tachyoff

Thank you, that means a lot. I'm happy to hear you were able to get better too, and that you were able to keep pursuing the things that were important to you. And I can see how working towards life goals would be helpful in the midst of depression. From what I've read, setting goals (even small ones) and trying to achieve them can be helpful too.

This hits home pretty hard. I've been struggling with depression for a while, and I think it's slowly getting worse. That being said, I'm job hunting and probably about to move so trying to find a permanent therapist (which is on my todo list) isn't exactly in the cards.

A particularly insidious symptom, I think, is how depression creates a cycle of negative thinking. I learned about Seligman's model of depression and explanatory style recently and realized I've been doing exactly what the model describes. People who are depressed tend to interpret bad events as being permanent (stable), entirely their fault (internal), and applying to their entire life (general). Good events, conversely, are interpreted as unstable, external, and specific. So, if a depressed person fails a test, they're more likely to convince themselves that they're stupid, that their entire life is ruined, and that this is just the way they are. Similarly, if they pass, it's obviously only temporary and can't possibly be related to their ability at all. Of course, there's more nuance here in specific cases (sometimes bad things /are/ your fault, and sometimes good things /are/ random, for example), but the idea is that depressed individuals tend to use this kind of attribution, whereas non-depressed people reverse it.

Anyway, I'm not a cognitive behavioral therapist, nor have I seen one (I would like to, though), but I've been trying to fix my explanatory style. For example, I recently passed an interview round and immediately felt depressed instead of excited. When I read about negative attribution, I realized that I'd been doing exactly that: /obviously/ I am actually an imposter and I'll just be rejected next time, and of /course/ this good thing can't be permanent, and /obviously/ I only passed because of random chance.

Of course those things aren't (entirely) true! I tried hard and I think I decently know my stuff. I passed because I have a modicum of tech skills and I was able to demonstrate them. I do believe that a large part of interviewing is outside of our immediate control, but that means that even if I don't get the job then it doesn't help to dwell too much on failure anyway because I had little actual control over it.

So yeah, depression sucks, and when you're trapped in a cycle of negative thinking and emotions it can indeed seem impossible to get out of it. But cognition is a funny and powerful thing, and I absolutely believe (and the science seems to bear out, at least with CBT) that you can do some metacognition and change how you think. If you became depressed, you absolutely can become "undepressed", as it were. It's not easy, but at some point you have to try to claw your way out. Being aware of these types of thoughts and trying to challenge them is one way of making them stop. It helps to write them down, then write down all of the ways they don't make sense.

Maybe this helps someone else. At the very least, it helped me.

It’s unfair and unrealistic to expect everyone to assimilate, if for no other reason than people bring the entirety of their experiences with them wherever they go. There will always a bit of a Californian in transplants to Texas, just like there will always be a bit of a Texan in transplants to Pennsylvania or Florida or Germany or wherever. I think this adds to the richness of life, but I suppose not everyone feels that way.

Nothing, assuming local policy and large corporations don’t price lower-income earners out of their homes/apartments.

Californians are leaving for /cheaper/ states.

That would make its way to the Supreme Court well before that, don’t worry. Then it’ll either be legal everywhere or illegal everywhere. #federalism

That depends on how you figure. Do you mean socially? Legally? Business-wise? There are a lot of complex forces at play to make Silicon Valley the way it is (including history). I don’t think it’s fair to tell any group not to “make” some city like their previous one. Furthermore, one nice thing about the American melting pot is everyone gets a voice. If enough people move to Texas and change its culture, that’s just something you have to deal with (or move, I suppose).

I would argue that aggressive education campaigns (similar to anti-smoking campaigns which drastically reduced the number of smokers) could help with seatbelt awareness. Showing how far someone crashes brought a windshield even at 35 mi/h can be pretty effective at getting the point across.

I need something covering me. I’m sure it’s a culture/childhood thing to an extent, but I can’t sleep without a layer. It’s another reason why I always wear shorts and a t-shirt to bed too (plus I can’t stand the idea of making my sheets filthy even more quickly by wearing less).

I wouldn’t call time complexity particularly complex math. Imagine a loop. It does something n times. Within that loop, you do something n times. For each outer looo through n,you do an inner loop through n. Trivially, this is n*n, or n^2, also known as quadratic time. If you nest another loop, it becomes n^3, or cubic time.

Anyway, there might be some confusion of terms, perhaps. Exponential time in the algorithmic complexity sense is any algorithm that takes 2^n operations to complete. If you’re talking about the number of iterations after you loop through n things n times, then that increase itself would not be exponential. But that delta in iterations is unrelated to exponential and polynomial time complexity.

Can’t wait until it costs $30 and takes 45 minutes to unlock my car!

This is fabulous! Got from cheese to postmodernism in two hops [1]. Really excellent work, and thanks for making it open source!

[1] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Cheese&target=...

Except clearly that doesn’t work, and clearly some people who take out loans like this aren’t doing it in bad faith. The idea that the threat of punishment is effective at stopping “bad” behavior has, I believe, been thoroughly debunked by psychology. It’s not as simple as “someone borrowed $10 and didn’t pay you back”, typically. Even personal bankruptcy is available to people who borrowed in good faith and couldn’t make the ends meet. But when there is an entire system that is designed and exploited to make it hard or impossible to pay people back (e.g. payday loans or usurious rental contracts), no amount of punishment will get the desired behavior you want because the system itself is broken.

> This is not a battle you are going to win.

When cities are gridlocked by expensive, polluting cars, nobody wins.

> I'm happy for other people to take mass transit and leave more road space for me.

That kind of thinking is why we don’t have reliable public transit.

> Mass transit is not a good solution, it's a poor solution...

Nobody tell Europe, or Japan.

