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

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661–670 of 874 posts

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

#661
post #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?

In general you can leave your money in the stock market and take out 4% a year and expect that to continue forever. Obviously there is no guarantee on that but it has held true for 60+ years. If your expenses are 40k/year you only need 1M to retire. 20M would get you 800k/year.

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

#663
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: T…

You pretty much listed off what my response would have been. I use Gajim quite extensively, and I've also got Kaidan installed on desktop and mobile for testing. It is certainly coming along, with more improvements in the future pipeline. I've yet to try Dino on my PinePhone, but it runs just fine on desktop.

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

#664
post #222

I'm starting a tech meetup in my small town. I moved from a city last year and with remote work I really miss sitting with other devs and chatting about tech, asking questions, and offering advice. I'd like to encourage participation beyond just powerpoint talks so I'm looking at the Lean Coffee framework, where folks write down topics and we go through them as a group one by one. Anyone else have suggestions for a m…

I too started one in my town. Started for same reasons. We grew it to 180 members last month and 2 sponsors.

I would look into Kahoot maybe

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

#665
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consider starting a family :-)

Ha! I've considered it and if I found the right woman and we had a relationship that was in the right place I'd definitely do it. But starting a family seems like one of those 'slow and steady wins the race' type of situations.

You don't know who you are until you've experienced the stress of a family and little kids.

Even if I didn't have to, I decided to get a job while having kids to maintain sanity and use the paid paternity leave. Now that the kids are older and I feel like I have a brain again, I'm back at doing what I like: building online businesses.

I highly recommend pursuing family, but you need to be careful in your situation. Getting in a relationship on a lavish lifestyle is a good recipe for a divorce later on. Once I started looking (~at 25), I was extremely blunt in what I was looking for and that helped screen things considerably.

I personally decided to start a family without marrying because marriage laws are pretty unfair towards men where I am and create an incentive towards a divorce and lies just to extract money from the other part. You don't know how your partner will turn out in 10 years, so better safe than sorry. We're still buying a house together and splitting 50/50 irrespective of income / savings. That should make sure there won't be a wife maintenance for me to pay in case we split up and that I won't lose 50% of the house. We also have wills to make sure we have guardianship of kids and access to money in case someone dies.

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

#666
When my work projects were interrupted because of COVID, I was able to advance a side project, Factonaut, into a "minimum viable product" (or at least into one that I no longer have to be ashamed of when releasing it). I continuie to improve it, but only slowly as my work projects returned to previous levels.

Factonaut is a computer programme for Windows 10 that allows you to compile historical events in a knowledgebase and easily create chronological overviews. Product link: https://www.factonaut.com/

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

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obamacare is utter garbage and costs ridiculous amounts of money. It impoverishes poor people far more than it helps. They should've provided a tax credit to people who pay in with it. Instead they just reduce AGI. What a joke. Honestly the best thing Trump did was make that no longer mandatory or face a penalty. It was a rammed through system democrats did just to pat themselves on the back. Quite literally one of t…

It sounds like you are incredibly privileged to not have "pre-existing" or chronic medical conditions. For many, the ACA saved their lives and the lives of their loved ones even if the premiums were as universally outrageous as you claim.

This. Little babies born with health issues used to be forced onto government healthcare, and parents had to reengineer thier life to qualify. Absolute savagery.

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

#668
post #540

I'm healing from PTSD, I took two years off work and then the last nine months I just finished up my PhD in mathematical physics working part time. I'm still disabled in different ways, I get triggered by groups of people so I can't socialise very easily I'm kind of slowly reintroducing interacting with society. I had an interview for a postdoc in my field last week and I'm waiting on whether I got offered a job or n…

I'm sorry to hear about your struggles with PTSD. I've experienced significant healing through EMDR therapy. I highly recommend undergoing treatment if you can find a licensed clinician or therapist. https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

Hey thanks, I tried EMDR a couple of years ago and it didn't work for me. I'm in a different place now though, could be worth trying it again

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

#669

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 index…

Do you have any writeups/examples in the public?

I am on purpose not addressing the exchange of information between people – never considered it, no vision, would just confuse me.

I'm also not so keen on indexing. I'm envisioning this more as a file system layer, where data is added to the database as it gets saved. Ideally there would be no way to access the data outside of the database (that would cause desyncs and the need to reindex stuff). We don't need no POSIX file systems ;)

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

#670
post #639

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…

Probably quite fun to have a small business / startup where you are the boss and hire a few people to solve some problem, maybe related to your previous employment but a niche they didn't cover?

This is quite literally my dream. FIRE, then scratch some niche itches of mine solving deep problems without ever worrying about profitability.
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