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milsebg

142 karma · joined February 27, 2019

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milsebg··on Ask HN: Battling Depression
Yes, sure, there is more than one way (maybe even as many ways as patients). My point was not about gym or not, it was about the idea that depression is something that is totally outside of one's own control.

Happy that you found your way, too.

milsebg··on Ask HN: Battling Depression
> You don’t care about your work because you’re depressed. > Same with everything else. > take it seriously and find a good psychiatrist to help with it.

So, you're seeing a depression as an external "illness" that can only be cured by pharmeceutical compounds?

I can only speak for myself, but to me that was dangerous advice. it removed accountability for my actions. the only thing that helped was getting into new actions. actively changing small things.

i was diagnosed with severe depression more than once in my life. things started to change for me only when I stopped believing this narrative.

a psychiatrist will give you pills, a psychologist will talk to you with a "playbook", both will try do bring some predefined indexes of clinical depression down. nothing of this is tailored to your personality.

because you mentioned it: gym does not change everything miraculously (neither do pills), but it taught me that my actions have significant effect. going through a perceived hamster wheel all the time, that realization was a big step forward to me. i did things that i did not want (like meeting people, applying for jobs, etc.). that helped, and it gets easier with each step.

ymmv

milsebg··on Ask HN: Battling Depression
purpose. survival mode lacks that.

i guess for most people this comes down to connection: social, romantic, whatever.

best you can do is leave the house, interact with people, (re)connect with friends and family. no shortcuts.

milsebg··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
Instead of "python --version", just use the "python" executable from within the venv. Sourcing is a concept for interactive shells.
milsebg··on Ask HN: Is there an open source HN?
https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news
milsebg··on Nitro: Tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor
That's pretty cool and looks way less complex than s6.

Unlike s6, it does not seem to support dependencies, or did I miss something. How is it supposed to start services in the right order?

milsebg··on I Miss Web 2.0
Isn't it just that we were pioneering web2 in a time (after the dotcom bubble) in which access to the internet became more ubiquitous?

Remember the beer app on the first iPhone. Playing with Sensors and graphics on a new device was just fun. Just like tinkering with the Raspberry has been.

Then, this got commercialized and optimized for money to the ground. To me, as sad it might be, "tech" and "web" has just become a mature market.

> Not just the vibes, but the net hope for humanity and short/medium/long term forecasts of the health of the united states were all much higher among the average joe

I'm European, so genuinely curious why that optimism faded away in the US

milsebg··on Show HN: DevNotify – Track Your Starred GitHub Repos and Issues (Open Source)
Looks cool.

Here's the correct link to the repo:

https://github.com/Surajsuthar/dev-notify

milsebg··on Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?
This could be me. It is interesting to see how close some details are: My home country is (based on your user name) the same as mine, I do have the same dreams, I do have approx. the same savings. Im just a little younger and I didn't get my education in the US.

So, I really, really can relate to your situation.

Here is what worked for me:

First: Radical self-acceptance. Your outlook to the future determines your success in reaching your goals. That's the hard part, and I'm not there, yet, too.

Second: If you struggle with self-acceptance, apply what I call the Paradox of Specificity.

In professional sports, any exercise should be specific to the training goal to achieve maximum results. If, for example, you're training for a marathon, there is little value in doing chest presses all the day. This rule of specificity to me, is very appealing. It just works like programming: Effort in, result out. However, the rule of specificity does not apply to the way more complex thing that we call "life". Take dating for example. If anything you do with your time is somehow "looking" for a partner, you will most likely fail. This is the part where specificity is actually causing harm.

So, what I did: I created a mindset that I can influence my well-being. The reasoning is easy: If I see that I can change things for the better, I will continue to do things.

