olingern

First, I would say that behavior modification is long, hard process. It's not something that reading a book can fix overnight.

Second, just reading your post and the tone in it, I would say that it's not you but the narrative that you tell yourself. Maybe your co-workers didn't interpret the conversation as "harsh" at all and maybe they just thought that everyone had closure. It's important to consider maybe there's no ill intent or negativity behind their actions

Lastly, I have the exact opposite of your problem and I have to work to hold my tongue. In some cases, people respected me and in others people would "work around me" so that my input wasn't needed or blunted. The grass is definitely not greener on this side. I would say moderation is key and choosing your battles wisely is important.

Also, I would recommend seeking out a therapist if you feel like this is a pattern you see over and over. It could be that this doesn't originate within the workplace, but somewhere else in life.

For what it's worth, I've watched some of the least aggressive/assertive people be the most effective communicators. People rally around them because of how they can trust them and the clarity they can bring to a situation. I believe effective communication and fostering relationships are much more valuable assets than being assertive or aggressive.

Typically it's so crowded that it's impossible to find who you're meeting. So, I don't understand why people typically meet there other than tradition

If you live in Tokyo, you know that the statue of Hachiko-san is the default meeting place / hang out spot for many Tokyoites in Shibuya

I don't think there's any conscious symbolism around it today, but I wonder if the trend of waiting there started off as an ode to Hachiko's loyalty and extending that to a friend you're meeting.

I come from small town America and NYC, so I'm jaded. There are a lot of good cops out there who set out with good intentions, but I believe their training is inadequate. In my experience, they do not act as stewards of a community, but rather someone with power who is to be feared.

In regards to my comment of "most other countries," I believe 'most' could be changed to 'many'

You are required to show your card to police when they suspect there is a crime. You can refuse by asking if there is a reason to believe there was a crime and if this is a "professional inquiry"

If yes, they must provide the reason. [1] At that point, you may have to show them your card depending on the circumstances. They may leave you alone, however.

My experience: I was once taking photos in a dark alley for some cyberpunk type shots around 9 p.m. I was approached by two officers who asked, "What are you doing here?" Kind of a trick question, because then they said, "Oh, you speak Japanese. Do you have your resident's card?"

I complied here because of the optics. After complying to show my card, my bag and me were fully searched which I was not okay with. After that I experience, I became well acquainted with my rights because, at that time, I did know them well.

1 - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/04/02/issues/rig...

[1]'s source / reference: http://www.debito.org/shokumushitsumon.html

Current resident of Tokyo. Can be a little scary when getting randomly searched. I could argue, but my Japanese is intermediate and the police are always right.

A youtuber interviewed a trial lawyer [1] last year and I thought it was really good. I wasn't aware that the holding days could be extended for each crime that you "commit." There's an entire scheme to this:

  3 days - initial detainment

  10 days - judge determines whether you can be charged or not

  10 days - possible extension.

If you commit two crimes, that could be up to 46 days in detainment.

Basically, don't come to Japan and do anything questionable and everything should be fine. In the unlikely event you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you should know how to wield Japanese well to try to get yourself out of it.

On the other hand, I watched an interaction between a couple of foriegners and the police one day. They were drinking in the park one day (legal and common) and the police were called on them for unknown reasons. After the police arrived, they basically told the police to go away for an hour and refused to show their resident's card (both also legal). Backups and backups of backups were called and eventually they dispersed. I think this is a good example of how there is a lot of restraint with regards to police here. I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.

The thing about Japan is that once you're caught up in the system, it has no mercy.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZLGqL1FMo&vl=en

I'm new-ish to Go and find "Go Time"[1] nice for building context while I continue learning.

1 - https://changelog.com/gotime

This is sort of a 'turtles all the way down' sort of issue. You could also say:

> Learn assembly and the rest will come

> Learn binary and the rest will come

> Learn the fundamentals of electricity and the rest will come

...

I think learning the layers below which you typically operate can be beneficial; however, I think the patterns and ideas ( semaphores, scheduling, etc. ) are probably the most beneficial part of an exercise like this -- not the actual C language.

Lindy Hop. 15 years in and I still enjoy it.

Why are you getting hung up on nomenclature? The point of the article is clear. If you feel that using 'microservices' is too trite or "buzzword-y" then that's about you and not the article.

The book on updating one's favicon missed the list. Tragedy, really.

I find not eating to be a nice way to implement calorie control and also work on executive control. In my case, I've done it for the greater part of of the past three years. A typical fasting cycle would be 2 months of 20/4 intermittent fasting and 1 week of "normal" eating. I have an unfounded theory that re-sensitization helps sustain the benefits.

