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

24 years old too and I also thought that work would "fill the void" in a way. I recently talked again with a high school friend and it was great, but it doesn't really solve the problem daily. I'm thinking of trying antidepressants for a while and see how it goes.

> 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.

I don't know what to say here except that I lived through that too, and it's still hard to accept.

I really love how humane this whole thread is. People often say here than they miss the old internet, in a way this thread feels like it.

While in high school, I had one or two professors give kudos to my writing. Joined a sci-fi/fantasy forum with active writing competitions, reading clubs and the likes. Got some kudos from there as well. Wrote first, totally unpublishable, shameful novel.

Got into university (electrical&computer eng), exploded outwards (socially). Published a couple of short stories, attended a handful of literary workshops. Started mental outline of First Great Novel, which became gradually documented in a deep yet unorganized way. Multiple attempts at writing the first chapters failed, mostly due to intense (or at least intensely experienced) personal issues.

Never succeeded in pulling this off part-time. Again and again opted for professional growth against the artistic life I had been daydreaming about (and increasingly, as the years went by, obsessed upon) as a teen. Ended up in a CS PhD (27 at the time of writing, third year of study).

Covid hit. Found true love. Life and income have stabilized. Finally feeling dumb and courageous enough again to give writing another chance. The premise of the book is:

what if people started, beyond their control, to transmit their actual feelings through the air via their breath?

How to learn reverse engineering... Good question.

First of all, nowadays, free interactive tools like Ghidra drastically accelerate the reverse engineer process. Ghidra's decompiler is able to produce actually reasonable C-like source code in many cases. So, if you want to jump right into the water, do the following:

- Write a small C program and compile it

- Install Ghidra

- Load the binary of your program into Ghidra

- Try to make sense of what you see :)

That's a quite cumbersome way to learn, though, although there are several Youtube videos that follow that approach. Modern decompilers are good, but they are still far from perfect, especially when applied to highly optimized machine code. Often, the output of the decompiler only makes sense when you have the assembly code next to it. Therefore, I highly recommend to first learn programming in assembly, which includes understanding how code and data are represented in main memory, how the stack works, how OS functions are called, etc. The good news: once you have understood how a particular CPU and computer architecture work, you can transfer that knowledge easily to other architectures. Therefore, maybe just start with x86 if your computer has an AMD or Intel CPU: http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/Pro...

Once you can read and write assembly language, you can go back to Ghidra and disassemble some programs for which you have the source code. That will teach you a lot about how compilers translate high-level languages to machine code. You will later discover that hand-written machine code sometimes look very different from compiler-generated code.

There is also what I call the platform specific part. That one really depends on the type of programs you want to reverse engineer. For example, if you want to reverse engineer a text adventure written for MS-DOS, the only platform-specific things you will encounter in the code are the four or five BIOS calls necessary for printing text, reading the keyboard, etc. That's something you can easily look up in the Internet without any deeper knowledge of MS-DOS or IBM-compatible PCs. On the other hand, if you are working on an Amiga game, it helps to be familar with the hardware and to be able to recognize the typical series of instructions that are needed to query the state of the mouse buttons etc.

> Thank goodness for Obamacare

Yes, without Obamacare it wouldn't be possible for me to even imagine retiring early.

> Thanks to Obamacare, individual plans have the same coverage as employer plans.

Not quite. The network is usually smaller. Employer plans have a nationwide network. Which means that if you get a rare disease for which the best doctor is in UC San Diego, you can fly over there and get treatment. Most Obamacare plans have limited networks, for example in my area only in-state providers are on the network.