Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other options) over the last few months. Just feeling very aimless so I’ve started reading Russian literature and spending hours on Reddit every day.

27/M (today was my birthday :)

If from the Coinbase IPO, you just got out of lockout and you're new to that amount of money. You're probably still near 100% invested in Coinbase and need to divest into something more diversified and less volatile than Coinbase before you can sit on your hands and look at the number in your brokerage account as if it was real retirement grade money. Plus you'll need to pay a ton of taxes on the capital gain.

So don't chill out too much. Divest out of Coinbase, continue life as before and get used to the money. Take your time before changing everything and increasing your spending levels. In a year or so, hopefully you'll have diversified and your head will have cooled from the new money, and you'll be more leveled and realistic about what this money enables you to do, and how to handle your life going forward.

As far as I can tell, it seems like a large (20-50) percentage of people who have a large windfall... end up losing it all because they don't take the time to learn how to handle it.

Good luck and happy birthday!

There's a Ask HN thread, maybe a few, of people who hit it rich and later lost it. The common theme is it's easier to make lots of money than it is to keep it, which is a little unintuitive.

thanks for sharing, storing thst up in the noggin

Do you have a link to this one please? Sounds interesting!

Not to mention that there's a nonzero chance of Tether bringing down the entire crypto ecosystem (temporarily) within the next year, Coinbase stock included

I'm trying to figure out crypto right now, could you explain why you believe this? Or link somewhere where I can read about it?

Tether has been extremely opaque in what assets they hold to ensure the 1:1 USD/Tether peg. It's been observed that at least as one point they definitely didn't have enough USD-equivalent for it, and they've been issuing new Tether at quite a clip since then with flow on effects to the BTC market.

Now if they actually had this financing in place, this would all be fine - but nobody can find a proper accounting of who they're doing business with at the scale they claim to be doing business, beyond the observation that none of the big US players seem to have any business with them - so what assets are actually backing tether?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasgans/2021/05/13/tether-...

Note that the vast majority is "commercial paper": basically short term loans to companies with relatively risky backing. The problem is that's all we seem to know: no one knows from who they've been buying these. It might be large US companies with 50 year histories, or it might be Chinese property developers at risk of bankruptcy (at which point international debtors will be the first to lose their money).

Tether is just one of many cryptocurrencies -wouldn‘t its implosion lead to people pulling out and investing their money in other crypto, hence consolidating the market and making every other coin rise?

What are the most common reasons for losing it?

The number one reason for folks who won the "IPO lottery" is they fail to cash out/diversify their stock, and at some point in the future the stock price drops dramatically.

For example, during the 2001 tech boom/bust a lot of tech companies went bankrupt in a very short period of time. As a result a lot of tech employees saw the value of their stock/options drop to zero (effectively). The speed in which the bust happened caught a lot of people off guard.

It is generally a good idea to move at least some of that money into a diversified portfolio as soon as possible. But folks often put this off because they don't want to pay the cap gains taxes and/or they think the stock will keep climbing.

I guess I did the right thing: Atlassian IPOed in 2015 at $21, despite everyone suggesting to cash out, I wasn’t interested, and I sold only since 1 year between $180 and $320, and kept 1/3rd. BUT it keeps climbing, $480, so you aways feel like you’re missing something, whether you sell or not.

There is no right way of doing it, you’ll never sell at the top. At least the right moment is when you can use the money for a project.

sell half, keep half (or whatever ratio you're comfortable with)? that way if thing go bad they are not as bad as ending up with nothing and if they get better you still benefit a little bit.

I'm guessing lifestyle inflation, divorce, bad investments ...

I was in a similar circumstance. I drove a city bus in Las Vegas for a year. The experience opened my eyes to many things and changed my life in good ways.

I would like to learn more about your experience.

Would love to read a blog post about this kind of experience!

That's good to know. One of my projects is to write up experiences like this I've had.

Please do write this up. What a fantastic experience to learn more about !

I went back to university at 36 after achieving a very, very modest degree of stability in my life. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Gave me a completely different perspective on who I am, what I'm interested in. It gave me the skills to start working in a sector I actually enjoy.

My friend, if I had never work again money, I'd just pile up Masters and PhDs.

I‘m wondering what‘s your motivation behind that… Do you just like the sensation of studying so much?

I‘d probably feel empty myself just accumulating knowledge all my life and not applying it to any high impact problem worth solving.

My Ph.D. was far more than 'just acquiring knowledge', though I did plenty of that.

It is also about advancing the state of all human knowledge. Like what the big tech companies promise that you'll be doing, but without the corrupting element of needed it to be immediately profitable. Much less evil.

A good Ph.D. program should be built on solving a high impact problem. I nailed a few of them, including a couple of medical breakthroughs around some pretty serious diseases. Didn't make any money off of it, but did make a big difference to the world.

And after the Masters, the emphasis is not on 'studying' as much as it is in 'teaching'-- you should be teaching others how to think and approach a problem. Again, potential for massive impact.

I would also feel empty just accumulating for myself. But that's not what Ph.D./post-doc is about. It actually sounds more like getting a job at a FAANG where you are paid megabucks to get 6-yr olds addicted or to destroy the internet or to totally co-op open source.

Many people (myself included) that get PhDs simply love learning. Solving problems is important but for some there is this inner drive to need to learn and master everything. It doesn't preclude solving problems, but it's the acquisition of knowledge that is the internal engine, not the desire to solve a specific problem.

Teach at the university! It is incredibly satisfying work.

Not that you asked, but just find things you enjoy and do the shit out of them. It seems that keeping the mind busy and fulfilled is a part of a long and happy life. Seen a number of folks fall into a sort of purpose hole when they got everything they ever asked for. It’s a strange thing. It’s sort of like… okay? Now what. We did it. What else is there. But really it’s the same things there always was, just that the external forces are removed :)

Do you perchance like to teach? Maybe lectures like traditional classes, but there's a huge need for mentors to young folks with interest in technical fields, particularly in underdeveloped countries (in many such cases merely talking to them in English is already a lot of help!)

I know I'd like to do that, but I've always liked teaching so maybe it's not fitting to everyone.

E.g. I volunteer at a local (Brazilian) nonprofit org as part of my employers' give-back programs and I love it. I try to get (underpriviledged) kids interested in computer science concepts by discussing how they are applied in games. It is all remote (which adds a level of challenge)

I'd believe many such orgs exist. In fact, writing this it occurs to me that putting together a curated list could be a worthwhile effort.

Can I ask you what the name of the org is? I really like to teach, I've done it before, and being Brazilian really makes me want to give back to an institution closer to home.

Please add an email to your profile so I can reach out directly - I shouldn't doxx myself that obviously and if I post the name of the org I will

Recommend reading "Four Thousand Weeks" by Oliver Burkeman. It's about time management, but not the traditional "how to get everything done" sense. He talks about what a normal person can do with their "4000 weeks", or, roughly speaking, their life. If you do decide to go back to work, I'm sure you'll approach it in a very different way. I'm a lot older than you, but I'm also 6 months off work on a break. I'm doing a lot of non-tech stuff (DIY, cycling, running, reading, adopting two greyhounds). But I am planning on heading back to work soon. I didn't win the IPO lottery, but my house is paid off and I live frugally. I could probably do nothing for another year, but it's time I went back to work. I'm just going to approach it very differently this time around. My father is very old, and I lost my sister three years ago. People matter.

I just read the short summary on goodreads [1] and... color me skeptical...

It reads like a version of "The Celestine Prophecy" [2] but aimed at a middle-aged tech bubble. Could you (or anyone else) compare the two, for a very slow reader to make a decision? :D

PS yes the comparison is probably too harsh but that was honestly my first gut reaction...

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36481028-4000-weeks-a-li...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13103.The_Celestine_Prop...

I believe you reference the wrong "4000 weeks". That one is by a different author. There doesn't appear to be a Goodreads listing for this one yet, but there is on Amazon.

I think you can cross the military off your list. If you've made enough money to not work, I feel like you'll get tried/frustrated of the BS involved in a lot of it before your commission is up. I could be wrong though - just things I've seen.

Plus, doesn't the military come with an elevated risk of being killed on the job?

1. Take up and learn about investing. Managing large amounts of money can be a part-to-full time job, and not knowing key mechanics will cause you to get screwed or be at the mercy of others.

2. Find love but keep your wealth a secret until you're sure they are the One and financially responsible. Love comes undone fast over money, and you'll probably need a pre-nup to avoid getting cut in half if things go south. Easier if your partner is also a professional and has assets which goes back to them being financially responsible.

3. Establish a relationship with a law firm. You never know when you're going to need them.

4. Build those software projects you've always wanted to.

Same age, also won the IPO lotto, but not enough to not have to work. Just enough to be financially comfortable with any downturn.

