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

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641–650 of 874 posts

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

#641

Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut).

I started balding at 15 (thanks to my shitty genes) and am now 26. Of course, I've tried everything but nothing worked or they had massive side effects while not working (meds) or they were costly and not always effective (transplant). I will not dismiss your suffering and will not say that you will be as attractive without hair, that's wishful thinking and cruel, the only thing you can do now is trying to look yourself in the mirror and find a way to accept this new reality and hope that someone discover a cure in the next 2 decades.

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

#642

Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut).

1. electric razor

2. 15% body fat (20% if you are tall)

2. six-back abs.

All of the above is under your control.

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

#643
post #615

I just finished spinning up a new xmpp server/site for myself and friends, as well as anyone else (its public - https://civitaz.xyz ). Other than that, doing more stuff for FOSSphones (my Linux phone news site) and working on my side project TTS game. Fun stuff.

Do you have any experience using XMPP with Linux phones? Are there any clients which support OMEMO for one-to-one and group chats and encrypted A/V calls?

The ones to watch are Gajim and Dino. Both are likely candidates for the emerging Linux phone platforms. Though neither quite there yet, there is a lot of activity across the projects.

Dino: OMEMO for one-to-one and group chats. Calls (encrypted) are in nightly builds, and there is a branch to use libhandy for the UI to make it more mobile-friendly. Some more info here: http://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Dino

Gajim: The older and more mature project, it too supports OMEMO. The UI is currently being revised. Although it supports calls (and has for a long time), it doesn't yet support some of the more recent advances, including encryption for calls. This is on their roadmap. Again, postmarketOS has a dedicated page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Gajim

Kaidan is worth a mention as it uses Qt and aims to be mobile-friendly. However it is much younger and still has a number of rough edges and unsupported features: https://www.kaidan.im/

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

#645

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

When people say "enough money so that they don't have to work anymore", what kind of money are we talking about here? 1 to 10M? 10 to 20M? or what?

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

#646

Too many ideas given the time, but now I'm focused on two: 1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things. 2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and…

I've been working on 2. since January.

All your photos, chats, e-mails, messages, health data (eventually all your data) into a single database, which can be distributed onto multiple removable 'volumes' (disks).

Plug in the volume and the db index is seamlessly merged and queries run on all the connected volumes. No files. No cloud. Data on your disks only.

There are processing nodes that run in the background indexing the content, finding people and locations in the pictures, chats.

It allows you to build up a fully search-able archive of all your data, which you can physically keep in a locker or safe.

But also, if you store and keep all your data on disks that you control, then many of the services that we use could just run as local apps on your server, reading and writing from your archive via an API.

Social apps are just two people's archives sharing content between each other, no 3rd party services required.

I worked a lot on it until about 1.5 months ago, when I got discouraged by how hard and big this project is. Breaking up with my girlfriend around that time did not help either.

But now I see you mention it and it's kind of inspiring, since I've been doing a lot of thinking and gathering strength for another crack at getting a prototype out.

It would be interesting to see what other people have been thinking/doing in this area.

But since there's at least one person who wants it, I might actually jump back to work ;) Thank you !

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

#647
post #548

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

This is quite normal. Many who win big in the literal lotteries are worse off. I know reddit is all antiwork these days, but that's really mostly about rights and not not working. Being a productive member of society is meaningful. I'm from Scandinavia and a lot of our identity is tied up with our careers. Being without a job or any structural social purpose is asking for depression. GWF Hegel wrote about suffering f…

It's just a matter of what you've been taught to believe is important in life (by culture, religion, parents, peers, etc.). What humans need psychologically is something to keep them occupied and their time structured in some meaningful way, but one doesn't need a job for that - you can practice your hobbies, socializing, taking care of family, or whatever one finds fulfilling. People also need a sense of security and, as you mentioned, peer recognition, but having money fixes both of those quite well. In the end it's all very individual, because the sense of purpose, achievement and self-esteem doesn't deal with some absolute predefined values, but it's relative to your own set of expectations and goals.

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

#648
I wrote a book of fiction (in French) and I self-published it on Amazon (KDP) after some encouragement from someone here on HN; it's just been selected as one of the five finalists of the Storyteller Amazon contest. Sales are slow, though.

I'm trying to get good at EDM but am making little progress. I have watched many tutorials, studied the masters. I am good with tools, and sometimes I come up with 4- or 8-bar loops that aren't that bad, but the songs as a whole are boring. There is something about building expectations, intensity towards the "drop" that I still don't understand.

About a year ago I built a touch-less MIDI controller based on Arduino and cheap HC-SR04 sensors. It's fun to use but I don't know what to do with it. It could be a cheap alternative to a true Theremin but I think the market is too small to pursue.

I'm working on a webapp to teach sight-reading; the market is probably also small but at least there are no moving parts, prototypes, inventory, shipping, etc. There are other apps that do the same thing but I think my version may have an edge. We'll see.

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

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘m wondering what‘s your motivation behind that… Do you just like the sensation of studying so much? I‘d probably feel empty myself just accumulating knowledge all my life and not applying it to any high impact problem worth solving.

My Ph.D. was far more than 'just acquiring knowledge', though I did plenty of that. It is also about advancing the state of all human knowledge. Like what the big tech companies promise that you'll be doing, but without the corrupting element of needed it to be immediately profitable. Much less evil. A good Ph.D. program should be built on solving a high impact problem. I nailed a few of them, including a couple of m…

Touché, and thanks for sharing that perspective.

I chose the entrepreneurial path to societal impact for myself, but you reminded me about that a lot of the basic research we‘re all depending on was done by doctorands and researchers.

And just like entrepreneurs, you‘ve got two kinds of PhDs as well…

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