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nvilcins

273 karma · joined March 24, 2016

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nvilcins··on Why Employees don't want to return to office?
1. Depends on the person. 2. Depends also on the kind of environment they have at home. (e.g., living with kids in small apartments is a distraction, etc.) 3. Do not underestimate how much people can slack off in the office.
nvilcins··on Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
Different ways of erosion leave different kinds of traces. The ones in the Sphinx enclosure are indicative of water (more specifically - rainfall) erosion.
nvilcins··on Where to Move?
Latvian here.

You are right about the taxes in the Baltic countries - in all three you can get ~20% effective tax (minor differences between the countries). And they are really similar otherwise.

Most people in a similar situation to yours pick Estonia. It is the most focused one on tech, supporting startups, and overall the most developed one (relatively speaking). Also seems to be the most expensive of the three.

Lithuania has the most business-oriented culture in my experience. Otherwise a nice and chill place.

Latvia is maybe not the best in the above regards (though, not too far off either), but I would say it has the most stuff going on and things to do overall.

nvilcins··on Ask HN: Are You Fasting?
I've been doing intermittent fasting for years now, on a not-so-typical schedule: first meal late in the day (5PM-ish) and the second (final) one within a couple of hours.

What I love:

* Total mental clarity during the first half of the day, can focus fully on work or life responsibilities without a single thought about food.

* Freedom to not have to organize the day around food (making choices, planning logistics, "wasting" time). Pays off big time when traveling.

* Never inconvenienced or slip into grumpy mode when for whatever reason I don't get food.

* Eating a lot of high-quality home-cooked food - as I love cooking (when I have time) and I don't depend on eating out / ordering food / quick-prep meals as much.

* Bonus: great ROI of the occasional first alcoholic drink of the day (on a more or less empty stomach). Not a health advice!

nvilcins··on Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
The elevator in our apartment building has a touch-button(?) panel.

Guess what happens during the cold season when you you've got your gloves on? Yep, absolutely nothing! (bonus f.u. points if you are carrying stuff and cannot easily take the gloves off)

Luckily have a fully analogue car so I'm maintaining my sanity somewhat.

nvilcins··on Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
> - Related: be sure to understand the difference between transaction vs explicit locking, a lot of people assume too much from transaction and it will eventually breaks in prod.

I recently went from:

  * somewhat understanding the concept of transactions and combining that with a bunch of manual locking to ensure data integrity in our web-app;
to:

  * realizing how powerful modern Postgres actually is and delegating integrity concerns to it via the right configs (e.g., applying "serializable" isolation level), and removing the manual locks.
So I'm curious what situations are there that should make me reconsider controlling locks manually instead of blindly trusting Postgres capabilities.
nvilcins··on Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics
This is awesome! Does anyone have a collection of similar kinds of fun questions?
nvilcins··on Tell HN: As a dev, Slack has ruined my life
Absolutely this!

As a long-time remote worker I also noticed (especially in early 2020) that a significant portion of people were struggling simply because they assumed they can continue doing things _exactly_ like at the office, only at home.

No, it's a considerably different setup, and you (and your team) have to adjust your processes accordingly:

• Slack is not a (chit)chat. Be precise about what you want and provide enough context to the reader. Small niceties are important, but reduce the overall fluff.

• Pay attention to how you structure your messages / exchanges. Take advantage of the formatting features. Make your messages easily digestible. Small things add up over time.

• Take notes / write documentation more than before.

• Embrace tools that you didn't need previously (for communication, brainstorming, whiteboarding).

I believe work in a remote setting is generally more productive if done well.

P.S. Not trying to dismiss the highly extroverted folk who _need_ human contact to feel normal day-to-day. I believe that's a separate topic entirely.

nvilcins··on Association of maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy with child growth
We absolutely need low-stakes mechanisms to discover potential causalities to research further.

What we need to stop is put unreasonable emphasis on association studies (i.e., interpret the results incorrectly).

nvilcins··on I don’t have notifications enabled, nowhere and never
Less discussed but similarly controlling of your life are all the nasty visual tricks apps and services use to grab your attention (bright red notification bubbles) or to annoy you into submission (so you download their mobile app or upgrade to pro).

I've gone the extra mile and set my phone to be entirely in grayscale, and have never been happier.

(Doable on Android at least, look under "Developer Settings")

nvilcins··on High-intensity exercise, some new news
FWIW, for me HIIT was the catalyst to exercising.

As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway.

Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.

nvilcins··on Ask HN: 6-hour workdays more important than 4-day workweeks IMO
Been practicing 6-hour 4-day work week schedule for a while now and I'm the happiest I've ever been. No real noticeable difference in productivity long-term, and a significant improvement in the amount and quality of personal (non-work) time.
nvilcins··on Ask HN: How do I Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck?
Eat in. Drive an older car, or bike. Work remotely. Live where rent is not astronomical. Reduce alcohol consumption, especially at bars/clubs.
nvilcins··on Heart-disease risk soars after Covid, even with a mild case
Given that different variants of the same virus outcompete each other (very evident with Covid), why would that not apply to different viruses of similar nature? SARS-CoV2 and Influenza both effectively compete for the same vulnerable population, and abide similar epidemiological dynamics. There is also some level of cross-immunity for corona viruses.
nvilcins··on I paid for a perpetual license of TeamViewer. Stop calling and emailing me
(Just to clarify a question raised in the child comments)

Those were Spotify ads promoting other podcasts, not sponsors promoted in the podcast itself.

nvilcins··on I paid for a perpetual license of TeamViewer. Stop calling and emailing me
Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

Tangent: Now that I occasionally play music on Spotify I get ads in the form "We know you were a premium user before, how is life with the free service now?". I find that somewhat creepy and disturbing.

nvilcins··on Show HN: Meetup with other travelers in a new place
Props for YYYY-MM-DD
nvilcins··on Show HN: Randomly create beautiful website layouts
Dummy question from a non-front-end dev:

What is the simplest way to host this project as it is on the web? (as a static page, no additional functionality)

nvilcins··on I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
Tangentially, I frequently add dates to filenames to keep things organized. And _always_ in the `YYYYMMDD` format for clarity and technical reasons; `DDMMYYYY` (or God forbid the Americans' `MMDDYYYY`) never made much sense to me.
nvilcins··on Job vacancies surge past one million in new record
Those jobs are temporary.

On the other hand how many jobs were made redundant as a side-effect of the pandemic? Catering moving a lot towards delivery, people realizing they can actually work from home, etc.

nvilcins··on Too Good to Check: A Play in Three Acts
This a great concise illustration of what's wrong with the information ecology today.
nvilcins··on I'm a Coffee Roaster: Here's What You're Doing Wrong That's Ruining Your Coffee
I'm a novice coffee enthusiast, and I was blown away by the difference appropriate water made to the coffee. I am now "making" my own water by adding optimal mineral mixture to distilled water. The results are superior to those with tap water ("raw" and filtered) or pretty much any bottled water brand that I've tested.
nvilcins··on Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout
No less than 5%, or 100 billion.
nvilcins··on Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout
Adding two _trillion_ dollars of net worth sounds pretty productive to me.
nvilcins··on Why is it so hard to be rational?
We all operate with abstractions and simplifications - because it's impractical (and actually impossible given the complexity of the world) to process end evaluate every single detail.

Dealing with contradictions in our own beliefs (paradoxes) is a part of life. The rational approach is to accept that and "fuse" those beliefs carefully, not (a) accept one and reject the others or (b) avoid the topic entirely.

nvilcins··on Becoming a Chess Grandmaster
I think the problem is that people interpret the "do anything" part as "become #1 at anything" (i.e., "prodigy" as per the parent post).

I would say something like "get to the 80th percentile at anything" (or even 95th) would be much more accurate, though, that doesn't sound as catchy. Heck, in many areas you don't even need to work _that_ much or hard to get to the top 20% or so, it's just a matter of a reasonably informed and structured approach, exercised over time.

nvilcins··on I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)
> I don't remember if the wording was specifically like this [..]
nvilcins··on I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)
Wow those sound like such badly designed questions. What country is this?
nvilcins··on My business might have 32 days before it's shut down by NYC [video]
And the best part is - the citizens (who are impacted by this directly or indirectly) are paying for this.
nvilcins··on Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure
The title of the BBC article [1] that references the study:

> Teens, tech and mental health: Oxford study finds no link

What the study actually says, according to the same article:

> We couldn't tell the difference between social-media impact and mental health in 2010 and 2019, [..]

> [..] the connection is not getting stronger.

Hence, the title is an obvious lie. (likely to get more clicks, push a certain agenda, or both)

Having a title contradicting the contents of the article has become extremely common these days. Unfortunately, it's also very common for people to only read the headlines (does anyone know the stats on this?), and I'm sure media outlets are fully aware of that.

Hence, I would argue that articles with titles like these should be classified the same was as false information, and fought against accordingly. It's not enough to "clarify" the meaning in the article, when the title - the false claim - is all what most people take away (and disseminate further).

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56970368

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