Hacker News, thank you for all the links and all the great reading. Now I have to say goodbye.
I’m with my wife Bess (https://bessstillman.substack.com/) and my brother Sam, and crying, but it is okay. At the end of Lord of the Rings Gandalf says to the hobbits, "Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” And that is how I feel now. Ending prematurely hurts, but all things must end, and my time to end is upon me.
These symptoms are a classic sign of burn out. One thing I notice in your writing is you’re very tied up in things having meaning and mattering in some specific way. This itself can lead to burnout because if everything must matter you must be emotionally invested in everything. But you can care without it mattering to you. You can do a good job without being totally invested in everything about it. You can love what you do without it having significance in every detail.
In a complex job with a fast pace, a fair amount of tech debt around every edge, a relentless pace of innovation happening, and - yes - growth, there’s too much to be invested in everything. It doesn’t have to matter that much. The parts you really care about, the craft and quality of your work, your relationships, mentoring and growing the people around you, seeing things get better one piece at a time, and a few things - they can matter. But everything can’t. And even those you have to at some very deep level realize don’t matter really.
Stripe doesn’t really exist in this world. It’s a shared fiction to help frame the interactions between you and a few people you actually interact with in a day. The real truth is the only thing that happens in your days is you type on a computer and talk to a few people. It actually doesn’t matter in any meaningful way what you typed or some higher purpose around humbling honesty or exothermic curiosity or PMEs or whatever stories we tell ourselves to create some sort of reality out of the fiction. The only important things you really do is how you shape the lives of the people you interact with, and how you shape your own life.
Burnout is hard. Adopt a daily meditation practice. Let your mind heal by letting go of meaning and practice enjoying the moment you’re in with whomever you’re with, but most especially yourself. The joy will come back faster the faster you let go of things needing to matter or have deeper meaning, especially when those things are a fiction like a company or a career or any of the other small and big lies we’ve been told and we reinforce to ourselves daily. I know I’ve been there man, and I know exactly - exactly - the sensations and experiences you describe. It gets better, but I think once you get there it never totally goes away and it’s easier to slip back.
FWIW I don’t think burnout is the same as depression. I’ve felt both and burnout is different. It’s that loss of ability to engage - which overlaps with depression - but usually doesn’t come with the thoughts of hopeless despair and desire for life to be over. It’s just more of a deadness and inability to initiate what you think you should want to do but can’t, and it pervasively impacts everything.
I am only partially qualified in that I am not a professional archeologist, but I have done post-doctoral archeological studies and have read enough archeological studies to understand the larger academic context.
It is not possible to present all the data informing a judgment in such a short work. Even in a book, it would not be possible. Thus it is common in archeology for papers to be written as part of an ongoing conversation / debate with the community - which would be defined as the small handful of other archeologists doing serious research on the same specific subject matter.
Part of that context here is that these tombs are well-established to be the royal tombs of Alexander's family, spanning a few generations including his father and his son. This is one of the most heavily studied sites in Greece for obvious reasons, and that is not something anybody is trying to prove.
In that context, his arguments are trying to identify any body as one among millions, but as one among a small handful of under ten possibilities.
At the same time, the fact that he is not a native English speaker and general archeological style come into play. For example:
"the painter must have watched a Persian gazelle in Persia, since he painted it so naturalistically (contra Brecoulaki Citation2006). So the painter of Tomb II has to be Philoxenus of Eretria" sounds like a massive leap, and it is. He continues:
"... Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) must have been painted hastily by Nicomachus of Thebes (Andronikos Citation1984; Borza Citation1987; Brecoulaki et al. Citation2023, 100), who was a very fast painter (Saatsoglou-Paliadeli Citation2011, 286) and was famous for painting the Rape of Persephone (Pliny, N. H. 35.108–109), perhaps that of Tomb I."
Another huge leap, both 'presented as conclusions'. However he then continues to indicate these are just hypotheses: "These hypotheses are consistent with the dates of the tombs..."
So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms, but also appears to be working within the context of the conversation with other archeologists I mentioned to start: They all know every affirmation is as "probably", rarely anything more. So it is relatively common shorthand of the craft in that sense.
I believe you are overthinking his responses to other authors, although I understand the culture shock. It is an ongoing conversation and archeologists tend to be blunt in their assessments. Add Greek bluntness on top of this, and it does not seem to matter to the material.
