jm__87

This is why I follow it up with "try to figure out what makes sense". The fact of the matter is, neither you nor I get to decide who voices their opinion on something on the internet. This is why it is important to scrutinize everything you read instead of blindly following the first piece of advice you read.

I do agree that anti-vaxxers and flat earthers are a problem and it is clear that not everyone has the same ability to scrutinize what they read and determine where the truth lies. That being said, I tend to assume that people posting on HN are intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves and in that case, I think it is fine for non-experts to offer opinions.

This is silly. Someone can know something about a topic without being licensed in it. Similarly, someone can be licensed to do something and give poor advice. I don't see why you wouldn't just take all the advice you can get and try to figure out what makes sense and what does not.

I think I would start with the easiest one, which is whether or not you feel like you're in the right job. Just make a list of what you like about your job and what you don't like. If the dislike category is large, you need to ask yourself some more questions. Are you likely to find employment elsewhere in your field without all those cons? This may require some research. If not, are there other fields of work that may be better suited to your preferences? Again, got to do some research here.

I'm just going to ignore the laziness point since I don't really like that word. You can dislike an activity and avoid it, that doesn't make you lazy. If you need to still do something regardless of whether you like it or not, you need to change how you think about that activity or find a way to enjoy it, otherwise you're just needlessly torturing yourself. Or you just avoid thinking about how much you dislike something and just do it instead. Either way, saying someone is lazy carries both a negative judgement and a lack of insight, so this word I think is best avoided. If you feel you're being "lazy", best to try to understand why you're avoiding what you think you should be doing and fix it.

Lastly, if you're depressed or burnt out, there will be some obvious signs. You'll be tired, have a hard time focusing, you may have muscle aches or headaches all the time. You may see nothing positive in your future and may ruminate excessively about your perceived shortcomings or problems. You may also find it difficult or impossible to react emotionally to things (e.g. being excited or sad). Basically, you'll feel terrible all the time.

I've always viewed laziness as a word that people use to describe behavior when a person didn't do what they were supposed to do, but they dont care or don't know how to investigate why.

What you described is not laziness but either a lack of focus, a lack of awareness of how you are wasting your own time or a conscious decision to not do your work in favor of something else. Both depression and burnout make it hard to focus on tasks that are going to move your life forward, so you could easily be depressed or burnt out AND waste hours on Youtube as a result of it. You could also just be a distracted individual who is not burnt out or depressed and still waste time on Youtube. You could be too tired to devote your mind to coding, so you waste time on Youtube - this is just biological reality, and I dont think we would normally call someone lazy if they can't code anymore after a 12 hour day. Perhaps the act of coding brings about some negative thoughts (e.g. why am I doing this, my colleagues are just going to criticize my commit) so you're actively avoiding it in favor of another activity. This is not necessarily lack of focus but maybe a lack of awareness. Perhaps you are feeling stressed and watching Youtube helps you relax, so it is a strategy to help you avoid burnout in the long run. Basically, I don't think laziness exists, its just a word used to describe something you don't understand.

So let's say a man expresses how he feels and is then shamed for it. This really just reinforces the notion, for this man, that he shouldn't be expressing how he feels. I'm not sure you can "unlearn" in the way you're saying unless you're in the right environment and around the right people. Or if you're willing to let people shame you, which is probably a bad idea.

I think it entirely depends on your past experiences. Let's compare two hypothetical experiences:

1. When Alice was 7 years old, she scraped her knee and started to cry. Her mom ran over and comforted her and then they went and got her a bandaid.

2. When Mark was 7 years old, he scraped his knee and started to cry. His dad yelled at him to stop being such a pussy and shut the hell up. He couldn't stop crying so his dad hit him.

It is pretty clear who is going to try to not cry going forward. You don't need to repeat what happened to Mark many times for him to learn that expressing how he feels in that scenario is not a good idea. Keep this pattern going long enough and you get an adult who is probably going to view emotions as a burden. As to whether expressing emotions is a good thing or a bad thing, it entirely depends on who you are expressing them to.

