soueuls

I left the western world several years ago, partly because of this. I could not live in an idiocracy where some people hire based on skin colors or genitals.

Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism.

I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies.

I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it.

I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt.

But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)

I am mostly working as a contractor so I don’t know the feeling of staying many years in the same company.

But from time to time, I asked myself « is there anything else I would rather do? »

And the answer is always no.

Considering I have to work to make money, I don’t think there is anything else I would rather do for 40h/week

Not at all, I have been working remotely for a while now, but I always kept clear separation between my home and my work (for the most part).

So, I always go to coffee shops, libraries, coworking, bars, to get some work done.

I work a few hours home at most, not enough for me to feel lonely

Yes, it depends on the person’s ideals, it’s now obvious to me that I am more aligned with China then my home country.

I wish I could be there right now

I did my master degree in Tsinghua University, China.

I was surrounded by really smart people.

I regret leaving China to go back to Europe. I truly wished I was still living there.

You can use gender or race or any other factor. I just don't want to have anything to do with that company because I am afraid I will lose IQ point on the long run.

I am a capitalist, I am not sure which factors are the best factors when it comes to correlating with performance.

Is it hard skills? Communication? Do I need a generalist? A specialist? Is it better to hire people with ego or not?

One thing I am pretty confident is that vagina or Melatonin are pretty weak factor. And I would not trust any HR or managers optimizing for it.

I am a lot more happy since I live in a country where that does not value these things.

I tried to find the original source, I could not.

That being said, I have witnessed this non sense during my professional career, we had meeting discussing the need to hire woman or black people.

As an engineer I can't possibly agree to that. I want to work with engineers, problem solvers. I don't think Melatonin or the presence or absence of a vagina to be a useful metric.

That's also the reason I left the Western world for the foreseeable future. It's clearly impossible to focus long enough on a problem without being disturbed by the new shiny ideology of the moment.

If I could not really use a computer at the moment, I would look at the biggest project dependencies, if some are unknown to me (or I don’t know them enough) I would instead spend sometimes reading their documentation.

It does not fully answer the question, but I think I would still gain valuable knowledge about the codebase indirectly, rather than being utterly slow trying to navigate a big codebase on my phone.

There are services like https://www.onoff.app/en/ (which I have personally used in the past)

It's pretty cheap and easy to use.

I think "Airr" is your best bet

I am not preparing in any ways, I like my days simple. I also don't read the news, so I pretty much have no idea if something is going on

I don't think there is any biases behind it.

Google is incentivized to return you results. And there are probably not enough Malaysian restaurants in Fremont.

So I would assume they have some data that says "people who like Malaysian cuisine tend to like Burmese cuisine as well".

And so they are returning them as well.

It does the same quite often. I am French and I live in Thailand. If I look for "crepes" it will return me results about "roti" (which for any French person is a disaster)

1. I am 27 but I could be retired if I wanted (lucky break in crypto + living in a developing country + big enough portfolio. I don’t want to retire. I have been programming since I was 13 years old, it’s what I enjoy doing. I would probably need to make a conscious effort of not being paid, that would be a bit absurd.

2. I don’t need more work/balance, 1-2 days off à week is enough for me. I don’t need weeks of holidays. I am working remotely in a nomad fashion, I don’t need time off to travel.

3. I am using my excess cash for fun experiments, your cap would not allow me to do that.

4. Except for unique circumstances, people making half a million a year, are not in the rat race. That allows you to buy roughly 8-10 appartements every year in some countries. They keep working because it’s something they enjoy doing.

What would I do if stopped working?

I would basically keep coding but make 0 money doing it while there are people willing to pay me?

Does not make any sense

I am not British but I see monarchy positively.

She was indeed an interesting character, witty, frail yet fierce, out of this time and truly royal.

It’s definitely the end of an era, that makes me a little bit nostalgic.

I have been thinking about this for the past two hours, rewatching the speech she gave at 21. She was hesitant, unsure, obviously unprepared for the death of her father, yet she became a queen at the blink of an eye.

One of my favorite speech, very human, a young lady suddenly realize the weight of her destiny, pledge to put her life, her only life, aside for the rest of her life. She spent the next 70 years being the Queen, no matter what, never complained, never showed any sign of weaknesses, relentlessly performing diplomatic duties.

Being right for 70 years is difficult. I think she genuinely tried.

I would not put any effort toward it.

I have done some charity work in Benin and Thailand before, with the goal of teaching basic and fun computer science for kids and teenager.

I do it with my own money and time.

My goal is to show up, entertain, try to inspire and get them curious, and possibly become a mentor if few of the kids show high interest.

My goal is not to seek people who are not showing up.

Just treat everyone fairly. This includes girls of course.

I stopped getting/looking for information related to society as a whole.