I think it might have been the best outcome. Actually on second thought, no, I'd love to not work. Congrats.

Same age, made $4.5 million in an IPO. Decided to join the military. It was worth it, would recommend with several key caveats. Remember, most FAANGs pay you your tech salary while you’re training. A lot easier to get smoked by a Drill SGT when you know you’re making 10x their salary while doing those push ups :)

American companies pay you to join the military?

Some pay the difference between your company salary and your military or reserve military salary.

> rich enough to never work again

Congrats... but be careful. Some young people underestimate the amount of money needed to "never work again". If you're not working then you don't have group health insurance. You're in the individual market, which often has crappy insurance providers. If you have a serious health issue, and get into a dispute with the insurance provider, your illness can cost millions. If you have > $10 mils you're probably safe though, assuming you invest wisely.

Thank goodness for Obamacare (at least in the mid-Atlantic US). Before Obamacare, individual plans were absolute shit (my individual plan wouldn't have covered my wife's pregnancy with our first kid... her job's insurance did).

Thanks to Obamacare, individual plans have the same coverage as employer plans. Without Obamacare I couldn't have started my company which now employs 9 people in well paid tech jobs (without a penny of outside investment). I'd be stuck in an artificial set of handcuffs imposed by a stupid legacy system of tying health insurance to employment.

I’m not sure if I agree with your experience, in New York City Obamacare plans are horrendously bad, The coverage comes nowhere near to the crappiest employer plan. I had to hire a Nigerian kid to just call the doctors listed on Obamacare website which accepted the silver plan, and about only 40% of the doctors really did (this was for a delivery). $1400 per month for a mother and a child. I currently pay $1400 per month for coverage in all the US through open access for a full family of four (because I live in a place where Obamacare isn’t applicable so the prices are relatively dirt cheap and allows special deals with mainland insurers to get that coverage most mainlanders don’t get).

The price is probably similar to what the employer pays. It just gets hidden because everyone only pays attention to what comes out of their paycheck. I know a past employer paid $2000 for me per pay period.

Health insurance is bullshit obviously. the costs are hidden and definitely suppress what our wages could be. A government solution would be hard pressed to be worse.

Obamacare is utter garbage and costs ridiculous amounts of money. It impoverishes poor people far more than it helps. They should've provided a tax credit to people who pay in with it. Instead they just reduce AGI. What a joke. Honestly the best thing Trump did was make that no longer mandatory or face a penalty. It was a rammed through system democrats did just to pat themselves on the back. Quite literally one of the biggest slap in the faces to the working class in a long time.

It sounds like you are incredibly privileged to not have "pre-existing" or chronic medical conditions. For many, the ACA saved their lives and the lives of their loved ones even if the premiums were as universally outrageous as you claim.

Sorry, but anti-health-care supremacists don't get to do everything in their power to sabotage, strangle, and corrupt something necessary, good, and sensible, just to backflip and whine that it's not perfect, not named after their cult leader, and "not hurting the people it needs to be".

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

Why is penalizing people you disagree with (or secretly agree with, but just hate) more important to you than saving lives?

If the net effect is saving lives, improving health, reducing poverty, battling pandemics, fighting quack medicine, and advancing science, then maybe the DO deserve to pat themselves on the back, huh?

not being denied for pre-existing conditions, or being dropped for hitting a lifetime limit, have been a huge lifesaver for many Americans. if one is fortunate to be young or healthy the ACA wont benefit as much. but its a huge improvement and peace of mind for the large percentage of folks it helps

That's not really true anymore though. The ACA made it so individual health plans are really similar now to what you will get through an employer. And no denial for pre-existing conditions, etc.

Fk you money where you don't ever need to work again and* maintain a big lifestyle is a totally different story though. Doesn't mean OP can't take a break for a year or two though.

Even for a serious health issue, millions seems very unlikely. Additionally, while health care in the US is expensive compared to everywhere else, it isn't likely that the premiums for a single 27 y/o would be the deciding figure in "can or can't retire".

No, but people tend to spend more earlier in retirement and he can plan for it. Planning for rising premiums as a single person is easy, planning for a family if he ever wants one is more difficult.

Consider going back to work, but be ultra selective.

I've worked with a few people who can afford to retire, but find themselves happier showing up to work everyday.

Also, consider YC's founder matching network. Let someone else figure out what the product is, how to sell it, and you just do the bits that you enjoy.

I was in that middle ground and didn't like it. The worst thing is it was tremendous fun to get there... but not enough motivation to do it again without that incentive.

People who find meaning in being rich, enjoy being rich.

I kind of think riches are an illusion - you should just go directly to whatever you find meaningful in the first place. Which might include a lot of experiences to find out what that is. Essentially: living.

You can still do that - although having to do something is very motivating, even if we don't like it!

There's an additional problem though. What if you've found a type of work that you do find meaningful and interesting, but you just don't want to spend 40 hours of your week doing it, now that you "don't have to". It's hard to fit back into working life if you only want to do it, say, 20 hours a week. Some part time jobs exist, but they're the exception.

Open source is always looking for more people to work on it.

If you have the time and feeling lost, I suggest you to spend 10 days for a vipassana meditation camp. They have centers worldwide. Happy Birthday btw!

I do not recommend vipassana unless you've done a _lot_ of meditation before. 10 days of complete silence is a massive strain. I did it, based on little more than a recommendation like this, and had a bipolar episode (no history of bipolar or serious mental illness before). My story [0]

[0]. http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com/2010/02/bipolar-chronicl...

Vipassana is great. I went to a retreat in 2017 that I fully credit with putting me on the path that led to this current situation. I've been trying to enroll in another 10-day course for the last year, but they fill up fast and I've yet to make it off the waitlist.

https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/courses/search

I’d consider studying philosophy.

When I had questions, I ended up changing from chemistry to philosophy in undergrad (before dropping out after realizing no one had the answers). Despite the aforementioned realization, the grounding in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and a few others gave me fertile grounds to later plant seeds of wisdom from thinkers and artists from every walk of life.

I wish I could help you with the struggle, but unfortunately, like most learned things, it’s something that only you can do. If you ever want to, I’d be happy to chat seriously about what it means to be human, beyond making money, any time.

From one sick bed to another: best of luck, and happy birthday.

You could do worse than Russian literature. I did the opposite, moved to Russia instead of pursuing a career. Looking back, your order of doing things makes more sense...

Congrats, could you give a ballpark figure what is considered rich enough nowadays?

At 27 maybe you should look into spending more time with / starting a family?

Happy B-Day!

Looking for external sources of happiness is likely a losing battle. Keep your eyes open and you will likely see somewhere to be useful/maybe even create something that both helps others and makes something for yourself to get to the yachts stage. In the mean time, try working on relationships around you and maybe volunteer/give back with something more valuable than money - yours skills and experience. Good luck!!!

Take up martial arts. That's what I turned to after a windfall. I only stuck with it a year but it got me in the right frame of mind to continue feeling ambitious.

Happy birthday! No great answers to meaning of life, but work focused on societal contributions helped me. In 2009 I was burned out on consulting for banks and telcos, switched to focusing on public sector challenges. Lots of needs for purpose-driven design, dev, product. Also coaching and mentoring, especially for social innovation. Have yet to hit lottery, and make less than I could with industry clients, but better for my sense of making a difference.

Apart from philosophy mentioned by the other poster, you can also read into psychology. Some branches in psychology deal with the question of how to live a fulfilled life, eg. positive psychology [1] and humanistic psychology [2]. Also Buddhism has similar goal and teachings interleave with these psychology topics [3].

To start, you can pick a Psychology 101 textbook (I like Psychology and Life [4]) and then read the people and bibliography mentioned in these Wikipedia articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanistic_psychology

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_psychology

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Life-Richard-Gerrig/dp/020...

Agreed. On my journey to some sort of personal meaning I ended up going through psychology, physical sciences, philosophy & meditation - roughly in that order with poetry and literature interspersed…

But understanding life has, in my experience, been similar to the hermeneutic circle: to understand a part, you must understand the whole, and to understand the whole, you must understand the parts…

That is: the entry point is here - learn about the world and about how humans think about and perceive it. Start anywhere, but start.

*edit: I forgot to add also history. It also helps to shed light on the different meanings people have discovered over time.

If your interest in moving to your parent's home country is not brand new and therefore it's more than something you're just beginning to consider, jump on a plane "tomorrow" and start reading Russian lit and spending hours on Reddit there. This assumes you haven't spent a ton of time there in the past because if you haven't then you will find immediate meaning living there. And if you decide to do one of those other things, or you just feel like it wasn't the right move, you can immediately fly back! No risk. Don't wait. Please. Just book a ticket now.

I don’t know op’s situation - but visa/green card is a big monkey wrench in those plans.

Also consider the wealth expatriation tax of your host country-they can really sting.