As to your last question, is this legitimate research? The answer overall appears to be yes, although I could see several points (such as the identification of artists I quoted above, and various items I noticed), which I would never have put into ink the way he did. Still, most of his arguments are compelling. It is a shame that the aggressiveness of a few affirmations detract from the overall value of his work. Archeology is not code nor is it physics. It does not pursue universal truths that are more easy to verify through repeated experiments, but unique historical ones which necessarily attempt to interweave physical details and ancient historical records. Each field has its own level of certainty, and the fact that we cannot establish these details with the same certainty as we can establish the chemical formula for water does not make them useless, or pure inventions. Far from it.
The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Don't forget that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
(Edit: I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.)
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in a single bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
But this is a misunderstanding—it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.
Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks.
Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language despite what the Spanish Academy would like. Castilian Spanish (lispy) is a very different animal from Mexican (beat poet who's constantly out of breath), Venezuelan (all the sighs), Cuban (if Sean Connery spoke Spanish), Nicaraguan (I dunno. I still really struggle with this one.), Equatorial Guinean (like from Spain only clearly not), Chilean (Spanish is only a rough guideline, ¿Cachay?), Dominican (one word, and it's all the words), or Argentinian (spoken with an Italian accent).
If you're from the US and only learn from Duolingo, you might be able to get by a bit easier with folks from Colombia than with other accents (as long as you steer clear of Medellín).
You've already gotten a bunch of answers but to be honest I find all of them a little incomplete if you don't have any electrical background, so here is my attempt to be quite thorough from (almost) first principles.
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The equation for power delivered by an ideal system is P = IV, or power (P) = current (I) * voltage (V). Power is measured in watts, and that is generally the overall number that matters, in terms of what you can run off of your system at the same time.
So to increase the wattage (power) of your system you can either increase the voltage or the current.
- Increasing the voltage of a system increases the amount of resistance it can "break through". In "danger to human" terms, our skin is generally not a great conductor, so voltages lower than 50V usually won't enter the body (read: vital organs) at all. Voltages above 50V will start to enter the body depending on conditions, which is when electricity becomes much more dangerous.
- However even if the voltage is high enough to enter the body, if the current (I) isn't very high it still won't be dangerous. Current is measured in Amperes (A), and the usual number at which a current inside the body becomes dangerous is above 30mA. 30mA can cause respiratory failure if it passes through the lungs, current as low as 100mA can cause cardiac arrest if it passes through the heart. In a car's electrical system, the currents we're operating with are definitely going to be over the 30mA threshold we just established, so we want to keep the voltage under 50V instead.
Anyway back to cars and ignoring danger to humans for a second. Resistance is the main thing you want to overcome when it comes to the efficiency of such a system. The equation for power loss is P = I^2 * R, or "power dissipated (as heat) is proportional to the square of the current times the resistance". So if you increase the current of your system (in order to deliver more watts) you will also increase the amount of power you lose as heat. You can decrease the loss by decreasing the Resistance.
The equation for resistance through a material is: R = ρ * (L/A), or Resistance = resistivity (an innate property of the material) * Length / Area. In other words, the longer your wire is the more current you will lose to resistance. But if you increase the cross-sectional area of your wire (A) by making the wires thicker, you decrease the resistance.
So in short: if you have a high current (amperage) system, you use thicker wires in order to ameliorate resistive heat loss. But you can alternatively just decrease the amperage to reduce your resistive heat loss, which means thinner (and therefore much lighter) wires. But then you need to increase the voltage of your system in order to offset the power you're losing by decreasing the current. If you increase the voltage by 4x, from 12V to to 48V, this keeps it under the human danger zone (of 50-60V) and means your wires can be up to 16x thinner, taking up less space and less weight. Having it be a nice multiple of the previous system (4x) should make upgrading the relevant circuits a little more straightforward as well.
Once upon a time, when += was spelled =+, struct members in C were global names whose "values" were the offsets from the beginning of the struct[1]; a.b is simply a[ptrtab[b]] and a->b is a[0][ptrtab[b]].
[1]: This is why all of the names of struct members in unix are "needlessly" prefixed; i.e. struct stat.st_mode is not struct stat.mode because that could conflict with struct foo.mode until the early 1980s.