Initially, I did find great benefit in the cognitive benefits [1] of fasting but found it came at a price. This price was mostly strength at the gym later in the day and some added stress during the workday (_not eating is sort of a stress of its own_). It also led to me yo-yo'ing (5-7 lb fluctuations [2] ) a bit with weight because I would be so hungry that I would overeat. I should mention that I paired my fasting with ketosis as type II diabetes runs in my family. I saw a lot of improvement with how I deal with insulin (shakiness, irritability, skin issues, bonking[3]).

If anyone is thinking about fasting, here are my beginner recommendations:

- Contrary to what this link suggests, I think the key is to start slow. There's no need to even do a 24 hour fast, in the beginning. Your body is not going to change over night. Build up to daily 10 - 12 hour fasts and build confidence that you can accomplish the fast. There are a lot of benefits to prolonged fasts, but I would suggest building up to them and learning how your body reacts instead of getting to a place where you feel faint-ish and don't know what that means for your body.

- Fasting on keto feels like cheating, so I think it's a great tool for facilitating more frequent, longer fasts. For me, it seems that ghrelin is highly suppressed by being in a keto induced state. I don't feel well after 72 hours and noticed abnormal heart rhythms, most likely sodium or potassium imbalance.

- Practice saying 'no' or at least make note of social obligations where you have to eat or knock yourself out of your fast / ketosis. 1 day here and there doesn't make a big difference, but how your overall diet quarter to quarter and year to year is what really matters.

- Don't listen to the popular IF / keto sentiments of, "I don't have to track anything! It's magic," if you're below ~18% body fat. This is what I listened to and it led to overeating and reaching 10-12% body fat and quickly jumping back to 15-18%. No matter what your diet is, you should know your caloric intake and ( in general ) what keeps your body at maintenance.

- Not sleeping makes fasting so much harder[4]. If I sleep less than six hours it's definitely an uphill fight.

____

None of this is "fun" per say but it's a process of getting to know yourself and observing how time, age, and environment affect your body.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3670843/

2 - I know salt and water retention play a big role here, but these changes were more than just looking / feeling bloated.

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitting_the_wall

4 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3763921/

I've seen such ironic,self-deprecating media in advertising on TV -- but a SAAS's landing page? Bold.

The stickiness and success could make this a mini-trend which dies out quickly, comes back five years from now, and then lives on forever as paradoxically ironic.

> Wakamiya also teaches "Excel art," which uses the spreadsheet software to create designs.

I've worked at a couple of Japanese companies in Tokyo and am truly amazed at what they can do with Excel. Most recently, I had a co-worker create UI mockups in excel. It wasn't Sketch / Figma level of design -- but it was pretty effective at communicating what he needed.

On the other hand, some things are just down right atrocious like internal company pages with everyone's name and picture.

It’s very annoying how it handles backticks via some sort of autocomplete.

Questions I ask myself about this: - Why is this not an “opt-in” feature? I could see it being useful for people not acquainted with markdown-like syntax

- What PM / UX’er thought this was a great idea? I’m sure there was internal feedback that this was less than ideal

I think the HN crowd goes 50/50 on this. One half hates it and the other believes it's a necessary evil. And then there's the small minority that enjoys it.

I was apart of the former half who hated algorithms until I was tasked with help hiring people. The only thing I believe that is worse than an algorithm is me spending 8+ hours of my free time on a "take home" problem. So, I used pretty easy to solve algorithms alongside real problems I had solved recently for interviews.

Being on the other side as the interviewer really made me see the value of algorithms. It becomes a medium where candidates can convey competency. I think it has gotten murky due to the lines between a web developer and software engineer blurring. That statement alone can be a can of worms.

Anyway, I would say algorithms / data structures for backend development do come up when laying the groundwork for a new project or something that might see a lot of traffic. Lots of things in development model certain data structures (queues, stacks, graphs, etc.) so knowing them allows you to converse with your co-workers and conceptualize them to others. Probably comes up somewhere between 2-5% of the time. Design patterns probably get brought more as their a bit more applicable for everyday tasks. It really depends on who you're around, how challenging the work is, and what the engineering culture is like.

Everyone loves a good Javascript punching bag but I would argue that the language/ecosystem has the most inertia and positive change within it. It's not perfect and it's exhausting at times, but I'm confident that the language will continue to move towards something more robust and ergonomic.

One more thing to note. From the post:

> In a C application, try as hard as I may, at the end of the day I am always on my own, making sure the invariants I need for memory safety hold. In Rust, I can be 100% confident that I will not have memory-unsafe code. Not 98%-and-I’d-better-check-those-last-2%-really-closely. One hundred percent. That’s a game-changer.

I think if you're always leaning on a compiler for correctness, maybe your problem doesn't reside in the static vs dynamic debate.

I'm a big fan of Yamazaki 18 year for special occasions (hard to find right now) and the 12 year for an anytime drink.

Hakushu is also great, but I haven't tried their 18/25 aged whiskeys.