Same here, but without the meaningless feeling. Started like you, and quickly 6 months became two years. Now I have two kids that fill my day routine. And I too read philosophy and reddit a lot.

don't be sad.

You could consider angel investing too.

Edit: and travel the world. Maybe travel the world and angel invest ... startups outside the US would appreciate it!

Happy birthday! Man am I jealous, I think I’ll have to grind away all my best years at faang or worse.

I also love Russian lit, so so checkout Oblomov and Tolstoy shorter novels like the Death of Ivan Ilyich. I think you’d really like the japanese book Musashi as well (or the incredible Vagabond manga adapted after it)

I thought with fang you can retire in 10 years or so.

Getting everything you want can be a curse! My belief is that humans need to struggle towards getting better and things. Maybe take up chess?

If you want to try angel investing in something meaningful, I'm happy to pitch you my nascent Biotech project...

Ha! I've considered it and if I found the right woman and we had a relationship that was in the right place I'd definitely do it. But starting a family seems like one of those 'slow and steady wins the race' type of situations.

For many of my acquaintances, starting a family was a jump in the deep end and sink or swim.

As for end results for child and parents, I am really unsure whether slow-and-planned beats random-pregnancy-and-shotgun-fatherhood. Both succeed and both fail.

I also got there a few times, but always got robbed.

Lucky you! A lot of us older than you don't have that luxury :)

what about "meaningful" work, like at the internet archive or Allen Institutes or something -- smaller paycheck, possibly impactful work

What were the events leading up to getting such a big equity pay out?

What # employee were you?

Was it options/RSUs?

What % of the company do you have?

How long did you work there?

I ask because I am at a series B, and I'm very optimistic for our future. But I am only employee #100 or so and don't see a big payout for me barring a multi billion dollar exit (a little too far fetched). I'm just curious how it all goes down for those lucky employees.

I think you are in the sweet spot. Equity compensation drops fast for early employees. Roughly, the first employee might get 1-2%, but by employee #10 it is down to 0.25-0.1%. At that level, you would still need a billion dollar exit to get into FU money territory.

And keep in mind, at the early stage startups salaries are often lower and the startup is likely pre product market fit. So it is much more risky. Employee #100 feels like the sweet spot because it likely means the startup has found product market fit and is hitting the accelerator re growth, but you still get a taste of early employee equity.

Of course this is just in terms of maximizing "IPO lottery" potential. If you are trying to maximize probable net worth, FAANG probably wins due to higher compensation.

Thanks for that insight. While I can't say what mine is, but your ranges mean I'm OK. I see it as a lottery ticket, you need a billion for someone with say 0.1% to be worth a million, and that is assuming no dilutions.

Also what % do you have out of interest? I'm outside the US so I feel my % is less than you'd get at US startups that generally compensate better. Obviously % isn't everything but it's a metric to track.

Hah this thread is perfect. I just finished building my new four axis robot arm design. It’s all open source. Three months ago I started playing with a new planetary gearbox concept, where the first stage is in the middle with second stages on both sides. The first sun is driven by a shaft that goes through a hole in the second stage sun. The result is a very balanced joint design with parallel outputs. A good configuration for weak materials like plastic. And then the gearboxes and the frame are all integrated together, so this is not something where you assemble a gearbox and bolt it to the frame. The gearbox members and the frame members are unified.

I’m very happy with it so far! Video here:

https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1455320442642714625?s...

It’s open source, CC0 licensed. Please fork the design files here!

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/d663661f8c0c34e7a29bbfa6/w...

EDIT: you may prefer to watch the project and wait to fork it until I have fleshed out a few more things. In that case feel free to star this git repo and I will update it as I make progress.

https://github.com/tlalexander/brushless_robot_arm/

I count three axes, what am I missing? (considering the "stick" at the top "a finger" and moving down, I see the wrist rotation, the elbow rotation, and a rotation at the shoulder down on the desk)

So in the video you first see a section of movement using the second and fourth axes. Then after that the arm goes back to zero (sticking straight up) and you see the midsection rotate back and forth without the end section rotating. That’s the other two axes. There are also closer photos here:

https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1455100498428588036?s...

Wow awesome. This is one of the most impressive arms I've seen. How much did it cost you to build? About how many newtons can you excert when fully extended? / What weight can you lift? What is your experience with backlash?

Definitely considering forking

Thank you! I had all the parts lying around and I’ve not put together a full BOM to calculate costs. But it’s two odrives and four brushless motors plus maybe $100-150 in bearings from AliExpress, then some screws and a couple kilos of PETG. So maybe $850 if you built it from scratch?

I haven’t done testing of its capabilities yet as I just got it working today. Also I am running at 24v but I want to try 48v when I can upgrade my odrive controllers to the 56v version.

Not sure about backlash either except joint 3 has bad backlash not due to gearing but from a fixable issue with the way the output connects to the frame.

But I am very happy with this design! I think it’s pretty promising.

Also it should be noted that with my $850 estimate that is $400 worth of Odrives. For years I have longed for good brushless drives for under $100 per channel and there are some newer ones out there. But basically brushless drivers are a major chunk of the price which I think could be reduced with cheaper custom drivers.

In the beginning of the pandemic I've attempted to build a 6 axis arm from this project https://www.anninrobotics.com/

Overall great documentation, and the author also sells hardware kits so you don't need to source all gears by yourself.

Fun! In my case all the gears are 3D printed so there’s no sourcing issues. Tho those designs are more finished than mine!

Super frustrated by the state of videos for kids on youtube, especially in the arts and crafts department, i decided to launch a channel and start creating my own content. Basically, all videos start half decent but for some reason end in a big noisy mess, weird sounds, spoiling food, questionable product placements, zero creativity and always incentivize more watching and trapping viewers in the infinite ‘next video’ loop.

Instead, one of the goals for my videos will be to take a step back and inspire to create, zero commercial interest, not too much distractions and something parents can trust.

Still in the process of figuring out all the parameters, camera, editing, setup etc but its a lot of fun learning new skills. I have a million ideas for the content already so enough work to be done. If there is little to no ‘success’ in terms of viewers, i really don’t care since i enjoy all aspects of it and im building a nice catalog of creative videos to watch with my kid later. I have no public videos yet (coming very soon) but here are two samples of what to expect:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_3e0tawk45E

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mBZStuxOUlc

Agree with waalo.

For me the thing I enjoy is that you are setting realistic expectations, not being wasteful (I notice you start from the edge of the paper instead of cutting from the middle, etc.)

The lack of any kind of commentary on the second video gives me strong ASMR-but-for-papercraft vibes.

I would watch that even as a grown-up.

yeah, I heard this from others as well but not something I particularly aim for at the moment (I could easily release a second version of a video with the original sound though). Although sound/music is one of the bigger questions/challenges I need to 'solve': it's quite difficult to strike a balance between setting the mood for a video and too intrusive. Pure original sound is difficult for other reasons, mic quality, background noise etc.

Great idea. Would you consider putting your contents into public domain?

Thanks for the kind words.

In principle I'm absolutely in favour of releasing it to the public. To be sure: do you mean the _content_ I create in the video or the _videos_ themselves (I wouldn't mind both, but just to clarify).

One of the things I want to add later are downloadable resources: PDFs with the drawings or cutting templates, so people can get a head start with e.g. colouring instead of having to do the drawing first.

Too many ideas given the time, but now I'm focused on two:

1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things.

2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and 10 years of chat logs. Why can't I find anything among them? I own a computer, after all. I have 10 folders called some variation of photos/Cologne/2020/flowers! Having to organize them myself is tedious and a fool's errand, so I'm leaning towards using a database as a file system, to let me just query for files. Geo queries using a map? Yes please. Selecting bounds on a timeline? Oh yeah!

Turns out I'm not alone, Microsoft tried this with WinFS, and failed. But the idea lives on: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...

3. Writing. I hope I can find the time to expand on the above on my blog.

How much would you pay for a program that would help you do 2 way more effectively than just by querying it?

That depends on how easily I could compile it, and how much more effective it would be than querying. At the moment I can't come up with anything better than queries.

I'm willing to part with some money to have someone implement it for me if I see there's demand.

I presume you've checked out the likes of Lightroom for photo organizing? Though don't let that put you off something better!

Lightroom is closed and comes from Adobe, so it was never on my radar. Being able to modify the software is a must: photos are only part of the problem, so any solution must be open to integration with other sources of data.

It would have been interesting to see how it organizes the UI, but there's no demo version for Linux :P

My son's mom died of cancer last February, and two days later they found tumors in my then girlfriend/now late fiancee. She passed away last month.

I stopped working several months ago and have no immediate desire or need to go back to work.

I'm not sure if it's a blessing or curse to have so much free time to grieve.

Enjoying the downtime with occasional spontaneous bursts of tears.