Maybe it is just me, but I've seen this issue multiple times where a programmer used a regular expression thinking they were clever, only to have it backfire later when there was some corner case not covered by their regex (which likely would have obviously been caught if they had just taken the time to write out each case as an if statement). You're usually just gaining complexity in exchange for fewer lines of code, and I'm not sure that is always the best tradeoff. Something to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to use regular expressions.

With that being said, your list of things to know are all things I have to know for my job (these are things almost all programmers should know, in fact) and I would not consider myself a low-level or systems programmer, just an application programmer.

I am quite the opposite. I remember bad things quite readily, but have to remind myself repeatedly it wasn't all bad.

As for drinking, it was an excuse to act like an idiot and have some fun when I was younger I think. The hangovers did get much worse as I got older, so I rarely drink now and when I do I don't usually enjoy it that much.

So in my own experience, older colleagues can usually bring two things to the table regardless of relevant work experience: maturity and responsibility. This isn't always true (I've definitely had some older colleagues who are exceptions to this rule), but I think probably your average 40 something is more mature and more responsible than your average 20 something. More importantly, if someone went and did this degree in their 40s, I know they are doing it because they really want to follow the career path that the degree leads to, not because they chose this academic program at random at the age of 17 or 18 because they weren't sure what they wanted to do.

I think in America, it is too late. The arms race between police and criminals has gone on for too long. If police stop carrying guns, criminals aren't going to magically stop carrying the guns they already have.

I found CBT for sleep helped my insomnia. A good book on this is called Goodnight Mind. I also read Matthew Walkers book while I was going through insomnia as well, and I can say this book is likely to make your insomnia worse. Half of it is just telling you all the ways in which you're killing yourself by not sleeping. Not a great thing to read when you can't sleep.

Perhaps some poor grammar on my part. I was responding to the post with a hypothesis as to why some people experience the "call of the void": to make us more aware of the danger of doing an action that would kill us. My opinion is, this makes no sense. You can imagine what would happen quite easily without having the urge to do it. This is the "call of the void" explanation which I do not buy.

Well, I was going to make a comment that this sort of "just so story" logic is prevalent amongst those who are anti-evolution (e.g. creationists) and would rather see the idea die, but it seems I do not need to.

I've never really bought that "Call of the Void" explanation. You can imagine fairly easily what will happen if you jump from a tall building without having the urge to do it. I've always viewed it as a legitimate momentary urge, just one that conflicts with almost every other urge we have to live, so we don't do it and don't even acknowledge the urge as legitimate (most of us, anyway).

Consensus is the best you can ask for with evolutionary stories. There is no equivalent of a mathematical proof in that field. Do you think we shouldn't bother with this field of study at all since we cannot definitively prove something?

I would think if the story holds across all cultures over time, it is pretty good evidence it is not just a just-so story.

Ah, I wouldn't say I've lost complete confidence in my statement. Just wanted to add a disclaimer in case I didn't fully remember the details correctly (perhaps it isn't all gorillas, just certain species of gorillas. Perhaps the female gorillas aren't entirely infertile, just significantly less so. Etc), as I don't have the book handy to validate.

I would think it depends on what scale you're looking at. It is pretty obvious that if one guy takes out a large chunk of the order book of one security, over the course of seconds, on only one side of the market, the price is going to move. If we're talking about the S&P 500 dropping over the course of a few months, I think it is accurate to say that those who want to sell are outnumbering those who want to buy.

> you certainly don’t gain anything by wanting to kill/eat human babies

Actually, this is exactly what gorillas do. When there is a new alpha male, he will go and systematically kill all the baby gorillas who are still nursing. Why? So he can impregnate the mothers of these gorillas who are unable to reproduce while they are nursing. While human females can get pregnant while nursing a baby, they are less fertile during the first few months of breastfeeding.

Now I'm not saying this the reason why some people have this impulse. Just thought I'd share some interesting info with you. Happy new year!

Edit: I am not an expert on gorillas, just something I have recalled from reading Robert Sapolskys book, "Behave". I'm sure there is some nuance to this infanticidal behavior of gorillas which I have misrepresented. Apologies in advance to the primatologists who read my comment.

I've read and followed the advice in both "The Depression Cure" and "The Mindful Way Through Depression" and can say both helped quite a bit. I personally did not find that therapy did much of anything for my depression (though I will say CBT for sleep was a life saver for me, so it was worth it just for that).