Three bookmarklets I made for my bookmarks toolbar:
"Don't mess with paste" - for when signup forms expect you to hand-type your email address twice. javascript:void ["contextmenu","copy","paste","selectstart"].map(e=>document.addEventListener(e,e=>e.stopPropagation(),true))
"Nebula no-alt-#" - Nebula's video viewer annoying captures e.g. alt-3 to do the same as plain 3 (seek to 3/10 of the video currently playing), but I expect it to switch to the 3rd browser tab instead. YouTube doesn't do this. Luckily I can just activate this bookmarklet: javascript:void document.addEventListener("keydown",(e)=>void(e.altKey&&!isNaN(+e.key)&&e.stopPropagation()))
"canvas DL" - when playing skribbl.io and someone has made a nice drawing, this lets you download the current drawing as a PNG. javascript:var w=window.wdq||(window.wdq=document.createElement("a"));var p=/The word was '([^']*)'/g,pp=/<span>([^<>]+) is drawing now!/g,tt=document.body.innerHTML;var mm,nn,xx;while(mm=p.exec(tt))nn=mm;while(mm=pp.exec(tt))xx=mm;w.download=location.host+"_"+(nn?nn[1]+"_":"")+(xx?xx[1]+"_":"")+new Date().toISOString().replace(/:/g,"_");w.href=document.querySelector("canvas").toDataURL();w.click();
It's definitely worth taking the time to set up a credit freeze with the three big agencies (Experian, TransUnion, Equifax). Initially setting it up is a pain in the butt and is rage-inducing, as you have to provide a bunch of personal data when the whole problem in the first place is that they're careless with your data.
However, once you've got it set up, it's very easy to freeze and unfreeze them. Just keep all the URLs, usernames, and passwords in a secure note somewhere, and any time you need to apply for credit, unfreeze them for a day or a week.
I used to have all sorts of identity theft problems (people taking out credit in my name) but freezing my credit has solved it.
When I was young, I read another story with a similar emotional texture that I've been trying to find again for years now. It had a mentally challenged boy who worked in a restaurant with a lobster tank in the front, and the boy loved the lobster as a pet and stopped the restaurant staff from killing and serving the lobster. But one day when the boy was gone the lobster was killed.
I don't remember much but I've been looking for it for ages. I hope I can find it and read it again someday.
That list above is what I was mainly thinking of. Here's a few more with great storytelling, done in various ways (sometimes non obvious but they all have a story to tell that kept me hooked)
I don't recall any physical violence in the following games, although psychological violence can be very personal and some may run you in a mood or facing events that can be unsettling at times. Some of these have neither.
Gone Home
The Swapper
Fez
Day Of The Tentacle
VVVVVV
You Have To Win The Game
Braid
Shelter 1 & 2
Her Story
Portal 1 & 2
Thomas Was Alone
One Night Stand
The Stanley Parable
Antichamber
Carto
RiME
Oxenfree
Never Alone
Life Is Strange
Soma and the Amnesia series could be of interest as well. I seem to recall it's all about fear, but not violence.
Mirror's Edge has punching but you don't kill anyone and you can avoid most encounters, with parkour style. Definitely not COD.
Limbo and Inside have gore but clearly not the COD one.
While enemies have guns and the setting may subscribe to "war-like", I seem to recall you can also complete Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut without lethal action (in the original non DC bosses have to be killed) which is rewarded with an achievement at the end of the game.
Heavy Rain is also a great game with original mechanics. Don't attempt to play with PS Move, use a controller.
Some of these are good for kids, some aren't, depends on kid age and how you want to raise them!
Single player games fun to play around tv / switch controls :
Firewatch - about 6 to 10 hours narrative walking exploring adventure with beautiful scenery. Teens and up probably.
Outer wilds : astonishing space exploration game. So many mysteries and puzzles and wonders and connections to be made. Cannot recommend highly enough.
Tale of two brothers. There's sadness in this game but handled very well. If you're ready to discuss life and death with your kids. Beautiful graphics and fun puzzles.
Machinerium / Botanicula / Samorost, of course. Beautiful and lovely and happiness inducing.
Tons of point and click adventures.
Coop
It takes two - might be super fun for your kids to play as parents! Beautiful graphics and fun gameplay.
Lovers in dangerous space time - technically there's guns but nothing with people or anything recognizable.
Overcooked - if no guns is really a strict mandate :)
> I think most C level officers in a startup would be quite happy to buy lower level employees shares.