Edit: thank everyone for the kind words. I put together this 4 minute tribute of our times together to honor her/us. She was beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB5_1mdTgcM

I am sorry to hear about the loss you have suffered. My situation is similar. My wife passed from cancer Oct. 1 and I have no desire to return to work.

Please feel free to reach out if you want to talk with someone in a similar situation to yours.

We’re here if you need someone to talk to. Reach out any time, my email is in my profile.

My deepest condolences to you and your son for your losses.

I'm very sorry for your loss. May their memory be a blessing.

I'm sorry.

People are precious and our time with them even more so.

Sorry for your loss. Do whatever you need to make your days easier.

I just bought what will eventually become an artists’ residency, and we will start renovating it later this month. It will probably take about two years to get it started. The plan is to have a few artists a year come for about a month each and make art under the influence of the crazy dramatic landscape there. It will not be a paid thing, I’m financing it myself. At first it’ll have to be informal but eventually I want to have some kind of foundation running it so I can assist artists with visas where necessary.

I find it very exciting to work on a big long-term project like this, though it’s also frustrating because I’m doing it from a significant distance. Self-inflicted frustration but still.

Also, I’m learning a new language and moving to a new country, slowly but surely. Well slowly anyway. The residency is in yet another country. Maybe my life is complicated.

I didn’t win any lottery, but with a little juggling I had enough for a year or two without a day job. I was originally going to concentrate on just making art (I’m an artist as well as a techie) and trying to get settled in the new country.

This has worked pretty well considering the state of the world, but with a limited runway I will start looking for something to do in the industry next year. Maybe an indie project, maybe a startup, maybe just contracting.

The art center was in the back of my mind for a few years, and now that it exists (as a piece of land with some concrete on it anyway) I am quite happy to have a specific project that should bear fruit on a longer time scale than just a painting or a gig, and it helps that it’s not my source of income (like a company would be) nor existentially important (like kids). I can do more, or less, with it as circumstances allow.

Anyway that’s what I’m up to. In the likely event some of the art is tech related I will do a Show HN about it some day.

I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind.

I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.

It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.

But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)

I’m not much older than you but I eventually learned to enjoy friendships as just a moment in time. It’s nothing personal but people get busy and make new friends or get new responsibilities. I used to message tons of people to keep friendships alive because I felt similarly to you. Once you let go and just treat the people around you with your full attention, you will be happier. I fully understand covid has made that more difficult though. You could try Triva nights, board games, volleyball, events like that to get out there. I found that if you just walk up to people and start a conversation at those they are very likely to be like you and want to make friends.

I hope you feel better soon. Just know many people go through this and just don’t give up, get out there the best you can.

> the close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days

Just one dot point: a second wave of friendships comes when (if) you have children. It's a much under rated part of being a parent that suddenly you get thrown in with a whole new crowd of people also looking for like minded friends (since family based activities pretty much exclude all your old friends from most of what you now want to do).

Of course, this is not much help if you don't have a life partner yet, but just to say, don't conclude all your opportunities for friendship are gone.

That's sometimes how it goes. I'm in my late 30s and been through many phases in life. Different careers, different cities, etc. It's very difficult to keep friendships together when the circumstances that kept you in the same place change. After university, people go in dozens of different directions and disperse around the country. If you work in some job for many years, you'll find the same thing to be true when you leave.

There's only probably a handful of good, close friends that will last for more than a few years as good, close friends. That's okay. You'll make new ones in the new endeavors you take up. Do what you can to hang on to the ones that stick around.

This is super common at that age and I totally feel you with the university friends thing. I lost touch with many of my uni friends and only have a more shallow friendship with other friends I made after that (maybe I'm a shitty friend?) - I've thankfully made a few more friends at my last couple of jobs and through some hobbies but not super close ones, however I then had a kid and have lost touch with a whole bunch of them over the past couple of years :')

Anyway, there's a stereotypical lifestyle that we've associated with being a professional coder, especially in your early-mid 20s. We've all heard it: "eat, sleep, code, repeat". At some point IMO this should be considered harmful. First, it enforces a narrow, diminished lifestyle without additional hobbies or interests. Second, it reifies coding as an end rather than a means - yes sometimes we want to build something pretty for its own sake, but a lot of the demotivation I've personally experienced has been from building stuff I don't give a flying fuck about. Insurance systems, legal bookkeeping systems, even a fucking recruiting portal for my country's military... I actually feel guilty about getting pulled into that one.

I would recommend reading about stoicism and mindfulness. For me they felt like those things that are obvious but are super helpful to see explicitly stated. And have helped me learn to enjoy life more and set priorities for where/with whom I spend my most precious resource, my time.

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I often feel sad that the friends I have aren't very interested in the programming / tech things I like to think about. I'm hoping to find some meetups or other communities where I can build those relationships in person

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I love programming! How about we start a Discord - club for aimless 24 year olds....

Might actually work, also 24 and a bit clueless.

i wish i was in my early 20s and aimless. the whole world of possibilities still... feels like everyday just more and more doors close now

It helps to understand that life is about much more than your career or material success. Really internalize that idea. It's counterintuitive, because it feels so certain that hitting ProfessionalGoalX will make you permanently happy. But it won't. It never does. Even if that goal is wildly ambitious and makes you famous or makes you millions of dollars, it'll feel great for a while, but those feelings will dissipate, and in ~18 months you won't be any happier for it. This is one of those lessons that's better to learn vicariously than it is to learn by wasting years of your life and sacrificing your happiness ;)

As for friends, I'd recommend four things:

1) Build a habit of making friends. It's not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they'll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it's fun and sustainable.

2) Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.

3) Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.

4) Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier -- the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.

These things have helped me tremendously. I'm 34 years old, I moved to Seattle last year after living in SF for 10 years. I spent most of my time quarantining after I moved, but after getting vaxxed in April I've been much more social, and I've already made encouraging progress toward building a new tribe.

I posted on a thread about burnout back in May about quitting my job[1] after nine years, this seems like an invitation to post an update.

I used the time off to travel around in a van, hiking, eating, camping, and visiting friends. I'm now back in the city and catching up all of the life stuff that I put on hold for the pandemic and / or travel -- minor remodeling, maintenance, friends I didn't really get to see during the pandemic, etc.

I've been making big-picture decisions about future work as I go but the next phase is to put in serious hours into the search (since I'm planning to move out side of my current network / FinTech). Looking to start something new sometime this winter.

If anyone has questions about taking a longer time off work (will be 6+ months for me) or about taking more time almost totally away from computers / tech (2+ months), feel free to thread Q's.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27124604

I would love to hear about your time almost totally away from computers - do you feel more excited about tech? Less burnt out? Or even more determined to move industries?

I read through your linked comments, and I think I'm in a fairly similar place to where you were - lucky to have had a high savings rate for long enough that I can afford a long break; maybe forever if I'm frugal, or switch to a less-well-paid industry - and this has made me feel like I'm probably in my last corporate tech job. I haven't pulled the plug yet and probably won't particularly soon, but I'd love your perspective about what's after that leap.

No, it was refreshing, but it wasn't really quite long enough to break the mental patterns that I'd built up for so long around computer / internet / use. I did come back excited to read HN etc., I was no longer tired of tech news.

I don't have really any advice for others in this stage yet, since I'm still right in the middle. I hope I move into my next job, whatever that turns out to be, I have more perspective on the post-quitting period.

I'd love to hear more, specifically about moving outside of FinTech. Do you foresee yourself leaving tech altogther, or are you thinking about moving into another industry of tech?

No, I just want a big change within tech without totally invalidating the specific technical parts of my skillset. I would like to also be somewhere I believe positively in the impact of the company on the world overall, rather than just neutrally.

Any surprises you wish you had planned better for?

If you are in the US, what did you do for health insurance?

What are you hoping is different outside of Fintech? Or do you just feel like it is time for a change?

Not sure what specifically you mean about surprises. I guess not?

I bought health insurance on the state marketplace where my permanent residence is.

Just feel like it's time for a change, and I'm willing to accept the likely paycut that moving into a less hot segment of the industry will likely mean.

Looking back, were there any warning signs about burnout that you noticed, and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?

I don't really have too many regrets about it, there would have been both advantages and significant disadvantages to leaving sooner.

Certainly being a bit less emotionally invested would have reduced the burnout, and lots of people stay motivated and do great work without that level of commitment.

I have been reverse engineering automotive ECUs for a while now - https://github.com/bri3d/VW_Flash . It's a nice change from my day job in enterprise engineering management, and I've met some fun people and taught several folks a lot of new concepts, which is always extremely rewarding.

My latest project has been reverse engineering the data-flash encryption in Simos18 ECUs. After some work, it oddly appears the encryption algorithm used is Mifare Hitag2. I'm hoping to be able to re-encrypt NVRAM channels soon, although the overall data flash "filesystem" / channel-system layout needs some more work before I am ready to release my findings.

