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Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#241

Post by jwoq9118 »

jedberg wrote: post #61

I don't have much to offer you, but I have some questions if you're willing to answer: 1. Do you have a live in partner and/or children? 2. Do you work remotely? I ask because I'm seeing similar sentiments more lately from friends who work remotely and live alone. Even those with active social lives still have this sense of lack of fulfillment. But I don't see it amongst peers with live in partners or children or who…

This is a tale as old as time observation, and its spot on. We’re not meant to be alone. Those who are find something else to replace human company, usually a pet, or obsessive hobby.

I know the film gets some hate, but Ouiser from Steel Magnolias is a classic example. She’s a curmudgeon, but she’s not alone. The women in that town embrace her for who she is and they do life together. Everyone needs someone.

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#243

Post by silcoon »

granshaw wrote: post #152
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37

Wow, I just wanted to say thanks a lot for posting this. I'm in a very similar boat. I was always very focused and goal-oriented in my younger days - a bit of a workaholic but generally enjoyed working hard. A number of changes since the pandemic have left me feeling very similar to you: 1. Like tons of other people, I re-evaluated my relationship with work during the pandemic. To be honest, it wasn't easy. I think a…

One question I’ve set out to answer is: what would I do if I were fired tomorrow? Understood that not everyone is in the position to switch to lower paying careers, start over, etc - but if you have some leash, what WOULD you do if you were fired tomorrow? (And I don’t mean short term like take a vacation then find another tech job - mean longer term like what kind of job will you be looking for next, or business to…

I’ve been fired recently from a full stack position and I started working on a farm. I’m not in US and I’m not rich enough to afford to stay home.

I feel that in a few months I would like to look around and see opportunities to switch my career to some tradie job like plumbing, which in many countries are paid almost as software engineers. At least it could give me a meaning and probably a bit less uncertainty than software engineer for the future

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#244

Post by DoingIsLearning »

tenpoundhammer wrote: post #31

I found in my mid thirties that my perspective on what was important and desirable shifted significantly. Which led me to become disengaged from my desire to build side projects and learn new programming languages. It was a time were ecclesiastes from the Bible resonated a lot. After a while I just found out that I wasn’t interested in nothing but I had to rediscover what was important to me and what I valued spendin…

> It was a time were ecclesiastes from the Bible resonated a lot.

As an open minded agnostic who has not read the Bible or the Tanakh I am curious, what about the Ecclesiastes in particular resonated with you?

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#245

Post by docmars »

brabel wrote: post #235
kirso wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more like absurdism > the belief that human beings exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe.

Would be interesting to hear a convincing argument against that.

I think the fact that many people end up finding true, fulfilling purpose; and that miracles and seemingly unimaginable, orchestrated coincidences happen regularly, to our surprise, is well enough of an argument probably.

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#246

Post by granshaw »

silcoon wrote: post #243
granshaw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question I’ve set out to answer is: what would I do if I were fired tomorrow? Understood that not everyone is in the position to switch to lower paying careers, start over, etc - but if you have some leash, what WOULD you do if you were fired tomorrow? (And I don’t mean short term like take a vacation then find another tech job - mean longer term like what kind of job will you be looking for next, or business to…

I’ve been fired recently from a full stack position and I started working on a farm. I’m not in US and I’m not rich enough to afford to stay home. I feel that in a few months I would like to look around and see opportunities to switch my career to some tradie job like plumbing, which in many countries are paid almost as software engineers. At least it could give me a meaning and probably a bit less uncertainty than s…

Even in the US you can quickly get to sw eng level after a few years in the trades, which are booming right now

And bonus, it’s a direct step from there to starting your own business in that trade then making way more

Of course you could start a software agency too but the competition is way more cutthroat

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#247

Post by recov »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #244
tenpoundhammer wrote: post #31

I found in my mid thirties that my perspective on what was important and desirable shifted significantly. Which led me to become disengaged from my desire to build side projects and learn new programming languages. It was a time were ecclesiastes from the Bible resonated a lot. After a while I just found out that I wasn’t interested in nothing but I had to rediscover what was important to me and what I valued spendin…

> It was a time were ecclesiastes from the Bible resonated a lot. As an open minded agnostic who has not read the Bible or the Tanakh I am curious, what about the Ecclesiastes in particular resonated with you?

Not OP, but it’s very unique compared to the other books. It reads more like a philosophy-type book.

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#248

Post by webworker »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #131
j4yav wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we are surrounded by people not doing that, and not even through any fault of their own for the most part. They are wired into an endless machine that trades dopamine hits for their money. Children are wired in before they even have a chance to resist.

The Extremely Online crowd’s influence is waning. Twitter is widely mocked as a cesspool of conversation. Facebook is seen as antiquated. Instagram and TikTok are the current darlings but they seem to have less of an iron grip than the OG social networks. The future is probably not another winner-take-all network. We’ve tried enough of those. The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them b…

This is just a side note, but my Instagram feed has become basically entirely irrelevant. It's just reel after reel from people promoting themselves or some product. The network feels increasingly like a rapid-paced HSN/home shopping network or similar.

Do I look at it daily? Yes, I do. But I'd say that 95% of the content I see on it is junk, very few of my peers are posting their lives on there.

As for blue-line Facebook, it's so slow it's borderline unusable. I'm not sure what happened (ReactJS maybe?), but the performance is a fraction of what it was ten years ago.

> The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them based on affiliations, much like web forums.

Yeah it's like everyone got drunk on connection and is slowly rediscovering peace in disconnecting. I'd wager you're right about this.

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#249

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ponector wrote: post #233
bakugo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. The big turning point was the release of the iPhone, a device that allowed people who didn't know what a computer was to access the internet.

Why iphone? We had internet on mobile phones before that point. But I agree with idea that internet became dumber with more people in.

> Why iphone? We had internet on mobile phones before that point.

Certainly not in any way that mattered, and I say this as someone who spent the middle part of my career specifically on mobile.

I mean, sure, there was stuff like WAP, and some other niche phones that could (very, very clunkily) display full HTML. But the launch of the iPhone is what first brought the mobile Internet to the masses (and pretty much all smartphones after the iPhone aped the basic design), and most importantly, was the beginning of the change where websites started even giving a shit about mobile clients ("Mobile first" design and all that).

Re: Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

#250

Post by johnnyanmac »

bradley13 wrote: post #110

Sometime in my late 40s I got really tired of learning the "next great thing" only to realize that some young developers had reinvented the wheel. Again. Since then, I have learned new things, but not because they were "relevant" or "important", bit just because they were fun. Python is a crappy language, and always has been. It's just a happy accident that the ML folks glommed in to it. Most frameworks suck, serious…

>Python is a crappy language, and always has been. It's just a happy accident that the ML folks glommed in to it.

Is it? I can't imagine making any large scale code with it, but the purposes of being a nifty and intuitively designed scripting front-end seems to work. A lot of the research industry still uses Matlab, so I shouldn't be too surprised Python popped up right behind it.

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