Yamazaki 18 won a 'Gold'[1] award five years back through the International Spirits Challenge and has been difficult to find reasonable prices since.

1 - https://www.suntory.com/about/award/

> The company will move more than 1,000 employees just 10 miles south of its current South of Market headquarters, which it plans to vacate.

Click bait. They're moving ten miles south of their current office ...

Found a workplace and co-workers that I meshed well with. I worked for 3+ years with people who I struggled to connect with.

There are many constructs in ES6+ that make codebases more manageable. I make heavy use of destructuring, async/await, and template literals amongst many other features.

So, I would lean in the direction of it being irresponsible due to code being less easy to grok and harder to bring new people into the codebase.

- Read some recent PR's on an area of the codebase you'll be in. See if you can come up with some questions if you can't figure out why something was done. It would impress me if someone came to me with great questions or was just interested in learning.

- Be aware of your time. Sometimes, devs can be pulled in many different directions that distract them from what matters.

- Learn and research your company's tools and practices, i.e. Github/Bitbucket, Trello/Asana, scrum/okr's, etc.

- Get your dev environment running. If there are bugs or issues in the documentation, see if you can make a PR and fix it for the next person.

edit: PR stands for "pull request." Adding, since I would not have known this just out of college.

It seems like SoftBank has money in so many places and I was surprised when I read [1] how many 1+ billion dollar investments they have and have made.

1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-invest...

This is a subject dear to my heart, so I thought I would answer in earnest.

About my personal experience, I viewed myself as a victim of burnout. It's as if it was a battle already lost once present. That fear in itself contributed to this state of helplessness to something I felt like I couldn't combat.

Each time I burnt out it was related to the stress of the job or, at least, my perception of the stress. I think mild to moderate stress takes a toll on the central nervous system over time -- if you let it. There are definitely coping mechanisms[1] you can put in place; however, I've come to believe a lot of it has to do with mindset and how you choose to see your work and interactions.

As a fellow burnoutee, I would ask you to look over your past burnouts/experiences and see which ones could you see differently? Can you find where negativity and stress started to seep into your daily life? Could you have done something to augment it? How do others around you cope with similar stress or how is their situation different?

Asking myself these questions has allowed me to find the criteria of what I need from a workplace and people around me in order to thrive. Programmers, DevOps, and the like live in our heads and I think a key burnout preventative measure is the developing the ability to get out of our heads. In practice, I think this is different for everyone. Meditation, nature, exercise have all been effective tools for me to come back into the world and leave my head.

Recently, I found an episode of Tim Ferriss's podcast that I found to be resourceful for burnout and burnout-like things. Sometimes, Mr. Tim Ferris can come off as pandering to tech entrepreneurs and name dropping -- but a lot of his content and guests is worthwhile. So, I entertain it. I continue coming back to one of the recent episodes with Tristan Harris [2] because it put into words some of the things I've thought about lately and provided a lot of other adjacent resources. The main one that peaked my interest was "The Work" of Bryon Katie [3]. Her branding can come off as new agey with a Oprah-like feel to it, but it's a solid framework that (seems) to pull from meditative and CBT practices.

I don't think there's a silver bullet to defeating burnout. I think getting to know yourself and who and what help balance your equilibrium is an underrated, essential part of life we're never taught. Best of luck

[1] - https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/coping-mechanism...

[3] - https://overcast.fm/+Kebtdt5RM

[3] - https://thework.com/

Code review, IMO, is specific to an org and how it wants the culture and codebase to mature overtime.

Careless, quick reviews are going to foster an environment where PR authors do not feel adequately supported where as pedantic, nit-picking reviews are going to exhaust.

As for the semantics, it's often about being idiomatic in the language and adhering to good design, i.e. if some requirement changes -- can this change with it?

I agree. Without these people the site could fall into a mess of bad answers or a self promotion answer driven platform like Quora.

It’s exhausting that the author of Svelte has to continually compare his project to React. It’s a huge red flag when someone can’t substantiate why something is worthwhile without criticizing adjacent projects.

I understand that React is the front-end framework du jour, but React nor any other successful project got where it is by continually criticizing others’ work.

I remember digging through .NET forums to find answers for working with ASP record sets. 100% not fun.

Nothing is perfect and SO has its warts — but it’s far better than anything we’ve ever had.

Your posts have been helpful, thanks for the writing you do!

Personally, I've found how they aggregate research and list it a valuable resource for how I continue my own research on a particular supplement.

I find it much more valuable than the empty Mayo Clinic and WebMD articles that are so conservative in the information they provide that it's basically just reading common knowledge.

I think if you're using one site for your source of information for supplements, you're doing a disservice to yourself and potentially putting your body in harms way. So, with that said -- I also do not think Google should be removing this from their search results.