That is wicked. Would you ever be interested in developing an open source ECU platform?

I feel like there is a hole in the market for affordable and hackable ECUs. You could monetize it by selling the hardware boards I guess.

There are some projects out there already but none of them seemed usable for a full size track car at the time, and the issue was still a lack of suitable hardware to run it on. Idealy you could just buy a board with a generic wiring harness for ~$300, and have an open extensible platform for engine management in the software. Kind of like the ecosystem for flight controllers for drones.

This is great! It’s been on my hacking project list for a couple years now. Glad to see it go. :)

I hike a lot. Figuring out exactly where & when sunset will hit is next to impossible in mountainous terrain.

Feature request, if you’ll entertain one: instead of a 1-bit sun vs shade, show a heatmap of sun angle. Think “interactive golden hour map” for photographers.

Awesome site! I love moving around the sun like some kind of god.

Nice! Was thinking it'd be cool to have a little tool that calculates the height of an object (tree, building, etc) given the length of its shadow and the time of day (GPS coords might also be necessary).

Seems like you've already performed most of the necessary calculations here.

This is awesome, I can definitely see landscape photographers using something like this in order to get the right timing for the shadows.

It is very cool, will be using when planning morning or afternoon hikes in the mountains. Awesome job, thank you for sharing!

This is so cool, brightened my day - thanks for sharing :)

That's so cool! It's inaccurate for Manhattan though ;)

That’s awesome man I have no idea how you made that well done

Don’t think this is novel, but I’ve mentioned on an HN thread before that my friend and I were building (and have now built) a tiny house. We’d been complaining for years that housing was too expensive and so after doing a house flip and stops and starts on trying to build a spec house we decided to try a tiny house to see if we could build something move-in ready that looks (somewhat) nice and also is inexpensive.

Just started marketing it for sale a couple of weeks back. And we figure if we can’t sell it then we’ll rent it so that either way someone gets a roof over their heads for a price that’s just not really available in most locations these days.

https://www.weshelterpeople.com

wow its beautiful!

doesnt need to be novel imo. hope you really do go the long term lease route to help shelter folks. do yall have any newsletter? would love to follow

Oh man that's super nice of you to say! Quite a few folks have called/written us saying that they really dig the look of it, but you saying "beautiful" seriously warms my heart--thank you!

We're feeling the same way about the rental because based on the response we've gotten it's not like the people inquiring about purchase are all folks who need cheap shelter (some folks want to live in it, others for Airbnb, still others because they want to provide a cheap full-time rental for someone else). Cool thing is how much feedback we're getting, but the rental direction is definitely the most direct "get people who need shelter a shelter" option.

As for a newsletter, I wish we did. If your email's in your profile I'll make a note of it and make you the inaugural subscriber if we end up creating one.

lets do it! substack is super simple to start and you can think about migrating later. me[at]lamroger.com

It looks like a place I’d like to live in <3

That looks really cool, but can I ask why you chose that colour? Do you live somewhere really cold?

With proper insulation, and framing techniques you can get a away with a dark metal surface in most any climate. Not saying they actually did that but it's not impossible.

For a deeper breakdown on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o-yN8N-mXM

I wouldn't mind hearing about their approach to handling weather also as it kind of looks like SoCal which closely matches the climate I live in.

If that is the case then black may not have been ideal! It should help during winter though. If your peak heat is only 30c or something you could probably get away with it.

Still working on my side project, a virtual tabletop: https://bonfiretabletop.com, got a few hundred users, learned a ton of things about back-end, startups, and myself. But to be honest I'd not say no to a new full-time job.

Half a year back or so I built a mini SaaS product that failed, now I'm in the process of open sourcing it so that everybody can freely host it for themselves. Here's the project homepage https://magiclogin.net, it was/is transactional e-mails and e-mail authentication as a service.

Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself.

I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..

That seems really neat! Have you considered just relaunching it under a different name?

This is pretty useful as a product, and magic.link has been a hit and miss experience for me. Where will you post/announce the open source version? I’ll definitely check it out!

I started selling spice blends, the flavor being "Beef Noodle Soup".

After seeing "Everything but the Bagel" at Trader Joe's, I thought it was the first spice blend I saw named after a dish. Interesting! If people can have bagels anywhere, what else would people want to have anywhere? I asked my partner what sort of flavors would be familiar to people we knew, and she came up with the triumvirate: Pho, Ramen, and Beef Noodle Soup. And then I proceeded to do nothing about it for months, because I thought making a spice blend was the dumbest idea I've ever had.

Then during a Zoom chat with a friend, he suggested I liked writing code too much, so I should try to sell something without writing code. I suggested, how about spices? He laughed in my face, so here we are. (he was quite supportive right after laughing in my face)

So far, people seem to like it. It's good on eggs, rice, noodles with sesame oil, in olive oil for bread dipping, spinach, and dipped with a super Irish scone from Mary O’s in NYC. I never tried that last one. A customer told me it was good.

And yes, you can use it to make a small bowl of beef soup. If you're intrigued, you can buy a bottle here:

https://impromptu.shop

I like a good pho, and the noodles are dead simple. If there were an easy broth, I'd make it all the time! Ditto for vegetarian ramen broth, though the noodles in that case are non-trivial (but there are some decently-easy options out there). Please do a show HN when you add more flavors!

Can you share a bit on how the process of creating a spiced blend goes? You buy individual ingredients wholesale and mix them together with your own recipe? Seems like a unique but very fun side project!

This is an awesome idea! I’ve been thinking about doing something similar in the hot sauce area. Any lessons/takeaways? Would love to know how you got your first customers.

> hot sauce area

There isn’t enough fermented hot sauces in New Zealand… not sure if the product gap is worthwhile where you are, or whether it interests you.

Perhaps you could become as great as ADAM REAL-LAST-NAME-UNKNOWN - chapter heading page 119: https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourda...

“Why, of all his creatures, did He choose this loud, dirty, unkempt, obnoxious, uncontrollable, megalomaniacal madman to be His personal bread baker? How was it that this disgrace as an employee, as a citizen, as a human being-this undocumented, untrained, uneducated and unwashed mental case who's been employed (for about ten minutes) by every kitchen in New York-could throw together a little flour and water and make magic happen? And I'm talking real magic here, people. I may have wanted Adam dead a thousand times over. I may have imagined, even planned his demise-torn apart by rabid dogs, his entrails snapped at by ravenous dachshunds, chained to a pillory post and flogged with chains and barbed wire before being drawn and quartered-but his bread and his pizza crust are simply divine. To see his bread coming out of the oven, to smell it, that deeply satisfying, spiritually comforting waft of yeasty goodness, to tear into it, breaking apart that floury, dusty crust and into the ethereally textured interior . . . to taste it is to experience real genius. His peasant-style boules are the perfect objects, an arrangement of atoms unimprovable by God or man, pleasing to all the senses at once. Cezanne would have wanted to paint them-but might not have considered himself up to the job. Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown may be the enemy of polite society, a menace to any happy kitchen, a security risk and a potential serial killer, but the man can bake. He's an idiot-savant with whom God has serious, frequent and intimate conversations. I just can't imagine what He's telling him-or whether the message is getting garbled during transmission.”

love the idea of doing something without writing code!

Could we make this a monthly post, just like the Who's Hiring one? I miss that aspect of HN.

I LOVE this idea.

I am sure many on here are playing with the same "outside of programming" type ideas.

I've been a budding woodworker for the longest time and even though I keep going back to playing with some kind of tech thing outside my day job, I have been teaching myself how to draw faces (Loomis method), and trying to pick up woodworking again. Each of these require enough time but they're a welcome departure from the usual tech stuff (which I still generally enjoy but has been very intense, working on Pandemic-response projects)

100% we should. Work isn't the only thing a hacker should be doing.

It can be anything, from finishing something with a minimum amount of resources, broken code that somehow works or pure exploration and guessing e.g. phreaking or just finding a random telephone number that gives you goodies.

or, most especially life itself. No point of all work if no play.

They're already quite frequent, though idk about monthly. These are nice though, indeed.

Managing an apartment complex (pro-bono) alongside a tech job. In Bangalore, it is normal to have a committee of apartment owners who oversee the operations, set up rules for residents, take up mini-projects for efficiency / beautification /long term maintenance and also manage the finances. This committee operates for a year and then passes on the reins to the next committee.

Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:

- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements

- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)

- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)

From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting

- distribution of water, electricity, gas

- Sewage treatment plant

Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.

4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)

A couple of things. All unfinished (of course).

