Learning about ayahuasca in 2011, randomly when at a business lunch - the day after breaking up with my girlfriend - and taking it a year later for the first time
Changed my life fundamentally
Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
161–170 of 247 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#162A handful:
1. Stumbling upon a r/diy post on reddit of some dude building a kegerator with a raspberry pi. I thought it was cool, impulse bought a raspberry pi, and fell in love with programming. I was working at a gas station as a maintenance tech before. Ended up switching careers into software engineering and greatly increasing my life satisfaction, income, etc
2. Joining twitter. I joined in late 2020, and started sharing about side projects I was building. This led to earning my first $ online, launching a startup, raising money from investors, and getting into Y Combinator. Before sharing online what I was building I was making virtually 0 traction on various different SaaS projects i was building. It really changed my life and career in a tremendous way
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#163LSD
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#164I graduated a semester late…from MIT. Had I stayed on the planned trajectory I would have graduated on time and worked in a relatively boring job at either Booz, Hewlett-Packard, or Texas Instruments making a pittance. Instead, I came across Vistaprint, which offered 50% more salary, later joined startups, and am now in my current role at Stripe. I am quite fulfilled by my work, past and present, and my income/wealth…
I have a recurring nightmare where this exact thing happens - I’m back at MIT as a second semester senior and realize I don’t have enough credits to graduate. Happy to see this was the start of a wonderful journey for you! Now, if only I could convince my subconscious brain as much…
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#165Three. 1. Saw an ad in 1980 for a Radio Shack TRS-80 for $499. Suddenly understood that computers were more real than the spinning tape reels shown in movies. Started learning BASIC at the local Radio Shack while my mom was grocery shopping next door. Got offered programming jobs at least twice during those sessions (or maybe they were child predators). I've been exchanging code for money for the 40+ years since. 2.…
What was the thing that was trying to kill you?
Hopefully a bear or mountain lion and not a person...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#166When I was a little kid, I was at a department store and saw a guy doing something with a television. Or so I thought. Me: What are you doing? He: I am programming. What's your name? Me: MG He: Check this out: 10 PRINT "MG" 20 GOTO 10 Me: Woah! I picked a book from a shelf about "Basic" and started to try figuring out how this worked. And never stopped. Have been looking at these "televisions" more than anything else…
Scene playing out ca. 2013: Store Manager: It looks like someone hacked our computer, let's call the police, they'll know what to do. FBI: Our diligent detective work has uncovered the perp is named MG. We will lock him up for 20 years for a CFAA violation. Store Manager: Isn't that kind of harsh? I've since called the tech support line who told me to turn it off and back on again, and that seems to have fixed it. Co…
More like 1983. This was me at our local Sears department store, loading up every demo BASIC computer with digital vandalism.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#167A handful: 1. Stumbling upon a r/diy post on reddit of some dude building a kegerator with a raspberry pi. I thought it was cool, impulse bought a raspberry pi, and fell in love with programming. I was working at a gas station as a maintenance tech before. Ended up switching careers into software engineering and greatly increasing my life satisfaction, income, etc 2. Joining twitter. I joined in late 2020, and starte…
How did people found out what you were building on Twitter and start following you? 0 -> 20k in a couple years is quite the achievement.
Did building in public force you to work more diligently or was it purely about getting your product to the audience of people that would use it?
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#168One of those Spock moments - it would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#169I remember a conversation with a dear friend of mine. I was studying CS at the time, he was studying Philosophy. We went into a discussion over some esoteric topics, and we got stuck on a definition of a word, so I asked him "but how do we know what exactly does [the word] mean ?", to which in response he paused, looked me in the eye, and just said: It means whatever the hell we agree it means. That sentence has been…
Yeah it’s interesting how much people unknowingly fight over semantics. > Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively How exactly do you learn this?
>How exactly do you learn this?
In some graduate programs, Getting to Yes[0] is the first book of the first semester. But isn't this book about negotiation, you might ask?[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes [1]https://gfycat.com/likableglitteringaldabratortoise-keanu-re...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
#170Realising after reading something insightful and simultaneously truly malevolent to the extent that I finally accepted that the two things could coexist without cancelling each other out if you simply adopt a philosophical perspective I found disgusting, something that I'd dedicated the better part of ten years of my life to in the naive belief that it would be adopted and used from the same philosophical principles that drew me to it to begin with was not just naive in an inconsequential, minor way, but in the instance that temporal and economic power writ large might be imbued in parties within that ecosystem who would see fit to use it for things unambiguously evil and abhorrent. The kinds of malevolent sociopaths with whom my childhood had extensively familiarised me with, pursuing much the same ends, just with several orders of magnitude larger budgets and everything that implies.
Had me thinking long and hard about if the appropriate thing to do was throw a complete 180. But after that thinking, I came to the conclusion that people like that already exist and pursue the exact same abhorrent and adversarial outcomes as this discovery led me to understand were not isolated to the realms of states and large amoral multinational corporations, and attacking nebulous means to promote specific ends will just change the means that are used for the promotion of those ends all the same. It is the ends one has to be very careful of, fully cogniscent of the fact that those pursuing the most abhorrent ends rarely come out and actually earnestly mark themselves as the monsters that they are.