First, I started with a proper diet, then I added some sports. The first months already were amazing, so I read everything I could. I optimized my Gym training plan, my diet, my supplements, I experienced with medications, oxygen therapy, cold exposure, sauna, red light exposure and everything I could find. The results: - More confidence as I went from overweight to below 10% body fat - more overall well-being, better sleep, no fatigue - the idea that I really control what's going on in my life was planted in my head

Second, I put myself into uncomfortable situations: I walk every day at least 10k steps, no matter the wheather. I end my shower with cold as long as I could (increasing number of seconds each time), so that my mind gets programmed to complete a task even in uncomfortable situations.

Also, I did things that I would never have done before. Public speaking, travel in solitude (which I admit has felt like loneliness sometimes), practising martial arts.

Third, start to get rid of negative things: Avoid toxic people, avoid alcohol, and other drugs, limit my caffeine intake, no more junk food.

And now, where am I? I'm still struggling with positive perception of the future but I see this gets better every day. I am more open to people and I feel that I "attract" positive vibes around me. I was guest on a marriage and I was able to build strong relationships with other guests. Something I thought I've lost (or just became too old).

A word on therapy: Not sure about your insurance, but if you can afford it, take some "retreat" for 6weeks in a nice clinic that offers nature, sports, good food, therapy sessions and whatnot. This distance from your usual day to day life and the support you get, can be a booster. But: Tell them what you want, put the effort in. I know how harsh that sounds: But no therapist can help if you just sit there and complain how bad everything is.

Btw, getting back to the US seems appealing for me too, right now, even if the timing is not right from an economic pov.

If you want to chat, give me a note here and we'll find a way to connect

milsebg··on Ask HN: Do you think 'normal' working will ever return?
You don't have to supply (i.e. buy) your own hardware, but you might have to pay for the power supply.

On the contrary, you likely have lower commuting costs.

However, the more important aspect might be that you end up needing more space at home and the employer needs less space in the office. Working from your kitchen table is probably not the best idea in terms of ergonomics.

In my opinion this aspect gets few attention in the discussion.

milsebg··on Ask HN: Small Desktop Recommendations?
What about this one:

ThinkCentre M715q Tiny

milsebg··on Why Climate Change Won't Be Stopped (2018)
Sure thing, that mitigations would apply.

But again, the OP is about credibility. So, for the advocates of legislation changes (e.g. climate activists) it would give their credibility a huge boost if they started to surrender symbolically from things like traveling abroad (and also, would remove a rhetorically very easy target from their critics).

The proposed legislation itself should of course refrain from being "just" symbolic.

milsebg··on Why Climate Change Won't Be Stopped (2018)
And one way to "push for that regulation" is giving an example that you are not hurting yourself too much if your choices reflect the legislation you demand.

If you ARE in fact hurting yourself too much, then you prove that people can chose one from the following:

A) keep the status quo, but the planet will most probably heat up and very bad things happen.

B) change the status quo to something that really, really hurts. But the reward for your surrender is that there is a chance that the planet does not heat up so much and less bad things happen a few decades from now.

That is what most people perceive in climate activists.

milsebg··on Why Climate Change Won't Be Stopped (2018)
Well that is exactly the point. Of course, climate activists reducing their individual leisure demand would decrease global carbon emissions only insignificantly, if at all.

That's not the point here. The point is that climate activists ask their government for big changes because they fear civilization could end otherwise. And those big changes would have significant impact on the lifestyle of almost all people affected by these laws. So, why should one be willing to (and thus, vote for the changes) change ones lifestyle, if the advocates just say "well, I stop travelling abroad, when everyone else stops as well (and other carbon emission is reduced, too)"? The OP is about credibility, or, even lower level: sympathy.

Maybe it becomes more obvious if we look at one specific example. In the Netherlands they lowered maximum speed on highways to 100 km/h (from 120 km/h). Correct me if I'm wrong but the carbon saving from that law is close to non-existent compared to the whole economy's carbon emissions.

Or, the whole EU banned light bulbs. Also, the energy saving compared to the whole EU's energy consumption is probably sub 1%. And with the advent of white LEDs, people just use more light and the overall effect is even less.