First idea, a website that combines Reddit (or HN) and Discord. The goal is to create ephemeral, real-time communities (like this thread). I find discord too exclusionary to bring strangers together. And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation. With this site, you post a thread, people start chatting, there's a simple interface for groups of people to break off the public chat and go into a private chat or into a webrtc call. Once the thread loses momentum the chat room sort of dies. And people move onto the next thread.

Backend is written in Go. Frontend will likely be Elm. Redis for pubsub. Postgres for crud.

Second idea, an Elm-like language for building linux applications (and crucially linux-phone applications). I'd really like to de-throne apple and google from the smartphone market. I think a dead simple language like Elm + a super simple, standardized dev environment + no weird configuration or new conventions to learn would be a killer feature for the linux platform. Something like Elm-UI would attract a wave of new developers to Linux.

Unfortunately, I've never made a programming language before. So I'm working through "Crafting Interpreters" to get started.

Third, possibly finding a SWE in Miami and starting a software consultancy partnership. Could be fun and lucrative but I've never been on the business side before. So likely this idea will stay half-baked for a lot longer.

I think one of the main reasons why Reddit took off is that they didn't really care about building info on people... All they wanted was an email, user name, and password. Discrd is behind a wall that requires a log-in and understanding of how it works. Discords often are dead by the time I decide to check them out because they are often too much work to maintain.

IRC vanished after many years to favor texting, but IRC was a big part of life for me in the past because you could simply hop on without even using an email address, and conversations were free form without much moderation. The main rule is nothing was taken seriously back then, except net splits.

Not every community needs tracking and user accounts if you ask me, but they do if you ask the government. The increasing call for every community and even IOT products requiring a user profile is going to eat itself with an endless amount of passwords, or even a chain linked authentication scheme, it defeats the utility and benefit of getting quick answers to questions, and having simple human interactions minute-to-minute throughout the day which is what many people really want without knowing it. The key to keeping that manageable will be to keep each community relatively small and specialized if you ask me. Focus on the functionality and purpose thoroughly -- The language used will change over time, so whatever I can build quickly and efficiently in is best. Also, I don't have to worry about security as much as FaceBook (etc.) if I'm not storing user accounts and identifiable data, I just have to put failover, high availability, and data integrity from that perspective.

I've been building on a few ideas that have this in mind in addition to running my own web development company since Feb 2021. I know the struggle too, keep grinding! Cheers.

Originally they didn't even want an email. Just username and password. Not sure if its still that way.

Good luck with your company!

I've been running a really small time service on Pi and requiring an email verification to fend off potential bot attacks. How does one skip the email requirement without ending up being overrun by the spammers or dealing with 3rd party services

They still don't need one, but will never stop nagging about it. I've been clicking on the x to close the popup asking for my address multiple times a day for about two years now.

Your first idea sounds great and very close o some ideas I've been thinking a lot about. If you ever get somewhere with it, please post a Show HN!

On your second, I immediately thought of Fabulous, a package that uses the Elm Architecture to build Xamarin cross platform apps in F#. [1] Have you seen it before?

1: https://github.com/fsprojects/Fabulous

Thank you for the kinds words!

I had not seen fabulous before. It looks really cool! Gives me a sense of validation that others have thought of this.

I tried writing an iOS app in the past (hence the inspiration for the project). If I ever try again, fabulous will be my first choice.

I think the first idea is cool. I especially want something truly ephemeral. I don't want all of my messages existing forever. That's my main gripe with both Reddit and Discord right now.

One note about Discord though: why do you find it exclusionary? We use Discord for our customer ops, and we bring on a lot of not very tech savy people. It's really easy: they click a link and it opens in their browser. Not sure how you could make something more accessible in this regard.

Totally agree that on boarding is easy. Text chat is very easy to jump into but is very noisy in large communities. I think its the VOIP category that struggles most. I've been in large discords where one or two channels had a total of 4 people between them. Its just hard to insert yourself into someone else's conversation. I'm trying to fix that aspect of it.

> And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation.

What do you mean by "dynamic"? I think the reason it can be hard to make friends on reddit (and other social media) is because friendships require repeated meetings. The population of reddit is massive and the mechanics of the site make repeatedly meeting the same individual unlikely. Also, the design of reddit can make it difficult to recognize people (they'd need to have a distinctive and memorable name).

Discord fares better because there are many small communities and hanging around often results in talking to the same people repeatedly.

One little vote from the internet :) would love the first idea!

With all the positive feedback I think I'll slam out the MVP this weekend. Hopefully have a cool ShowHN soon!

Working on a couple of side projects/ideas in my spare time. One of them is a compute workload orchestrator from scratch. I'm taking a very "naive" approach here which means I'm not trying to mimic/rehash best parts/known practices of existing system. This gives me total freedom of implementation and removes the need of constantly benchmarking myself against existing solutions. What matters the most is the learning experience. I'm looking towards server-side WASM as target rather than containers.

Writing an emulator for fantasy 8bit computer based on 6502. Eventually I hope to build a "physical" version (fpga to the rescue). It's a complete waste of time, but it's soooo addictive

This thread is really great, it's good to know the honest experiences behind a lot of people here that you don't normally hear about. I just finished building a personal version of my remote browser product but it hasn't been that successful or made me that much money. I turned down 150k a year remote job couple of months ago in order to protect the IP for this project but I'll be going back to work in the new year. So for the last 2 months before that I want to finish one project I neglected a long time--adding full text search and a new better interface (among other features) to my popular web archive tool--and I want to try to quickly hack out a new project--a Scribe clone, because I really like what they're doing and it's close to the RPA collaboration tool I wanted to build with my remote browser; tho I'm going to have to build it as an extension--before I return to work, which I really don't want to do! I don't know if either of these newuns are going to be successful nor make money but I just want to finish the neglected and try my hand at a new project as another bet to try to get that success that I want. Aside from that, continuing to "live the digital nomad dream" in East Asia, but nomad has been replaced with agrarian peasant nesting in one place the whole pandemic. Weirdly though I feel more satisfied with where I live than I did before the pandemic--maybe forced to adapt? Like The Woman in The Dunes.

I've started a free education blog on web-scraping: https://scrapecrow.com/

Web-scraping and reverse-engineering is such a brilliant subject in my opinion and there's an unsurprising lack of resource in this area as it's a rather secretive medium - as a good scraping/reverse engineering strategy is often considered to be a business secret.

It started off as a need to not repeat myself on stackoverflow. Web-scraping is a common question subject and the same questions would be asked over and over again. I couldn't find explicit resources available so I wrote them myself! Now I'd often answer question with specifics and point to full article for further reading which people seem to appreciate and come back with follow ups less often.

I'm still working out the kinks - especially pacing, brevity and editing - though it has been a really enjoyable ride so far. Finally as a backend engineer it finally got me to get over the front-end hump. I've learned some pretty css and general web building - it's often frustrating but surprisingly fun!

great site , what im missing on the web is information on how to build or use proxy server for use with the wev scrapers

Thanks, that's a great suggestion! I actually have an article on proxies in the works however I'm a bit stuck on making it a bit more accessible since proxy access is either really expensive (for a single dev) or extremely unstable (like free proxies).

I've always had the luxury of paid quality proxies in my web-scrapers however for article purposes I'd like to have an example of cheap or free proxies for casual usage/education. Are you using something in particular?

One idea I've explored was using VPN service as a proxy but seems like most big VPN providers are not providing proxies anymore.

Anyway, I can PM you once I figure out how to put this together properly! :)

I once used VPNs as proxies for web scraping, using 2-3 VPN providers with multiple servers in different countries. It was a while ago, so my memory is a little hazy but I'll try to describe how I did it as best I remember.

I configured an Alpine Linux docker container with openvpn and a proxy server (I think I settled on squid for stability), and a bash script to to start up the openvpn connection and proxy server with config for both passed into the container. Then just generated a long, line by line list of every possible vpn connection config line by line, shuffled and duplicated.

Then in my outer scraping function: grab a line from the config file, start up a vpn-proxy container (passing in the config), do one page download through the container proxy and then stop and delete the docker container. This allowed me to download pages in parallel, with all connections originating from different IP addresses (as long as I made sure not to exceed VPN simultaneous connection limits).

Kinda messy, and I spent ages fiddling to get the container config just right, but it worked.

i got liver disease from drinking too much.. just kidding, studied russian and learned to code in a new language. built my first app and its being verified tonight. who knows maybe i'll get a download!?

I'm making a smartphone OS for my personal use. Gonna opensource under GPLv2 once ready.

OS kernel is Alpine Linux from https://postmarketos.org/ The entire userland is custom: graphics is on top of drm, kms, gles2, FreeType. Audio is on top of ASIO with just a few third party libraries like soxr, fdk-aac, minimp3. IPC is mostly domain sockets, input is raw input, wifi is controlled through wpa_supplicant.

Most of the code is in C#, .NET 5. Only 25% of code in C++, either SIMD heavy math like vector spline tessellation, or to consume libraries like FreeType designed to only be usable from C.

