mistahenry

I recently deleted social media from my phone. With nothing left, I found myself compulsively checking HN anytime I had a free moment.

That’s shifted now after a few weeks. I’m no longer filling those moments.

The wins are subtle but nice:

- when I watch a movie, I don’t feel the need to start scrolling

- I’m reading at night again. This is far more relaxing and gets me to bed at 9 - 10

- less doom / gloom

- consumption is more intentional. I consider what I am interested in then find, rather than be sucked down the algorithmic vortex of what’s proven to engage me

I mean, you've collapsed a complex, mixed system into a single negative narrative.

Examples of how I learn with LLMs:

- Paste sections from reading and ask questions / clarify my understanding / ask it to quiz me

- Produce Anki cards by pasting in chapter text and the culling out the goods ones

- Request resources / links for further learning

Basically, LLMs serve as a thinking partner. Yes, it's a fallible tool, not an oracle. But dismissing the idea that you can learn (and learn faster / more efficiently) with LLMs is reductionist

I agree that when it comes to portion size and whole foods, Europe makes it easy to follow by example. FWIW, I ate healthy in the US before because I rock climbed and needed to maintain a very lean mass. If I wanted to cut weight in Indonesia, it was easy: just eat their portion size, and I'd come in below maintenance.

What I've seen consistently amongst the non-healthy eating Americans is that they argue:

1. Dieting requires them to be hard on themselves and they're focusing on self-love, which they struggle with

2. They deserve a daily treat. They look forward to it, it brings meaning, etc

3. The taste of their food is super important to them, such that they can't imagine repetitively eating (meal-prep) or eating cleanly (no added sugar, monitoring sodium)

I lived in Germany and Indonesia. It’s easier for me now back in the US than ever to eat healthy.

I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc. Whole Foods is best in class (Alnatura doesn’t come close)

While to me, the layman, it seems health regulation in general in Europe is more conservative about what can be put on the body / be consumed, I think it’s mostly Americans don’t want to eat healthy. And the portion sizes here are insane (just look at the evolution dinner plate. 1960s plates at an antique sale only pass for salad plates)

Cool project!

I run tech for a reverse logistics business buying overstock from Costco/Target/Walmart and we’re building a similar system for recognizing and pricing incoming inventory. I sent an email a few days ago to see if you might be open to chatting.

It would be great to compare notes or explore ways to collaborate. Totally understand if things are busy!

For the never-ending text file for todos and work journal, I've found great success with org-mode, especially since deadlines automatically end up in my calendar with org-agenda. The outline format of org-mode is quite nice and it took all of 1 day to learn the key commands for making / manipulating the outline, creating links, and cycling through TODO states (using Doom emacs made the start super easy since I already know vi and didn't have to also learn the text editing commands).

I've also found the concept of an "inbox" from the Zettelkasten method very helpful. Anytime something comes up that's not yet in my system, I add it to the inbox for later processing (org-capture on my computer, and beorg on my phone). This way, note entry doesn't require a full context switch. I then just make sure to regularly drain my inbox.

I don't use emacs currently for anything but org-mode but I'm far happier with this than I was with a never ending `.md` file.

If you get Berzerk, I’ll sign up :) that’s what I’m looking to read next, one way or another.

I really enjoy the Shonen Jump app on my iPad for reading One Piece so I’m definitely keen on a service like this with an expanding catalog!

Computer Networking: A Top-down Approach, Jim Kurose

I read this about 2 years into my study of CS. I found the design of the internet, at times intentional and very often emergent / working around constraints, absolutely fascinating. I couldn’t help feeling that algorithms were things I could pull off the shelf but protocols were something I’d need to be able to design well throughout my career.

I'm probably C2 comprehension, C1 speaking in German. I self-taught to high B2 (based off placement into that level in a Goethe Institut Intesivkurs) in 15 months of 2 hours a day. I studied 1-2 hours per day on average and did not miss a single day.

2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.