Depression is a pretty tricky thing to deal with, but I personally find that keeping a daily meditation practice helps a lot. Ultimately, being more mindful throughout the day means you'll ruminate less and dealing with the psychological component of depression is like 90% of the battle. Mindfulness will not improve your life in any of the areas that might have led you to feel depressed in the first place (e.g. feeling alone because you are alone, feeling like you have not accomplished enough, etc), but it will allow you to break away sooner from the rumination associated with these feelings so you can work on improving your life in some measurable way instead of wasting time feeling miserable.

I also think depression can just be a tradeoff for some people with a given mindset. Some people are very hard on themselves when they fail. These people are probably going to have a better chance at being successful since they are always taking responsibility for their failures and trying to improve themselves, but they are also going to have a higher chance of becoming burnt out and depressed as a result of the high expectations they have placed on themselves. The state of being depressed is obviously extremely counterproductive to what they were trying to achieve in the first place - eventually the goals shift from trying to start that business or get that promotion to just trying to get out of bed in the morning, and ruminating on this setback only feeds the depression. Ultimately, cutting out the rumination is how to resolve this in the short term, and mindfulness is the tool for doing that. In the long term, these people need to realize they are only human and have limitations and figure out how to take better care of themselves or learn to not be so hard on themselves in the first place.

Yes, perhaps I should have chose my words more carefully. When more people want to buy than sell, prices rise. When more people want to sell than buy, prices fall. The exact details of how this happens vary from market to market but in general this is how it works. For every trade there has to be a buyer and a seller. The imbalances occur in the buy and sell orders.

Okay, well I think we disagree then. Most people who follow the markets know that markets are cyclical, but knowing if you're in the beginning, middle or end of the upswing or downswing portion of the cycle is what most people care about. Knowing the details are the only way you could even have a chance of correctly making these calls.

Not really sure what your point is. Cycles always happen for the same technical reason - more buyers than sellers lead to rising prices and more sellers than buyers lead to falling prices. Understanding what leads to these imbalances in buying and selling is the more interesting and more difficult part and the details tend to be a bit different for every cycle. Most people find these details interesting and for some people, it is their job to understand these details. The abstract idea that herd behavior is what moves markets is not that useful unless you understand exactly which herds are moving which markets and how they make their buying and selling decisions.

Here is a doctor that disagrees and gives a fairly detailed explanation of why it is unhealthy for you: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM

If you don't know what "too much" is for the thing you're eating or drinking, your advice is totally useless. This is why we do studies. No one ever worries if they're drinking too much water. On the other hand, we know we should worry about eating too much refined sugar, thanks to people who study nutrition. We also know the consequences of consuming too much sugar, which has been shown repeatedly through studies so we just don't have to rely on the word of nutritionists and doctors. I really don't see how any of this is bad. If you're sick of seeing headlines about nutrition news, stop reading it.

Everyone wants to blame the government or big pharma, but I think the fact of the matter is, human beings are evolved for a world that is very different from the one we currently live in. At least my perspective, this explains the situation much better.

Humans evolved in an environment where there were no highly processed sugars or highly processed carbohydrates and where our long ago ancestors got daily exercise looking for food, building shelters, running or fighting predators and so on. The human body is optimized for a certain type of diet and a certain level of exercise. In addition to this, human beings evolved to crave sweet food and eating sweet food is an enjoyable experience. We know that eating highly processed carbohydrates or sweets leads insulin to rise more than eating other things and doing this repeatedly over time leads to fat accumulation, insulin resistance and diabetes.

Contrast with the world we live in today: sugary drinks and foods and processed carbs are everywhere. Many of us are required to sit all day (or at least be stationary, if not sitting) for our jobs. To get food today most of us either drive to the grocery store, drive to a restaurant, or have food delivered to our home. We don't build our own homes. We don't hunt. We don't fight off predators. There is very little that many of us have to do in modern life that requires exercise. Almost all exercise is optional.