I don’t know how to communicate the idea that perhaps every single person having their own 2,000-pound personal transportation machine doesn’t scale well. I mean, never mind that we could reduce climate change, road deaths, congestion, and the requirement to own a car. How is having one bus take 20 people somewhere worse than making those people buy a car, making them drive separately, then making them find parking? Public transit is one of those things that, like public healthcare or public education, involves giving up a bit of perceived individuality to benefit the greater good. But if you’ve already got yours and are convinced that’s the way to go, I can’t help you. See you at the voting booth.

> There is no institutional inertia or political organizing involved in walking, riding your bike, or taking the bus for your next trip.

Assuming you live in a bikeable or walkable area, sure. Bus service exists, but it can be patchy and/or underfunded. Some people simply have none of these options.

I live in Detroit (yes, Motor City), and this area is crying out for good mass transit. In fact, two out of four necessary counties voted down a regional transit mileage (which amounted to peanuts every year on property tax bills), which would have provided billions to develop rapid transit for southeast Michigan, because of pretty much racial hangups and “screw you, got mine”-ism from the suburbs.

These are complex issues. I agree that building out transit infrastructure is complicated, but I think making them politically attractive are equally difficult.

I’m really sorry this happened to you. I’m glad it ended up working out eventually (it seems). I wonder how much time, money, and tears we could save if there were an easier way to simply reach people in these situations to let them know of their options. Of course, a better solution is legislation like that proposed by the ACLU. Hope all is still well with you.

Edit: just read your profile. I think you’re doing fantastic work!

> If they were preferable, people would choose them.

Balivernes. That’s just a tautology. I’m sure if you ask any American if they think the electoral college system is fair, 99/100 will tell you it isn’t. Yet it persists. Why? Many reasons, among them being institutional inertia. Institutions are big and slow, especially ones involving concrete and steel.

There are also power amplification issues. That is to say, certain groups of people might have more power to effect change than others. A majority can seemingly want something, but not know how or not be able to effectively get that change accomplished.

In other words, I think it’s a bit more complicated than “if people wanted public transit we would have public transit”.

You’d have to defeat the automotive lobby and voters in the suburbs who have issues with certain types of people being able to visit. I’m hoping those of us who really want it get the public transit everyone deserves, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

I seem to know a lot of anarchists, so I’m very well-acquainted with the idea of a world without the rule of law. Anyway, I think the principles of the American court system are pretty solid. Like all legal systems, it’s made up of flawed humans, and I don’t think it’s impossible to both hold it in some sort of esteem while also acknowledging that it needs improvement. That it is unfair to the poor doesn’t mean the entire system is broken (at least, that would be my argument; I’m sure you could argue that the whole thing IS broken), it just means parts of it need improvement.

Let’s not ignore all the ways the court system has succeeded, oftentimes in numerous tiny ways (i.e. cases at the state level that set important precedent and have pretty fair outcomes for the involved parties. C.f. restrictive covenants on deeds. The rulings for my state (Michigan), at least, seem pretty well-reasoned and legally logical.)

Downloading nginx doesn’t teach you how a web server works.

Don’t forget oceanic dead zones and acidification! All it takes is the death of an important part of the food chain to really hurt a lot of people.

This is disgusting. One of my adult fears is that I’ll wind up on the wrong end of a collections bill or something and everything will go to shit. That being said, our court system was never particularly kind to the poor and destitute (what institution has been?). I’m so thankful that organizations like the ACLU exist and that they continue to do good, solid legal work.

Poor people can’t comment because they’re poor. It’s the survivorship bias problem. People who are currently poor probably can’t comment on HN (or have no idea what it is), so what you see, overwhelmingly, is people who were able to escape poverty. This can lead some people to believe that it’s easier than it is to get out of poverty. And since this is an article about true, abject poverty, “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps with my tech skills” doesn’t really help anyone learn anything.

Then it’s good that my goal is not to endear myself to anyone here. Flippantly dismissing certain technologies and engaging in “just”isms needs to be called out because it’s not productive or helpful. Moreover, I think it’s funny that the same kinds of posts are being made in 2018 as were made in 2007 (i.e. “why don’t you just...”), considering they have nothing to do with Dropbox saving money by migrating away from AWS. Really, it’s not germane at all. Perhaps if the source were an article about open source alternatives to Dropbox.

This is well-said. To add some anecdata, I work in a “managerless” organization. It sucks. It’s hard or impossible to make certain changes because nobody has any authority to do things that aren’t necessarily politically sexy (e.g. fixing bad security or setting up asset management). There’s also this expectation that if you want to do something, you can just do it. This sounds great on paper, until you realize that doing things like managing infrastructure is a full-time job for an entire team, and not a “once in a while” position for someone with little experience. I’d love to go the extra mile, but I only have 40 hours or so in my work week, and I’m busy with my actual assigned tasks.

There needs to be a good balance (obviously too much red tape is counterproductive). Having managers can be nice when it explicitly assigns roles and responsibilities to a group, because that means not only are there dedicated people for certain tasks, but presumably they have a modicum of power to get things done. It also makes it plainly obvious whom you talk to if you need, say, a new laptop, or a printer set up, or a VPN account. Without managers you get company-wide emails like “who controls our website? I need to update something.”

Ah, you sound like this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Both flat and regular light switches allow for the use of elbows or, in a pinch, noses.

Car “infotainment” systems are the worst. I drive a VW and the touch screen is maddening. Transition animations are too long and involved, which is frustrating because 99% of the time I just need to force connect Bluetooth and that button combination is muscle memory by now. But every time I have to wait for the stupid interface to do this 3D flip. Oh, and if I skip ahead in Spotify with the on-screen controls, it doesn’t pull the new track data until the next track plays automatically, so it’s always out-of-sync.

I feel the same way about rent..

It’s an eternity if you’re out of gas. ;)