Most of the time it’s information I have no leverage over or can’t do anything with the information

Often it’s just people giving their opinion or exhorting me to submit and follow their opinion (if you believe that you are X, we don’t have time to wait because of Y, I can’t believe still believe Z in 2022)

My default mode is that I just explore my own topic of interest and ignore everything else.

If someone is trying to talk to me about the latest societal trend/fade I just cut the conversation and move on

My stance on this question is "Can I spot the difference between art 100% generated by computer or 100% made by human".

And my answer is : "Not so much anymore, not always".

So, yes, to me it's art. If I can't make the difference then I can't discredit it.

I have done some PHP in the context of modern WordPress before (Bedrock/Sage/Trellis). Meh. It's sufferable but it did not give me immense joy.

I am mostly doing frontend but I want to find a productive full stack framework, I am still hesitating between Rails and Laravel. Still thinking of using Rails though.

The reverse would be unfair as well.

If someone have to live in San Francisco to make 250k/year but pay a high rent etc. And you make 250k/year living in Ho Chi Minh that would be unfair to them. And would be a little bit unfair to your local people, the selected few (employees) able to work remotely would literally make 80x time the local salary.

There is no way to solve this problem, if you want your compensation to be independent from your local area. Become an expert, start being a contractor and cross your fingers.

I think you are missing the point. What you consider to be a controversial/non PC answer is considered to be a pretty normal answer to them.

They are not trying to get in touch with like minded people, they are just posting comment on HN to share their thoughts and react to a news, pretty much exactly like you are doing.

I will take myself as an example :

1. I think diversity is a completely useless metric. 2. I am in favor legalizing discriminations. 3. I believe we should not help people who want to commit suicide.

I don't consider any of these opinions to be controversial.

The main problem with diversity, is that most of the time it's a performance. And it's often done with bad actors, who will spend hours and hours on talk shows, describing how they are proud to be the first X to have played in this role.

The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value.

Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alienating the core fanbase because they are fed up seeing their favorite franchise being ruined by quotas, and racial war, especially when all other aspects are lacking (scenario, dialogues, poor yet expensive CGI, etc)

I just wish most of this company get broke and we start to see smaller studio producing interesting stuff around diversity.

As you can tell I have no fetish for diversity as it's a criteria I found useless in a workplace or in my entertainment. But from time to time, I would happily watch a high budget and original production about some fantasy world happening in Africa (like Game of Thrones is for England) or in Thailand or whatever with all the folklore around it.

Rather than seeing divisive comment about :

"Amazing, we finally have some diversity among LoR's elf, take that racist Tolkien"

or

"Disgusting, they put some black elf".

As usual, I really feel this modern world is not for me, it's ruining most franchises one after the other, yet it's not creating any new interesting franchises.

Never I try to avoid all form of synchronous conversations that happen through a screen. They can be useful, but almost never necessary for my cases.

I am gonna ask the weird question, but why are we trying to prevent generating CP content?

1. Sharing is publicly is still considered highly illegal. 2. The biggest problem with everything CP related is that to produce this kind of content, real children were used, tortured and often killed.

Should we not allowed the model to generate CP content in order to reduce the number of real children being hurt/killed?

Plus, this of course would not prevent any authorities from tracking who is sharing this kind of content.

Sure thing, I just updated my profile to include my email, feel free to get in touch

Interesting insight, but I don’t think she will be able to build software, I have to be realistic, it seems fairly “easy” to help her make 500$/month after 2-3 months (which mean should go from having a regular full time job where she can’t scale anything and she does not grow much, to learning valuable skills, being able to scale and pretty much being paid to grow)

But software is a different beast, I would rather direct her into something where she can see quick results.

That being said, I do think I am going to take 2-3 weeks to introduce her to nocode tools (Notion, Airtable and n8n), I am open to other suggestions

Not everything is worth posting on HN.

We all have random side projects with very little value, the world does not need to know.

I am currently in Thailand, will stay in Asia for the foreseeable future. I am thinking of starting a family in the new few years and I consider Western Europe to be too unsafe for that (and I don't believe the statistics that says the number of crimes in France is pretty much the same as in Thailand)

I consider my country (France) to have an absurd amount of tax for the quality of services provided, not worth the price

I personally have no trust in EU leaders. I studied China history extensively, and this look exactly like what happened before the great famine there.

They will be defending their world view until the last moment, then it will be complete chaos.

Number are constantly manipulated, the lies are getting less and less subtle as well.

I left the EU few years ago and I am not looking back.

I don't think the energy crisis is going to be the sole problem. You should expect civil war in several European countries as well (France being one of them).

Good luck to the ones deciding to stay there, I hope everything will be fine.

I feel like you are working 3h/day, is it a part time job?

I use Modafinil and Ritalin from time to time, when I want a good working session. I would not abuse it, but if you take doses smaller than the recommended dose they give to people with real symptoms it's probably fine, or should I say it becomes a viable cost/benefits analysis.

I mostly do it because I like the thrill of building something in one weekend. I would not like to live a life where I have to use it to keep up with work though.