I moved to Germany as well and self taught German to a high B2 level in the 15 months before moving. That was enough where I was able to be conversationally fluent within 3 months of arrival

When I self taught, I primarily used Assimil and Pimsleur daily for the first six months. After completing those programs, I continued with the daily study (that’s the most important part!) and used Easy German the YouTube channel, watched a bunch of German shows, and worked on speaking just by narrating / describing random things and looking up words as needed.

This is why I always like to have a `status_history` or `audit` table. You don't have to have event sourcing to still want a trail of who changed what in the system when.

Kotlin does this, and I find it’s massively improved the readability of our codebase

I read Kurose’s book in college and recommend it as the perfect book for this topic. As a neophyte at the time, I remember really drilling into the details of TCP and just being in awe of how well thought out the whole system was. This book laid such a good foundation for my career as a software engineer.

Your reading of this is rather extreme, and I feel you've missed the point by thinking that Russell is advocating to avoid fun intentionally at times so as to preserve a happy life. I read it as more an observation that the boring times, those in which there's a lack of stimulation, are an important part of a balanced, healthy life.

A more modern take on his advice would be to avoid mindlessly surfing the internet every dull moment in which we are waiting a few minutes for some time to pass. If you haven't taken an extended, conscious break from the internet outside of your work needs (no social media, no news, etc), I recommend it. It was very enlightening for me to feel this lack of stimulation. I certainly enjoy my time on the internet when I'm there because I want to be there, not because I'm just looking for something to kill the time.

Similarly, I've stopped listening to music while coding because I realized that the listening without mindfulness was killing my passion. After doing so, the passion has been restored.

His words, too, remind me of the drug user's plight. My sister works in drug rehabilitation and has told me about the struggles many go through known as Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. From my naive understanding, these people have adapted to the constant, unnatural amount of dopamine flowing through the brains during addiction by producing more dopamine receptors. When the drug is gone, those receptors are still there. But, the body is not capable of naturally releasing the dopamine required to fill these receptors even during the highest of natural moments, leading these people to experience serious anhedonia -- an intense lack of pleasure from everyday life. It takes a long time for these receptors to downregulate, which is the reason for such a high rate of relapse for certain drug types.

I think of Emerson's words a bit: "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!"

I was specifically thinking banking and it’s exactly this type of spear phishing attack that happens (although with other types of tokens the Fido). In these scenarios, you only need to move the money once.

You definitely have a point with regard to non-transaction usage that requires long term access

While mitigating a number of attacks, MFA with these types of physical tokens is still only as strong as their setup/enrollment process, which in many cases can be compromised via phishing.

From my experience, there’s a difference between trying to compromise someone with good opsec (many readers of hacker news) and compromising regular non technical people

What type of physical tokens are you talking about and what exactly do they do to prevent authentication on the scammer site?

I’ve used the Cocoapods tool Xcodeproj to facilitate really nice Workflows that Xcode didn’t provide for me out of the box. I don’t need this in every project but when I do it’s a really nice API for manipulating the pbxproj files

https://github.com/CocoaPods/Xcodeproj

Completely agree. When implementing new functionality in my Kotlin Spring Boot apps, I find the debugger crucial for fixing any exception that isn’t immediately clear. I’ll simply rerun my test with a breakpoint on the failing line, peruse the values of local variables (often spelunking deep into nested objects), and test theories with the window that lets my evaluate arbitrary expressions. Occasionally, I’ll change the value of a local variable and let the program continue to see if that value would fix the issue.

It’s a workflow that makes “Wait, why did that happen” such an easy question to answer.

I recently got an app on to the Shopify app store. The review process is the worst that I've been through.

My rejections in chronological order:

1. Rejected for having text in the app icon. The text was our company's name and is our logo which we had to change for Shopify...

2. Rejected because we didn't implement the GDPR webhooks. We don't operate in Europe so I didn't think they apply. I could have read this in the documentation but still...

3. My shop set up geographic restrictions for a few South East Asian countries and the shopify tester tested with a store with an Albania as the country, USD as the currency, and a fictional address. Shopify actually prevents this kind of invalid installation (that's the whole point of the geographic restriction). So when my store rejected his onboarding attempt with a generic error due to what was previously thought to be nothing more than a sanity check, he rejected my app and imposed a 2 week ban on my partner account from resubmitting.