Got 2 devices to test, ARM64 Pinephone, and ARMv7 LG Hammerhead.

Graphics stack is good by now, works on both. The only large missing piece is accelerated video decoding. The highest level was inspired by MS WPF, with XML instead of XAML, and a variant of CSS for styling. Performance is OK, uses couple percepts CPU while rendering animations at 60Hz, because GPU-centric architecture all the way down. Found a freelancer to help with GUI design, so far so good.

Audio is in progress: mp3 playback works, capture and high-level mixer controls missing. Too bad the LG lacks Linux kernel drivers so I'm only testing these pieces on Pinephone.

After the audio, gonna start integrating GSM modem: being able to call people is one of the use cases I care about.

I hope you mean LTE modem. All major carriers in the US are shutting down 2G and 3G cell towers. Calls won't work without VoLTE in the future.

Oh! This sounds like something I wanted to do. Mostly to see if you can actually get decent GUI speed on the Pinephone.

> if you can actually get decent GUI speed on the Pinephone.

Having used sxmo, I promise you can. Whether you can be performant and user friendly is still open.

Working on a side project. An app that should help to use mobile devices more focused and purposeful. App simply prompts users to type an intention before using the device(Android), certain apps(iOS). I'm making it privacy-focused, no analytics, no sign-ups, with local data storage. At first, I solved my issues with phone usage and now I'm trying to make the app easier to use and I focus on users feedback to improve retention.

https://acture.app

I run a website that shows immigrants how to settle in Berlin.

These days I'm thinking of codifying more things, so that people could fill a form and get answers instead of reading a long article. For example, a simple calculator that replaces pages and pages of information. I made a German health insurance calculator last week that saves a lot of reading and gives accurate results.

Aside from that, I'm building a timeline thing that puts all the personal data I can get my hands on onto a browsable timeline. It's a sort of enhanced journal.

As an immigrant who switched between several countries, I must tell that this is an amazing project.

The simplest and "obvious" guides are often the most helpful, and hard to find.

I wish every city has a similar website with the most basic instructions.

I'm working on a 2d multiplayer game where you play as the leader of an MMO guild. I'm shooting for it to feel like playing WoW without actually having to play WoW all day. Same dopamine levers, same time horizons, but instead of being the guy farming Frost Lotus and Saronite, you're the guy telling people to go farm Frost Lotus and Saronite and making sure the alchemist makes the right amounts of Flask of Endless Rage and Flasks of the Frost Wyrm to get you through the raid next week.

It's basically a simulator/management spin on MMOs. It's still on the stage side of the fourth wall - it's not like a meta kind of tongue in cheek thing or anything. It's not YouTuber simulator or anything similar.

I'm using phaser 3 and some undetermined python web stack - currently using flask and sqlalchemy. My time horizon is ~years at this point, I've been working on it for about 3 months and progress is steady but glacial since I have 1 busy job, 2 kids, and 0 gamedev experience (though significant MMO gaming experience, for as much as that helps, heh). I am but a humble data infra engineer by day so this is pretty alien programming for me (though at least I know what I'm doing on the backend?).

I have some nominal amount of frontend experience but normally I use Rails and React, but I decided to forego both for this project, with the entire game being in Phaser's engine (though I'm sure at some point I'll have a react website too) and using python on the backend because I just generally think python is better than Ruby as of python 3, mainly because I prefer how Python 3 did official type hints, and I don't particularly like Sorbet (though comparing python3 type hints to sorbet is unfair to sorbet, all I would want from sorbet is hinting).

Anyway, I'll admit, I want to make an MMORPG. But I can at least concede that a traditional "wow-killer" MMO is pretty much out of the reach of a single dev. My current vision seems to me like a fun "do you ever wish you played wow but don't actually want to play wow" kind of thing that is significantly more likely to be within the reach of someone who has 0-2 hours to work on this per night.

Sounds fun. I’d play this :)

Especially the part about not actually playing WoW. Have as much time to play a game as you have to make it.

I’m slowly developing a note-taking ecosystem that’s kind of duct-tapey but works well for me. Nothing is hosted anywhere yet, but the main thing is the ideas.

I find I want to _accrete_ information, not mutate it (in most cases), so the main organisation is chronological. But tags are important to find related information and see the chronological development of one “thing”, be it a work task, a personal hobby, etc.

But here’s the big idea: information can have an expiry date so that you can use it for years and not get buried in clutter. It’s as simple as tagging, say, exp+3w to set an expiry date three weeks after creation. There are other meta-tags too, like imp+2m means the information is “important” for two months but not after that, and it doesn’t expire.

The ideas have been percolating for years, and it’s fun to finally be working on it properly, albeit in fits and starts.

This is the area I've been eyeing for a while. I strongly agree with your "accrete, don't mutate" approach. Reduction via highlighting / summarizing is also important, but the default copy-paste and overwrite workflow of many systems means you lose so much context via destruction and mutation. Yes, restate and re-express ideas, but that should add to or shadow previous ideas, not destroy them.

I want to make something similar for myself. Starting from basically a log of everything: webpages visited and how I arrived, comments & posts written and related articles, emails, PRs, notes, transactions, messages, photos, books, podcasts, heart rate (lol), meetings and appointments, etc etc, then snapshot any relevant links with ArchiveBox. This forms the base of the "accrete" step. There'll be a lot of junk in that, so the next step is summarization: some of which will always be manual, and some sources I hope to gradually summarize in a declarative query language with a flexible output formats. In all cases the goal is to always be able to "reverse query" and see how any summarization ties back to the original source(s). E.g. maybe heart rate should be summarized into a chart that I review once a week, which itself is a new 'feed' that 'shadows' the minute-by-minute details in the usual chronological view. But if I notice a blip in the chart I can dive in and see what else I was doing at the time -- "ah, I knew reading the news was bad for my health" or whatever.

Of course this is gonna need some kind of categorization-like aspect as well, like tags or something. I've been looking into information organization methodologies, and I found PARA [0] -- which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive -- to be a pretty nice general starting point, if a bit loosely defined. In this terminology I think an audit log is the most basic "resource" for an "area", and my goal is to construct this basic audit log resource for the broadest area: "My Life" and spawn other more interesting areas out of that. I don't really like the formulation of "Archive" which I think is better conceptualized as a more general "Time" dimension. So maybe my version would be PART instead.

I really need to "just start" already.

Good luck on your note-taking journey, even "fits and starts" is much better than not started at all. :)

[0]: https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/

Since April I've been taking a break from contracting work and focusing on a project that brings me a lot of joy to work on and keeps on serendipitously connecting me with a lot of interesting people (both users and other founders). It's fully bootstrapped and I've been doing everything myself so far - from code to design.

Link here: https://flat.social

It's a platform where one can create playful virtual spaces for online meetings, workshops and hangouts. I'm currently experimenting with different types of virtual spaces and trying to figure out which direction brings the most fun and utility to the users. It's still not 100% finished and I'm changing a lot of features so if you happen to have any feedback or ideas please let me know! :)

I love this thread - it feels like therapy to me. Perhaps because I believe there's a few (if not many) people lurking around that I can relate to, and partly because I'm lacking the human connection I had with friends in my pre-parenthood years.

Anyway, lately I've been enjoying putting together "mixtapes" (not recording them live, just putting the tracks together and then exporting to MP3) and uploading them to Mixcloud. It's been creative and when I see that someone listens to it, I feel like I'm connecting with them in some way.

And you connect with someone here, by saying that. Mixtapes are special, even in the era where we don't burn CDs and use magic sharpie all over it :D

Kinda just stare at the sky a lot. Went from a job working 60-80 hours a week nonstop with no expectation of time off if you got a call to one with 1/10th the effort needed for the same pay.

Feels surreal at difference in compensation vs effort in, especially because I’m more productive at the new place.

Not really sure what to do with all my free time when there’s no fires to put out

Same. The way I see it we're paid for our expertise - not our time.

In terms of free time, I've tried to fill it with hobbies, side-projects, and learning. A lot of my time goes to my son now that he's here. But before that there were some periods where I just did not do anything. The thought has crossed my mind to work two jobs or maybe start a consultancy.

I think the real trick is to find friends. But I'm 30 and its difficult making friends at this age. C'est la vie.

That might be it? I actually live in a decently sized place with a handful of friends.

I think I’m feeling content for the first time in my life and US culture growing up in the 90s, did not prepare me for this

Started programming 4 years ago because wife gave me idea for brilliant, never been done before video game. Detoured down web stack just to get a job. Have since become a programmer for a University and had 2 kids. Maybe I'll start back up on the game in 10 years or so. Am > 40 years old and feels like life is just getting started for me.