Both measurments combined have an impact less than your claimed 5%-10%. Does that mean that government should stop taking small steps, and only the "big shot" counts?

Or can small steps (by governments OR individuals) be a tool to increase awareness?

milsebg··on Ask HN: How do some email clients track 'who read' the email?
> I always assume these trackers use some hidden pixel image when sending emails - but how can they trace the exact person who opened the email?

Apparently they use a hidden pixel, i.e. a separate tracking code, for each recipient. There was a discussion about this feature in Super Human: https://blog.superhuman.com/read-statuses-bdf0cc34b6a5

milsebg··on German Club St. Pauli Badge on UK Anti-Terrorism Guide Under 'Left Wing Signs'
> It's not a stretch that a militant person from Hamburg would also be a fan of this club. That's about it and how it probably ended up on that list.

I am far away from accusing either the club or its fans as potential threats.

It's just as you said: There is a visible overlap, this pirate flag ended on that list and that's it. The list we're talking about even puts not ban on that sign. It's just connects it to that milieu and that's it.

milsebg··on German Club St. Pauli Badge on UK Anti-Terrorism Guide Under 'Left Wing Signs'
The "Badge" is essentially resembling a pirate flag (white skull with crossed bones on black background).

Hamburg, of which St. Pauli is a nation-wide well-known area often in the media because it's red light district and its most known police station, is also traditionally a hot spot of militant antifa scene.

In 2017 the antifa turned that city into a burning hell looking like civil war area.

If that would not be enough, there is a building squatted since 1989 by far left scene.

So, it is not that counter-intuitive to associate fans of Germany's most violent soccer club with the far left scene of that city...

milsebg··on Show HN: Top billionaires favorite books for high achievers
I like your compilation, but would advise to post your Show HN not to the ProductHunt page but to your original source.
milsebg··on Show HN: Tailwind Builder – online editor for the Tailwind CSS framework
I really don't think this is a contradiction:

First, Tailwind encourages you to use apply to build reusable components,

second, Taking building blocks from a generator like the one posted here, makes at least to me more sense than it would be for Bootstrap: You see a component and can (thanks to utility classes) see how it's built and change the appearance relatively fast. With Bootstrap you would basically just add a component class and that's it - customizing is more complex then.

milsebg··on Show HN: Tailwind Builder – online editor for the Tailwind CSS framework
I really like the idea of life time purchases rather than subscriptions.

To minimize the risk that your site goes down (or is economically unstable at some point in time), you could consider making this a paid downloadable app.

milsebg··on Show HN: 100% CSS Mario Kart
Is there a link to a live demo?
milsebg··on Show HN: Community for Remote Workers
How does this compare to Nomad List?
milsebg··on What should the next search engine look like?
I don't know if there will be a 'next search engine'. From the days before Google, search engine in general haven't changed much.

In the beginning there was just string matching, word stemming followed, then we had synonyms and are getting more towards NLP for getting the user intend. Also, if the communication with the engine is via a text box or via a voice command or a live smartphone picture (for augmented reality) does not really matter.

So, what can change is just the "smartness" of information retrieval at the backend and the ranking factors (from freshness to PageRank to whatever).

Given the fact that the market power of Google actually shapes the internet by introducing their best practices (like AMP or schema.org) on webmasters on a large scale, I doubt that there will be one company with the big breakthrough in information retrieval like Google was. Maybe this field is now more or less saturated for the majority of use cases that it will only evolve slowly and not revolutionary.

milsebg··on 20,000 Startup Ideas
"Process or book convicted individuals into prison." AirBnB and Uber for prisoners. Sounds legitimate :)
milsebg··on Understanding SAT by Implementing a Simple SAT Solver in Python (2014)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is usually not handled by SAT solvers, is it?

Internally we use SAT solvers to schedule resources on medical devices which makes the device look "smart", but this is not AI...

milsebg··on Ask HN: Solving climate change idea, and question, high speed train
> maybe we should be careful about what we're doing

> realistically can shift to a whole new paradigm.