Ultimately, I was able to appeal the decision through a different channel. We had our first customer waiting to use our app so this added an extra 10 days of delay and a whole bunch of unneeded stress in my startup.

I'm an American living in Germany and I'm always thrilled when Germans think I'm Dutch after hearing my German ;)

As for the accents, I had a similar experience when moving around from Berlin to Munich to Mainz with regard to the "clicking". It's like my brain suddenly recalibrated to understand the vowel and consonant changes in the accent (and particularly in certain areas the parts of the words that simply were dropped off the beginning/end of the word).

People often tell me "Wow, I wish I was good at languages like you" and I honestly want them to understand how I feel: I didn't learn German, I simply spent enough time in the language for my brain to catch up and learn it for me.

The existence of a system that allows for companies to pay foreign labor well below market puts a downward pressure on compensation for everyone in industries that take advantage of it.

You mention that there are Americans who also struggle but I fail to see how that’s an argument in favor of systematic underpaying of foreign workers who are bound to a single employer (modern day indentured servitude). It’s the job of the government to improve the lives of its citizens and to protect their jobs, not to help foreign nationals improve their lives or to help businesses boost their profits at the expense of American salaries.

I’m all for immigration and fair pay. I’ve done it myself. But I don’t want to have to live as you described if at all possible. And I prefer that if you are talented enough to make it to the USA then you should be able to profit equally like Americans.

If forcing companies to pay equal salaries for foreign nationals stops the inflow of H1Bs, then this means that there are Americans capable of filling the job market. It there’s still unmet need for talent, then foreign nationals will be brought in at fair salaries

I've spent the last 3 years building the whole solution suite for 2FA banking devices. We have our own hardware devices with secure elements that use your computer as an internet proxy (connected via bluetooth low energy or USB). If you find a small company doing interesting work, your job looks very different than just writing configuration files. Especially when hardware is involved and the firmware is written in house.

From my experience, if you find a post startup small business with fewer than 10 developers, you end up wearing many hats. Both times I've been at large corporate jobs, though, it's exactly as you describe.

Risk analysis requires accepting trade offs. I don’t think it’s so backwards or self destructive to not want the level of potential danger that a nuclear power offers in your backyard.

The reality is that many nuclear disasters have happened and not wanting to risk irreversibly destroying your land for many generations seems like a reasonable position to hold.

I’ve worked in a number of areas with basically no fail/delay SLAs. I think it’s naive to think “if you need a hot fix right now, you’re doing it wrong”...the number of times we needed to hot fix because of ourselves was very low. But when you’re in an integration heavy environment and one of the many moving parts (outside of your control) breaks, well thought out “put the fire out” stopgaps on the server consistently save the day (and the company money by not breaching the SLA)

> so the money stops having tangible value

I couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. My current job isn’t the highest paying job I’ve ever had (or could currently get). But the value in what I’m learning and exposed to keeps increasing over time. I am not the smartest person in the room and super happy about that

I have a Chemex three cup and I can make one or two cups with it without any timer or scale. It tastes great to me and is really consistent. The need for scientific exactness is overblown here (although using a scale and timer only helps the result). Even a bad brew from my chemex with freshly roasted single origin beans is far better than the terrible black coffee I drank at the office for years (and still will drink if it’s all that’s available)

I was already using zsh and somehow the MacOS upgrade path for making zsh the new default shell deleted my shell history.

This was a short term blow to productivity since I had only made external notes on about half the difficult command line tasks I’d completed since getting this MacBook in 2017.

How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not

oh wow, that is certainly different than the news video which I assumed was relatively unbiased

I use awk very often at my current job when analyzing our logs. I've been slowly compiling a list of useful shell pipelines, the majority of which involve awk. Any time I need to do some novel analysis, I can steal the syntax/ideas from myself

Mawk on debian is super fast and can determine statistics like messages/sec, uniq ip addresses for a particular user, etc from 10GB log files very quickly.