seanbarry

And have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge of AI research.

Looks like the hackers have caused some pretty significant damage. I'm curious to find out what the attack vector was.

After all what? A blog post?

Your anonymous comment reduces somebody’s experience and decisions to a single sentence. I’m afraid it completely fails to successfully summarise them.

Not at all! You raised a valid point, I just wanted to clarify my intention. Thanks for engaging with the post.

Hey, author here. Sorry to disappoint but it's not in the UK. It's Innerdalen, Norway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innerdalen).

It's one of the most beautiful places I've seen. If you have the opportunity to visit, I recommend it highly.

Hey, author here. I understand your criticism.

Please see this comment where I've hopefully answered your questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=34426360&goto=item%3Fi...

Hey, author here.

I actually don't dislike cities and I didn't generalise that they are terrible.

London is one of the busiest and largest mega cities on the planet. It's incomparable to a city of ~400k people where you can walk in 45 minutes from the city centre to the boundary where the urban environment becomes a more natural environment.

The mega city is not for me, and I regret sacrificing quality of life for income. This decision is about rebalancing those two metrics.

Author here. Please see this comment I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=34426360&goto=item%3Fi...

Hey, author here.

When I wrote this, I had no idea it was going to receive so much attention. It was immediately after a call with my boss where I committed to leaving.

I have learned a valuable lesson: how important it is to be crystal clear with the words you choose and the message you convey.

Reading my post now, I agree it sounds like I'm naively planning on going to live in the mountains where I'll immediately die in a storm or get eaten by a bear. I also wrote "I'm the least fulfilled I've ever been". I should have written "this is the least fulfilling work I've ever done".

I am leaving an unfulfilling job, and an unfulfilling place, to move to a smaller settlement where I am a short walk from the seaside and a short drive from the mountains. I'll have a way higher quality of life, being able to do the things I love (hiking in the mountains and other general outdoor pursuits) at the cost of losing a significant amount of income.

This is a trade I'm willing to make, and it reverses the decisions I've made over the last few years. This is an important learning I hoped to share with others who may be in a similar predicament.

I don't have FU money, I still want to work as a software engineer and will have to very soon. The difference is that I will not trade quality of life for money, and I will try to find or create work on the terms that maximise happiness for me. These terms are different for everybody, so my solution is unique to me.

The TL;DR of my original post is "don't optimise for income over quality of life".

Author here. This was not my intention. Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=34426290&goto=item%3Fi...

Author here. You'll notice I didn't ask the reader to "follow me on twitter".

I had ~30 people reach out to me in DMs on twitter.

Some were people who feel in a similar position but don't know what to do. Others were people who have been where I am and offered advice.

Twitter is just a tool to connect with people outside of the immediate circle I have around me, I don't think there's any problem with using it as such.

Author here.

I posted this late last night (BST) and I’m shocked to wake and see it was so heavily read and discussed. Thank you everyone!

The post received some justifiable criticism for making it sound like I’m about to disappear in to the mountains to live like a hermit in a poorly thought out, idealistic middle finger to society.

In reality the change I’m making is to move to a much smaller place where I still have people and the urban environment around me, but with a much healthier balance of the things I value: family, nature, and quiet. Importantly, I’ll be a 15 minute walk from the seaside and a short drive away from the mountains - so I’ll be able to escape to them as often as I want.

I also want to find or create more meaningful work, even though this means my income may be lower.

I don’t have FU money from working at a FAANG company, so my personal runway is ~6 months. I won’t be taking significant time off.

The most ironic thing is that change isn’t immediate. It’s going to be six weeks before my obligations here expire and until then, life continues as it has done previously. As I write this comment I’m standing in a packed train on the way in to the city, but today with a little smile on my face.

Thanks for replying!

This is really interesting. Can you share a bit more about specifically how the marine achieves this? What do they say/do that achieves this outcome? Thanks!

That sounds like an epic hiking trip. Can you share more detail about the specific route and accommodation etc? Do you happen to have a write up anywhere? Cheers!

> By 2021 its valuation had risen to a hyperbolic $15 billion, and the founders had cashed out by selling some of their shares to investors. They bought a private plane and decamped from Philadelphia to intracoastal mansions in Miami.

This is might be the best example I’ve seen of getting rich by just riding the bubble mania and cashing out at the right time.

I absolutely love Synthwave '84 Blues (but with the text glow disabled)

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sabrsore...

Original parent poster here.

If you look at my account age and number of comment upvotes you'll see that I don't care about comment upvotes at all and have never made any effort to increase them.

My original comment was to highlight that I think the ratio of positive to negative feedback for what is an impressive effort by an individual seems unbalanced. There's lots of negative feedback and very little positive feedback.

I think positive feedback is important - it's good to know what you're doing well in addition to what you're not doing well.

As someone who has designed a product from scratch before I also think it's incredibly easy for people who haven't gone through that process to underestimate the time and effort involved.

>Not every showcase automatically deserves a compliment.

You're right. I do find, however, that the "default" reaction to showcases is to point out all the flaws, but not reinforce any of the strengths. To me that seems unbalanced.

I'm sure many HN users are content with this form of feedback - that's fine. I personally think that when receiving feedback, finding out what has been done well is as important as finding out what hasn't.

There's a lot of criticism in the comments here, some of it feels very negative. I can imagine reading it as the OP is quite demoralising.

Personally I think what the OP has achieved is very impressive. The design looks beautiful, and there's a very "Apple-esque" feel to the website. I love that sustainability has been made a requirement as part of the design.

I think some of the other comments give good feedback about the website, the most important of which is that some more photos with the entire keyboard in the context it's used (maybe sitting in front of an iMac) would be really to understand its actual size.

Well done though OP - I like this a lot.

Great effort! Keep it up!

How many munros are you at? I’m currently on 49!

It sounds like you have a similar process to me - you don’t actually “think” in or understand the imperial units - you have just memorised benchmark amounts and conversion metrics. That’s why you can’t get your head around fahrenheit - the conversion isn’t an easy one to mentally apply every time.

I was born in and have lived in the UK for my entire life. Although this document correctly asserts that we use imperial units in certain use-cases, my anecdotal experience is that I don’t really understand those units at all. When I buy milk, I know roughly how much “2 pints” is, and I know roughly how long it will last me. Similarly, when I see a distance in miles I mentally multiply it by 1.6 to roughly estimate what the distance is in kilometres. When people ask my height, I often give it in both feet/inches and centimetres, but the former means nothing to me. It’s just some words I’ve memorised that directly translate to my height. My point is - I see a divide in the UK. I was born after 1990 and I think many others like me have a similar relationship with imperial units - they don’t “think” in them or understand them at all. It’s my parent’s generation who seem to understand and think in imperial units.

> You can still write Javascript and solve business problems without knowing those things.

It depends what the requirements of the role are. For some frontend React work maybe, but the engineers we were trying to hire would be working on APIs and processes that handle high volumes of streaming data. In that context using sync methods over async would significantly impact throughput.

When asked "why are you using a sync method here" the answer would often be "I want the code to pause here before the next line executes". It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening under the bonnet that IMO is required for this sort of task.

Also - I agree that labels like "mid" or "senior" shouldn't carry a specific list of knowledge requirements, but they are useful to set benchmarks for what a candidate should be able to roughly offer in exchange for the level of comp they are requesting.

I should have clarified in the original comment: the roles all had python experience as a specific requirement and some of the candidates apparently had multiple years of experience with Python listed on their CVs.