. It’ll suck, but so what? Write another one. You’ll bomb all your upcoming interviews. Go to more.

From the immortal bard Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“Stop whining”.

jesuscripton Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

I mean we have good evidence that athleticism at the competitive level has a drop off at a certain age, and even that is mostly only a factor at elite levels. There’s nothing stopping you from being a great basketball player in casual terms at any age.

But cognition constantly being under ageist assault has little to no basis when you consider so many knowledge driven professions employ people well past middle age (academia, doctor, lawyers, scientists, writers, artists). They also do their best work much later in life.

jesuscripton Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

40 has nothing to do with it. Every other day I see a Ask HN post from younger people bringing up depression, burnout, and apathy.

Listen, there are 60 year olds that look like our long held image of a 60 year that can barely walk or do anything.

And then there are 60 year olds that go to the gym everyday.

How do you want to play this? I don’t accept your premise that 40 has anything to do with it.

Being a miserable fuck is age-agnostic. Trust me, I’m a professional malcontent.

jesuscripton It’s not just what you eat, but the time of day you eat it

Weight loss aside, eating a lot early just makes more sense. You can go the whole day hungry and tired, or you can go the whole day not hungry and tired. It just makes sense to put the big meal in the morning than at night.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

Then you don’t live in the real world. I’m not turning down a job in an industry that’s just as silly as any other and provides me a livelihood that gets ever harder.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

My best guess is that raising funding helps raise the valuation, especially as they approach IPO. So raise money for the sake of raising the valuation.

You don’t really need the money, but you got it. What are you going to do with it to appease the investors? Well you gotta act like you are doing something with it, especially something that shows growth.

Hire more. Hire more because we imagine more. Keep imagining until imagining doesn’t work anymore. Then fire, and say sorry. Hopefully you sold enough equity at the ridiculous ipo price.

Sorry, but not sorry.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

You have a choice if you have a choice. Choice is a luxury.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

Really?

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

There’s a lot of us that work in industries we have no affinity to. Lots of good devs in crypto, porn, society ruining media, society ruining social media, defense, war, and just out right saas scams.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

Unless he resigns along with the people he lets go, there is no accountability.

jesuscripton Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

They literally had people with 1-2 years of experience conducting interviews last I remember. They were on an unhinged hiring spree before they ipo’d, so this was coming no matter what.

jesuscripton Ask HN: What supplements do you take that have good scientific backing?

What are the facts on the hair loss concerns with Creatine?

jesuscripton YouTrack

Would this the first PM software with first class support in an IDE?

jesuscripton Ask HN: Can adding an ongoing side business (SaaS) on my resume hurt me?

They could care less, don't over think this. You'll be lucky if they look at that part of your resume and go "ah, how interesting" for more than three seconds.

jesuscripton Ask HN: Sites with the quality of Hacker News, but for more general topics?

There aren't enough people on HN to bury what Reddit would classify as a "controversial" comment. Reddit has so many people that anything that swims against the swarm would be deeply hidden unless you specifically use apps to filter by controversial (just means downvotes ~= upvotes). Reddit threads usually read like a circle jerk because the size of the hive mind visually drowns out all counters and contrarians.

HN still seems to have a natural disposition for countering, so it's rare to find a thread where everyone is jerking themselves off agreeing with each other. Not to say HN is a beacon for independent thought, but that at the very least there are two or three hive minds that counter each other.

So yeah, we have two opposing circle jerks instead of just one like Reddit.

jesuscripton Agile isn’t about speed, it’s about direction

Damn, didn't even know Agile and Scrum had such deep lore.

jesuscripton Agile isn’t about speed, it’s about direction

Well, who is in the position to change an Agile process in any company? If we have 20 years of using this system, we should have enough feedback from developers and the business to refine what Agile is. I can tell you very few developers have input on the overall process in most places.

It's not evolving into a better system because it's under the new bureaucratic regime of project managers. They are an institution now within the tech industry and are a self preserving entity. It's idiosyncratic for them to change this bureaucracy.

If a developer were to say, "here is what I think about the process that governs me", the governors will laugh you out of the room with a delicate smile and sweet fuck you along the lines of "woah, that's great feedback!".