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Good question. Big companies participate in incrementalism. Many companies invent one big thing and ride it for decades. Few build new things and succeed. (e.g. Apple). Some try, e.g. Microsoft with Xbox, Meta with VR, but even then often it ends up being billions of lost profits. Innovation often come from small groups of persistent and intelligent people and their first few acquisitions as they succeed. e.g. Microsoft with DOS, Windows and Office. They're still riding it.

The last startup boom began in the mid-2000's (around when Y Combinator began, you can read all about it on Paul's blog), when cloud computing was still new and lowered the cost of creating online businesses. It was also in the wake of the tech bust - a lot of tech employees became unemployed.

My view is, when the layoffs complete, the dust settles and you have millions of tech workers who are willing to accept only equity, with a new technology they can rent for $200 a month from DeepSeek or Anthropic or OpenAI, we may see the green shoots of a new wave of disruption.

A builder may use bricks to build a house - yet he may still be interested in the brick's composition & the brick making method.

These days, he may even use a brick robot to automate bricklaying, and still be interested in the mortar used.

Same for software ?

The most notable theocracies - Iran and Saudi Arabia, do fairly well compared to the other two forms of government. I wonder why they're do better than one might expect.

Amazon Aurora seems to fit.

There are a number of open source projects looking for contributors. I know wesnoth.org is one. The downside of contributing to open source projects full time is you will have to find alternative income.

One example I can imagine you can help with: if your city doesn't have it, you could put its train timetables in an app. There's one for Sydney, it's called TripView. A train timetable available in a convenient manner will help people rely on trains more and reduce CO2 emissions.

You might have seen aldjemy already but I thought I might mention it https://github.com/Deepwalker/aldjemy - let's us use SQLAlchemy queries in our django code without requiring redefining the models in an SQLAlchemy manner. It's easy to put a wrapper around it to convert SQLAlchemy results back into Django model instances.

I'm exploring using Django Channels to send data to visualisation SPA's in realtime. https://channels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Do you have a personal website? Leave one here; Who knows maybe someone reading your post would hit you up in the next few weeks.

What about cashflows including goods or services?

You can get some working experience doing freelance gigs. You could probably find better ones than upwork.com, but otherwise, do some jobs there, do bigger and bigger ones, until you've got a couple of 1-month long gigs and some good reviews. Then go after the 1-2 year work experience ones. The lower end you go, the less onerous the requirements are, and it's possible you can build up your work experience that way.

I think if you have a kid later on you'd worry less about growing old and more about making sure your kid grows old.

A modern day pyramid: monumental sacrifice and sights to behold.

I hope the "That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the state by the state for the state shall not perish from the Earth" (with "under God" struck out) poster meant something other than its literal meaning...

That really sucks - being tired of people you don't know looking down on you.

Let's take this further. Let's say there's a Googler looking down on you for not working in Google - there's a Googler looking down on that person for working on a "low priority" project. If there's a Googler looking down on someone for working on the "wrong" project, then someone's looking down that Googler for selling their life 50 hours a week at a time. Everyone is looked down on in some manner - even Warren Buffet or Bill Gates who might be looked down upon for being old. It never ends.

Anyway, there's nothing you can do about it - except to stop looking down on "mid tier conference", "second tier" hires, "2nd or third tier companies", and that would help a lot. It would improve the world only marginally but it would do tremendous good for yourself. It's your act of looking down on others that's causing your anxiety of being looked down upon. The injury originates from your own thoughts to others.

Pick any thing in the world, for certain dimensions (height, length, attractiveness, intelligence, etc...) and you can put it on the "negative" end, and make disparaging comments against it, or you can put it on the "positive" end and give it praise. Once you've placed it on the "negative" end of the scale, the "positive" end suddenly comes into existence. And once you've placed it on the "positive" end, a whole swarth of other objects now fall on the "negative". If we praise a Googler for getting into Google, suddenly we see less value in engineers who did not get into Google. If we disparage a person for being short, then we see more value in others who are tall. Both are different sides of the same coin. Refrain from criticism and praise. It's the act of comparing that leads us to suffer. Would you rather be the "top Googler" and so miserable to be entertaining suicidal thoughts, which to me looks like where you're heading if you continue thinking the way you are, or a someone who is much more happy with whatever he's doing than doing what straw man Googler's do?