This is really refreshing and encouraging for me to hear, as a father of a 2-yo. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Great thread, feels like a time capsule for some of the people that are starting new things in life, moving to a new city, getting a start-up off the ground, trying to get used to their new lifestyle. I hope I can come back to this thread some time in the future and reminisce as I'm sure many of you will.

To answer the question, I'm working full-time at a job that I feel completely hopeless at. Basically fresh out of college and I'm working at a place where I can't communicate with like 95% of the development team due to language differences, so I'm stuck working on an undocumented codebase with no guidance/on-boarding/help whatsoever. Lots of trial and error to figure out how stuff works, and a fair bit of going around the current code and working directly with libraries because I don't have the time/energy to try to understand the layer the people before me built on top of that library.

I’ve been making some art for an experimental art show called “Convivial Machines” at Museum of Boulder that just opened this past week.

The main project is an interactive painting called the “Musical Dot Orchestra” that lets you scan a hand painted QR code and “play” a musical dot that appears in the painting.

Some photos + videos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVokUYBMaXF/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CVbTpAaAHRY/

The “painting”:

https://dots.pindarlabs.com/viewer

The UI for participants:

https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/blue https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/purple https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/magenta https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/yellow

Recently got my first VR headset. Played around in Unity and did their create with VR course then made my own game - Whack-a-mole in VR. Thinking of participating in GitHub's Game Off by making another game in VR but so far none of my friends have been interested in the idea (Which is fair, they work in software and code all day. I used to but I teach now so coding outside of work is much more fun). I'll likely just do another solo project and later on maybe rope some of my students into VR development for future projects.

I moved to a new team where we leverage the idea of precise dispensing of fluids but apply it to life sciences. A pipette is all about dispensing a precise amount where you want it - so is a printer. We think outside the box on that. Feels good to be making something to make people healthy and not to just sell consumables.

I also finished walking every street in my city a while ago. See https://citystrides.com/users/31460/map#44.56456589999999,-1... Lot of fun, lost 10 pounds, saw a ton of fun stuff I had no idea was here (even after 40 years).

And I finally am finishing a classic (1800's) sailing ship wooden model I've had for ages. A lot of fun to do something very non-software.

I haven't worked since April of 2020, mostly not by choice, and definitely need to be hired, but right now I'm piecing together this inane React homework for some interview and also playing a bit of CS:Go, workin out, skateboarding. It's fun.

Just had twin girls. I have a feeling that will be my life for a while.

Amazing! Being a dad is the best thing that's happened in my life. I hope it's the same experience for you.

I started taking steroids two weeks ago. 500mg/week testosterone. They haven't even really kicked in yet (takes about 3 weeks to get really testosterone levels up) but I'm feeling real good and I'm really excited with all the weight gain I've had so far this year. I started at around 155 in June and today I'm up to 180. A lot of it is water weight I'm sure but I'm excited to hit over 200 in the next 5 months of my first testosterone cycle. A fair bit of that will be fat but I really want to over-eat than under-eat. I'm really happy with how I look already and I've added 2.5 inches to my biceps since June.

Testosterone supplementation is a lot safer than some people think it is. It's still not the best thing for your body and it does put stress on it, but honestly I'd put it at about the level of moderate to heavy alcohol use (depending on how you define "heavy"). Except instead of destroying your liver to get drunk you're getting muscular af and looking great.

I do also want to get hired but I posted in there on a different account :)

Of all the ideas in this thread this one seems the most dettached from my preferences and tastes.

It's cool knowing completely different folks are out there. Goos luck!

thanks! i only mention it here because I do think it sort of falls under the hacker ethos. At least my motivations for it are similar

What was the biggest factor in contributing to your decision to start taking T supplements? You were already happy with how you looked, so I’m curious to hear why you decided to take them.

I’ve held this idea in the back of my mind that someday, at some point, when I plateau, or when my body starts to deteriorate, I’ll start taking T.

I'm happy relative to how I've looked in the past. On the whole I have a TON of room for improvement. I want to be jacked. I want people to look at me and be like oh shit he works out. So as to why: largely vanity. My fiance is very happy with my progress and her actions show that, which is nice too. But also because it's a challenge and quite different from anything I've done before. I'm also just curious what it's like and I like trying new things.

I would recommend going to get your T levels checked just in case they're low, especially if you have low T symptoms. My levels were fine for my age (early 30s) but could be better.

You mentioned liver health.

Have you looked at the state of your liver before starting the regime?

AST/ALT/Ferritin etc.

I didn't, partially because a liver panel is like $350 and I have no reason to think my liver is anything but healthy. I'm injecting the testosterone directly and not using orals. Injecting it doesn't really have a reputation of being hard on your liver - orals do though. I mean they both do have an effect on your liver but it's not really the focus of all the material I've read on injection (which does advise strongly against a lot of orals).

I will likely get one in a couple months mid-cycle and if it's fine then I won't get a follow for my liver speciically up at the end (but will do all the other common markers still)

I mentioned liver health only because I was comparing steroid use to drinking, not trying to imply injecting really messes with your liver.

What about transdermal cream?

I am interested in the domain too, but I never pulled the trigger on the exogenous T.

I am at 600 but that means nothing because there's also the SHBG value and the T/Estradiol ratio and the T/DHT ratio , but most importantly the density of the AR receptors in the muscle fibers.

So somebody can be golden with T at 300 , whereas somebody else might need 950.

In any event I wanted to try and improve my T number via winning physical fights.

The skin cream is fine if you're doing TRT. To do an actual "cycle" of high levels of test you'd be basically swimming in it. It's also crazy expensive compared to injections, and I've never seen it available "underground" and you won't find a doctor willing to prescribe you enough for anything other than TRT

>In any event I wanted to try and improve my T number via winning physical fights.

Is this a joke? lol

> Is this a joke? lol

no, google: "winner effect"

What made you decide to start with the steroids if you were already gaining? And had you tried in the past to add muscle without success?

Honestly mostly just curiosity. I like trying new things and having new hobbies, and it honestly seems relatively safe so I figured why not.

I am traditionally a really hard gainer. I'm currently the biggest I've ever been in my life but it's been from 6 days a week at the gym lifting weights consistently since June and eating a ton. It's been a shit load of work. I'm seeing progress but not as much as I'd like.

Water weight and glycogen retention. Hopefully you're taking an aromatase inhibitor as well with those T levels.

The common advice is to take AI as needed when high E2 symptoms show up. Too many people take it preemptively and crash their E2 for no reason and feel like shit as a result. But I do have some on hand along with a huge array of other drugs "just in case" including stuff for PCT.

Pre, during, and post blood work is also happening to help monitor things like E2 level.

How long have you been training pre-steroids?

Non-seriously my entire life. My starting weight of 155 is an indicator of that. But I was 175 when I hopped on 2 weeks ago and it's been 6 days a week for the past half year. I know it's earlier than a lot of people recommend.

Just yesterday I finally had my 3D printer I bought a year and a half ago tuned and serviced by a professional. I bought it as a kit and built it not completely wrong, but it did have issues I'd not have been able to iron out myself. Yesterday, right after the service of the printer, I printed a Benchy and am very happy with the result! Next up I plan on printing a plastic case for a replica of a bus cash register and ticket machine that was in basically every bus in my country when I was a child (Czech Republic, the ticket machine is USV-24C by Mikroelektronika). I managed to buy this ticket machine in a pretty good condition when a local bus company was going out of business and another in a less than ideal condition for parts in case I ever decide to want to work on the real thing. In the meantime, I plan on building a replica of it running on an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi.

Working on a hardware startup. Building an epaper based tablet. In fact, one of my test PCBs just arrived earlier today from OSHpark[1]. Still a WIP but I'm looking forward to cooking some electronics tonight on a hotplate :)

I love doing this work. (Electrical engineering, firmware design, cloud backend, etc.) I just really wish I went to school for the EE though.

[1] https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/FBeESNgs

I've been steadily sinking deeper into Go (the board game, not the PL) for the last few years. I keep thinking that my enthusiasm for it will dry up soon, but it just keeps increasing. The depth is immense, every few months I feel like I'm swimming along the bottom of the ocean, then I come to a continental shelf and as I stare into the depths below, I realize that I've only explored the shallows, I dive, and leave the surface behind even further.

I was in love with Go when i was younger, i have even created an AI that played using some rules, not an algorithm.

But when i created again the same game with AlphaBeta algorithm, i just quit the game. No matter how good you are the computer can predict all the moves, and win you no matter how good you become.

what levels have those "shelves" occurred at?

I needed a camera slider that was not thousands of dollars and did not require someone else to operate. So I designed, printed, built, and programmed my own to use AI/face/object tracking to follow me around.

Video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLo_nu0BSLk

Thingiverse files: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4982093

I also have been spending more time actually creating video content. I used to do a bunch in the early YouTube days, but I hit a decade long bit of depression.