Wish HN: Happy Holidays

I'm an undergrad dabbling in software development. I don't remember how I stumbled upon HN but I'm so glad I did! I used to search randomly for good articles, links, resources, tools, books, etc. And HN is a treasure trove of those.

Heck, I use HN Algolia as a search engine! Want some resources about SQL? Search for "learn SQL". Want to know about a software? Search "caddy" and know in-depth opinions.

And the discussions. Even reading the comments feel so insightful sometimes.

I can't even comprehend how the top-notch moderation is done. It just makes me go, dang, that's amazing.

People here care about simplicity, performance, minimalism. People here care about making, learning and growth. They care about privacy. They are critics. They are skeptics (in a good way). People here are experienced. It is always so surreal to me when I see a news like "Y gets N Million Series F" and the CEO of Y is just waiting in the comments like "Hey HN! x here, happy to answer any questions :)".

Obviously there are trolls, people who spread unnecessary negativity but it's again refreshing to see them downvoted to opacity: 0;

All in all, I'm really grateful for HN, the people in it and its /moderators?/. I'll continue to use HN as what it is for me. A place to seek resources, insightful content, fun tools, advice, rational discussions and constructive opinions.

Thank you, HN. Happy holidays to you and your families!

I found some pretty cool articles and discussions with it.

Music sounds important to you. How impactful is the hearing damage you speak of?

Why can't you use power tools? Are they unbearably loud to use due to the hearing damage? How long can you tolerate in-ear earplugs for (possibly with high-rated passive earmuffs over the top) - or does this exacerbate other symptoms?

The concentration issue is particularly interesting. How would you say this relates to your hearing damage? Do you experience anxiety or brain fog when near/using certain devices? (I do; it can be cripplingly annoying, and in some cases dangerous.)

Regarding your points about suicidal ideation, on the one hand it sounds to me like you're expressing passive interest in the idea similarly to how someone might uninvestedly say of something "oh that might be interesting to try one day [after I count to infinity twice]", while on the other hand it sounds like you're really pushing to try and make this happen - on its own. At least that's how I'm reading your comment - I've often wanted things to self-activate because I haven't had the activation energy to fully resolve intent to motivated execution. I've recently realized this is just another expression of depression, and may (incidentally trying to get to the bottom of this) correlate with executive function impairment.

For what it's worth, there is absolutely nothing and nobody stopping you from jumping off a bridge, or heading to a train station, or tripping over your shoelace right as a truck is going past, or finding out just what a knife will do depending on where you use it, or any number of other methods. (Those are some of the ideas I've noodled over myself for the past few years.) Nobody is holding a gun to your head and requiring you to pick a specific method, "the right method." Structurally speaking, there is no fundamentally correct way to live or die. You get to pick and choose what's correct.

If you're struggling and on the fence with the how, perhaps the insight you seek lies not in considering one outcome vs the other (where the only common element is perhaps "I want closure"), but in deeply considering (as a major project) the focal point associated with the mental mechanical dynamics of the fight itself. Why is that argument happening, both in terms of causative input and neurological steady states? Despite the obvious components of learned anxiety in your statement that you lack the ability to suicide, it also sounds to me like you're trying to reach toward understanding the fight (in spite of the impediment of depression), which is a really good thing, and IMHO represents forward progress that if anything should be pro-rated to correct for the dismissive influence of depression.

You're also correct that vanishingly few people will know of your death if you do disappear forever. The Internet doesn't auto-chronicle us humans automatically 24/7 using AI (...yet, yikes), so we still get a significant role to play in how we represent ourselves to the rest of the world. The constant engagement required to sustain this can definitely be a terminal drain (I only frequent HN, myself, and don't comment much), but IMHO how much effort I make engaging, defending, etc has no bearing on the fact that some people choose to strategically do the "right" thing in the right place at the right time and achieve disproportionate influence and power over others as a result (with "right" quoted because it means whatever will move these people forward in the moment). I agree that it definitely stinks for circumstantial cheatcodes to land in the laps of undeserving people who then keep the benefits to themselves (and then some), but that whole sphere is a zero-sum game that calls for moral bankruptcy as table stakes, and you'll never succeed at trying to fight against it. If you have friends or people you empathize with that are impacted by such people, you'll never win by trying to take the big guys on because they will always fight dirtier than you choose/want to (and the law seems to have a curious permeability to this sort of dirty fighting).

One of the things I've been thinking about recently (it's pretty basic, but something something developmental delay, so it is what it is) is the extent of the split between the world of ideas in our heads and the world of what we retrospectively realize we've accomplished in practice. The world in our heads achieves justified cohesion by modeling the "right" ways to do things (spanning everything from morality and belief systems to aesthetic preferences in design or programming to knee-jerk editor wars which typically fuel off of experience level (and not wanting to look stupid)), while the world of what we actually accomplish is what contributes toward the emergent cohesion of society. There is a very real and very cognitively-dissonant split between these two worlds, in which feral sociopaths that would have significantly contributed to "the state of the art" in WWII-era concentration and torture science, are indeed part of the ostensible "furthering" of society. Such is the architecturally broken foundation of humanity; I am currently absolutely convinced there is no solution to this save for declaring that the boundaries of my moral compass are hard-limited by the boundaries denoted by Dunbar's Number, and deciding to keep good friends.

I can't really provide a more targeted response without additional context. It would be very interesting to hear more about your story, I think!