I wish it was different, but I believe that a smooth transition (i.e. evolution) from wasting everything we have to "let's all live a little bit more sustainable" is not a choice. The price tag of such a shift in paradigms may be a revolution. For example I could think of a very very big market crash which would reveal any of these dirty bookkeeping tricks which delayed the crash so far. After such a clearing with all assets set to zero, humanity might be ready to try the next social system experiment, whatever that may be.

That would be an event with immediate consequences.

But telling John Doe that "the planet is in danger because it gets a few degrees warmer, may not buy you his support for taking away his beloved smartphone and weekends in wherever...

milsebg··on Ask HN: Solving climate change idea, and question, high speed train
> Yes to all of those. If you said "to pay Microsoft licenses" I qould squirm and say yes.

Then the carbon tax is -- as I said -- just a tax like every other tax: Putting someone's money in someone else's pocket. How would that help the climate then?

milsebg··on Ask HN: Solving climate change idea, and question, high speed train
> Why couldn't we limit the amount of plane travel people are allowed for leisure ?

Why for leisure? If you want to get rid of 200 new smartphone models a year and other irrational consumables, you'd need to rethink the whole economy anyway, so that it is no more rewarding to rely on unsustainable consumption.

This may sound like utopia, but is not necessarily a bad idea.

So why not limit business trips instead of personal ones? The CO2 budget which is now wasted by producing planned obsolescent gadgets could partly be used by individuals to get more mindful by traveling, by getting in touch with different cultures, by having a better meaning of life than working their ass off to buy such gadgets. For a little more than four iPhones you can already have a flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas and back [0][1].

If you can't think of this utopia, you're mentally stuck to the growth based capitalistic economy we already have. In this case, limiting these resource wasting consumption goods would turn us right into recession, no?

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...

[1]: https://co2.myclimate.org/de/portfolios?calculation_id=23389...

milsebg··on Ask HN: Solving climate change idea, and question, high speed train
> I agree with you. We cant ask to return to middle ages.

True. So, maybe high-speed trains are not the solution, yet. It might be that they're missing a technological pinch, yet. In the same way battery technology was a pinch to electrical cars (which are around at least as long as fossil burning cars, just not usable, because... battery...).

As long as a solution is dependent on politics or taxation, it is a sign that there is still some pinch to tweak, some idea to discover or some detail to improve.

> fossil-burning-car travel compared to train travel is not reflected on the price.

Partly agreed. It's difficult to find a price. What does the emission of one metric ton of CO2 cost? The sum of the actuarial costs of damages to property attributed to climate change divided by the total number of tonnes produced? Is it the sum of the costs of the effort to save such tonne?

Then, is a tonne a tonne? What if you emit CO2 to produce a material which reduces the damages to houses from thunderstorms? Will you get credited the part which led to lower costs of damages?

And even, if you found the right price. Who is the beneficiary whom this price is paid to? Is it the people? So, what if democracy decides to use (a chunk of?) these taxes to rise pensions? Or to support young families? Or to rescue people from drowning in the Mediterranean on their escape from violations of their human rights? Or to improve the healthcare system?

There is no such thing as earmarked taxes.

milsebg··on Ask HN: Solving climate change idea, and question, high speed train
> Compare a country such as Albania producing all its electricity by hydropower and Netherlands which is still burning coal. Both are civilizations and nice place to live with welfare, yet one is polluting and the other is not.

And now compare the standard of living in both countries. Or their GNP. Or their healthcare systems.

I'm not saying that they're better of because they burn coal. But I'm saying that using energy is causing so much positive side effects, i.e. that we have an economy. It's just hard to attribute the negative side effects to one "polluter".

Again, with the same argument you might as well stop taxation, because it imposes costs on those who are productive to pay for those who are unproductive. However, upholding civil peace through a welfare system might be of higher value than 'punishing' the less productive people for their lack of capabilities.

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