Another thing to consider, is that the amount of stress we encounter in daily life has not gone down. If anything, at least in the developed world, we have ramped up the amount of stress that people experience on a daily basis in the past few decades. Stressful commutes, office politics, fighting the crowds while out shopping, constantly being prodded to compare yourself to everyone around you (i.e. social media) and poor sleep (and then overindulging in caffeine the next morning) are all parts of modern life. Consider that the stress response evolved in living things in order to get that living thing in to action, to flee or fight for its life. As it turns out, the physical activity that follows a stress response usually turns off the stress response.. but the times we find ourselves in stressful situations often do not offer a physical outlet for our stress. Thus, cortisol remains elevated in many of us, and it turns out that consistently high cortisol leads to insulin resistance.

So two hormones being persistently elevated lead to insulin resistance: insulin and cortisol. These hormones are persistently elevated in the average human in the developed world. Exercise improves insulin sensitivity but most humans in the developed world have no reason to exercise, aside from attracting mates and staying healthy.

Lastly, one's ability to forego pleasure or leisure now for a return later (or, for the promise of not getting sick later) varies a lot throughout the population. Some people are very good at this, some are not. Obviously the amount of education and knowledge one has also varies from person to person in the developed world. Since most of us crave sweets and processed carbs, they are readily available and nothing in our lives requires us to exercise, those who are not good at forgoing pleasure now or those who do not know that eating this way is bad for you, will sit and eat like garbage right now because it feels great right now.

It is not a simple explanation, but to me, this set of facts explains why it is becoming more of a problem as time goes on. As much as big pharma may want people to get sick and buy their drugs, big pharma didn't make people crave sweet food, nor did they make processed food ubiquitous, nor did they come up with office jobs that keep us sedentary, nor are they keeping us stressed out. These are all byproducts of evolution and our own technological successes.

I'm not saying the ADA and CDA are right or that your advice on diet and exercise is wrong, I'm saying the issue is more complicated than you are making it out to be. Your average diabetic knows what causes the disease and what is making it worse, yet they have a very difficult time making the lifestyle changes required to improve their outcome. If you're familiar with Jason Fung's work, you'll know that he himself raises this point, and this is why he is such an advocate of intermittent fasting - this lifestyle change seems to be easier to make for someone who is diabetic than improving diet and exercising more.

First of all, diabetics take insulin because it keeps them from dying, not because it cures diabetes. Prior to getting on insulin, type 2 diabetics have likely already been on a drug which does not exacerbate insulin resistance (e.g. metformin). As the disease progresses, the pancreas starts to crap out and you eventually end up on insulin since your body can't produce enough insulin on it's own.

> Why don’t we start telling diabetics the truth — your diet is broken and needs to be fixed; avoid most carbs, do strength training.

Yes, since no diabetic person has ever heard this advice before... as someone who is not diabetic but knows many people who are, every single person who is diabetic knows that diet and exercise will help them, yet they can't seem to get it sorted out. To me, this says knowledge and willpower are not the problem. Also, if someone has made it to the point where they are on insulin, their body is already pretty screwed up at that point and making these drastic lifestyle changes is going to be very very difficult (though not impossible). Regardless, we should have some more compassion for these folks - it is a very difficult disease to deal with and shitting on people for being sick is just mean, regardless of how they got there.

> if you model a simple assumption that resources get more expensive to extract over time

Why would you make this assumption? Resources get cheaper to extract over time as technology improves...

Honestly, I see these sort of comments on here all the time and it drives me nuts. Comparing homeopathy and a standing desk is comparing apples and oranges. Everyone has experience with standing - we evolved to do this. Taking homeopathy remedies to cure illness is not something we evolved to do, so we do not know what the potential downsides may be.

Another reason this is comparing apples to oranges is the potential downside risk given the difference in unknowns. Again, what is the downside risk of standing instead of sitting? Maybe sore feet, maybe a sore back, you'll know when you try it. What is the downside risk of treating your cancer with homeopathy? Maybe it doesn't work and you die. Not even in the same ball park.

When these things are in the same ball park: we know the risks involved and the risks are small. Under these circumstances, my argument stands: if someone likes taking homeopathy remedies when they get a cold and it is not a financial burden on them, who cares what they do. The only risk is having this same attitude toward homeopathy regardless of the ailment you are treating and then people start dying.