And please see a doctor.

Ask for a copy printed on nice pretty paper and frame it.

A gift from your Ship’s captain - it won’t be of value to anyone else but has intrinsic value for you.

That's not what Toshiba pays - that's the salary headhunters use to take engineers away from Toshiba.

'Fahren Sie, fahren Sie, dann brauchen Sie keinen Treibstoff' (Drive, drive, then you do not need fuel) - Erwin Rommel

Take a read of Tao Te Ching. It's written 2500 years ago about spirituality. Find a translation you like. Don't read explanations of the poems - It's designed for you to find the meaning yourself. Once you've gotten a meaning for each of the poems in relation to your life (Chinese philosophy is generally experiential rather than rational, subjective rather than objective), I'm hopeful it will help you get "there" wherever "there" is. I don't think it'd take you more than a few months to a year to get through the book.

So I'd go for "embark on a spiritual journey into your own mind".

My life is completely different than 4-5 years ago. Most of the acquaintances I knew then probably think I've gone nuts, (and IMO selfish to show them how good my life is now), but my best friendships have become even better; I really like where I am right now in my life - every day I wake up and enjoy it - At this point in my life I've spirituality, health, family, finance all sorted. I've met hundreds or thousands of people in my life, have not met anyone else who've got these four things together as well as has happened to me yet (except my wife) - and I don't know if it will last; but it all started when I started poring over those poems.

Anyway - most people these days tend towards an atheist/rationalist point of view and have no interest in books on spirituality & religion from 2000+ years ago, and if you did not ask the question I would not have written this comment. I do hope it helps you on your way.

I'd prioritise "engage with your wife and kids" over hobbies - a lot of divorces happen when one partner feels they're doing all the work raising kids and feels the other partner is taking up hobbies to avoid it. Engaging with your wife and kids, if treated as an emotional investment (i.e. got to be careful how you do it just like picking stocks for an investment fund), over time will yield dividends in terms of less nags and less screaming.

What about an alternative conjecture - they can help each other?

IMO everything borpik says hits the mark.

But if I were you I'd save up for a few years, throw away my career and work as a Ski instructor for a year or two anyways just to see how bad it turns out.

It's one thing to hear from others how extreme steps are unlikely to lead to a good outcome, and how we are trading one set of problems for another, but it's quite another to never have taken extreme steps in life and wonder "what if"?

Then once you're through with skiing, come back to programming. :)

Take the job, work a couple of years, then go Ski to your heart's discontent.

All the best to you. Please post back what happens - I hope HN can help. I've found in my life being open with others have generally been a good decision in hindsight - I hope it's true for you too.

IMHO. There is no error. A person who is aware of their actions but not the causes by which their actions are guided, are not free. A human may have the capacity, but it may not be exercised, and if it is not, they are not free.

By your definition once 1 is added it’s not a number we can understand.

Any broker can reduce trading fees to zero. How does Robinhood afford it?

It's not the stones that have value IMO - It sounds like they're more like a physical representation of more abstract values like "honour" and "respect". A physical token to represent these concepts can then be placed around a dance floor and to the people there, that looks awesome to them.

But if, say, a foreigner use a machine tool to carve one such stone in 3 days and transport it into the island to sell it to the residents, it's not going to be worth much, compared to the stone that's been in one of their families for decades, and where a few years ago they did a ritual with their son with it.

Going further, if said foreigner marries into a local family, and then performs a ritual with his first born son, in front of the newly crafted stone, the ritual involving the whole village, suddenly the stone that didn't have value, would now be valuable and accepted in trade. And later on, if now grown-up son's child commits a mistake and harms another family, that stone can then be offered as an apology.

It has a corollary to our own currency, but the values they represent are different - in our society, currency represents the values of "productivity", "offering what people want" and "cleverness".

Anyway, that's my speculation.

She had many years to compound.

Quarterly reports.