When I left my last job at a series d startup, it was small enough that the CEO had a meeting with people leaving and thanked them for their work, so the CEO knew me by name. I later emailed the CEO about connecting me with buyers. Silence.
I also talked to a few companies who lend you money to buy your shares, and one of the private markets. They at least said there wasn't interest. The company was doing ok and wasn't a sinking ship, but with zero interest from anyone, my options were effectively underwater, and I let them expire.
If you're thinking about exercising, reach out to some of those companies who either lend you money or run a marketplace. They're better at due diligence than you, and if there's no interest, you can assume the options are worthless. Even better, talk to one of these companies before signing at a startup. Tell them you're thinking about signing with X, I might want to sell some shares in a few years, but what's the interest look like now?
This isn't documented anywhere I can find, but I think it should also be possible to flash the firmware from a 64-bit Ubuntu distribution. Afaik, the vcgencmd it needs is available is closed-source and only available as 32-bit binaries that also need some 32-bit shared libraries. Also, the Ubuntu PPA [1] that someone created only goes up to bionic, and I'm running the latest release, eoan. Still, with multiarch support, [2] this seems to create a working vcgencmd:
This is a great post and so spot on. At some point in my career my 'review prep' (which was the time I spent working on my own evaluation of my year at a company) became answering the question, "Do I still want to work here?" I categorize my 'review' in four sections (which are each rated at one of five levels, needs improvement, sometimes meets expectations, meets expectations, sometimes exceeds expectations, or consistently exceeds expectations)
I start by reviewing how I'm being managed, I expect someone managing me to be clear in their expectations of my work product, provide resources when I have identified the need to complete jobs, can clearly articulate the problem I am expected to be solving, and can clearly articulate the criteria by which the solution will be evaluated.
Second I review my co-workers, using a three axis evaluation, can I trust what they say to be accurate/honest, can I count on them to meet their commitments, and are they willing to teach me when I don't understand something and conversely learn when their is something they do not know.
Third I review what level of support do I get to do my job. Am I provided with a workspace where I can get work done? Do have have the equipment I need to do what is being asked? Is my commute conducive to the hours required? And finally and most important, does this job allow me to balance work obligations and non-work obligations?
Fourth I review whether or not the company mission, ethics, and culture is still one that I wish to be a part of. Am I proud of the company's mission? Do I believe that the leadership will make ethical calls even if doing so would mean less profit margin? Can I relate to and am I compatible with the values that my co-workers espouse and the actions they take? (this is the "company culture" theme, is it still a company that fits me culturally)
A company that receives lower than a 3.0 rating I put on a 90 day "company improvement plan" (CIP). I bring issues to the leadership who are in a position to address the situations that I've found wanting and try to secure their commitment to change. If after 90 days they haven't been able to (if they choose not to they're done right away), then I "fire" the company and work to process my exit as expeditiously as possible.
It reminds me of the last wave of distributed P2P filesharing, c. 2000-2005. First we got Napster, which realized that by taking advantage of the bidirectional nature of TCP/IP, we could distribute copyright infringement so widely that it would become impossible to enforce. Then some techies at NullSoft realized that you don't actually need a central server for discovery at all, you can broadcast the existence of and metadata about files throughout the network for discovery, and put out Gnutella. Lots of excitement followed, with many people of that era believing P2P would be the Next Big Thing (among people working on this were such folks as Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh -> Uber, Mark Zuckerburg of WireHog -> Facebook, Friis & Zenstrom of Kazaa -> Skype -> Rdio, and Robert Tappan Morris of Chord -> YCombinator).
And then folks realized that Gnutella was slow. Really slow, because folks on transient dialup connections in Estonia were critical nodes in file discovery. So they created the idea of super-peers, where the protocol was adapted to realize that some nodes are more equal than others and route requests through nodes with known-good connections. Then the next-generation P2P network (BitTorrent) decided that it was easier just to rely on HTTP for metadata exchange and went to centralized trackers, and the ecosystem that grew up around BitTorrent realized branding & centralized search engines were important for non-technical users and we got big torrent search engines like ThePirateBay and Mininova.
Eventually, the market seemed to settle on convenience & performance over distribution, and the real winners in the mass market were DropBox, Google, and Apple. There's probably a lesson in there, but as someone who's been fascinated by P2P technologies since high school and wasted a lot of time thinking about the problem in college, the lesson is pretty depressing. If hierarchy, market concentration, and single points of failure don't already exist, they will be reinvented.
