For this particular situation on D3 I personally (who is not your doctor) would go with vitamin D3-loaded nanoemulsion. The reason is that Vit D influences how tryptophan is converted down the 5-HTP and serotonin path or the Kynurenine path. We want higher serotonin AND specifically in the brain. The higher serotonin means better melatonin which not only increase sleep, but increase the ERα expression which we are trying to increase... in the brain.
In general: Omega-3, bcomplex with choline etc all have studies. Really it depends on the individual and what their genetic weakest issue is. Its old and boring, but eat healthy, don't eat before bed, exercise (dance!), and get good sleep always apply.
> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product
I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.
This is so needed. This was a very encouraging article.
"Being a fan is all about bringing the enthusiasm. It’s being a champion of possibility. It’s believing in someone. And it’s contagious. When you’re around someone who is super excited about something, it washes over you. It feels good. You can’t help but want to bring the enthusiasm, too."
Stands in contrast to the Hemingway quote: "Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."
It feels socially safe, easy, and destructive to be a critic.
As a straight woman, dating in Silicon Valley has been a very eye-opening and bleak experience. I have a natural "therapist" personality, so people tend to spill their guts about their deepest feelings shortly after meeting.
I do not exaggerate when I say that at least 70% of the time, I can't past the second date without men admitting to having feelings of depression, or hopelessness, or anxiety, or lack of self-worth, or just a general bitterness toward their lives and world. Or they will spend an alarming amount of the date seething about politics and how doomed they feel the world is.
Now, of course, all those emotions are a normal part of the human existence, and everyone feels them from time to time. But these men are not feeling these things "time to time." Their existence is defined by mental turmoil and acute pessimism. And, of course, women are feeling these things too. But it seems so much more acute in men in Silicon Valley.
It's extremely alarming. I've been trying to figure out what is causing this trend, and there are a few core things that I think makes Silicon Valley worse than other areas in the country for men.
1) Workaholism. So many of these men are only ever told they're worth anything at work, which leads to them investing all their time into work, which leads to severely neglected social and romantic lives, which only amplifies the problem of work being the only place they ever hear anything positive about themselves, which leads to more work. It's a really vicious cycle.
2) Hyper-competitiveness. Everyone is always comparing themselves to each other, and in a land filled with unicorns and freshly-made millionaires, it's easy to have a 300k+ salary and still feel like you're "behind" or "not living up to your full potential."
3) Start-up culture. As this article points out, it's a roller coaster of highs and lows. For those working in start ups, it leads to emotional whiplash. For those outside of start ups, it leads to enviously watching the highs and feeling intense FOMO.
4) Skewed ratio of men to women. I am stunned by how difficult it is for my male friends to get a date in this area, but there just aren't as many eligible young women as there are men. I think this leads to a feeling of despair, especially for the shy, geeky types who already struggle with dating as it is.
5) The casual hatred of men within leftist circles. At dinner the other night, when someone was complaining about a boss, one of my friend's wives just casually made the comment, "Well yeah, what do you expect, men are terrible." This was said in front of her husband and the four other men at the table. Seemingly unthinkingly. And when I corrected her and said, no, terrible people are terrible, not men, she got visibly angry, and her husband jumped in to soothe her by saying, yes, she's right, men are terrible. No one else at the table objected.
I could list off dozens more anecdotes about this sort of casual bigotry dressed up as progressive values. And I have no doubt it's part of what's wearing down men's mental health. When you're told you're terrible, and your mind is miserable, it's easy to think, "Well of course I'm miserable, I'm a terrible creature." This only amplifies the feelings of low self worth and guilt, and makes people less likely to seek help.
I have no idea how to solve any of these issues, other than being there for my male friends to talk to. But I think a good first step is to be able to talk about the issues men face openly, without being accused of misogyny or "not caring about women."
He's also a fantastic game designer. I played through Return of the Obra Dinn last year and it was one of the coolest game experiences I've had. It really doesn't hold your hand, it's just using logic and clues to piece together a mystery and put names to faces. Keep a notepad handy and it's a real fun time!
One strategy I've found helpful in my own life for addressing that hopeless drowning feeling brought on by doomscrolling or other mindless activity incentivized by The Algorithm is to actively intervene and remind myself that this is noise. All of it is ephemeral, meaningless noise. It is not important. It is not nourishing my soul, and now is the time to turn the dial to a different station. Attention is a limited resource that I am currently squandering, and I better go find something else to do. And then I do it, and just like that, the hopeless drowning feeling subsides.
I too once felt aimless and demotivated like the author. But the desire to own things and have friends, as the author put it - this is Nietzsche's will to power, and it is one of the most profound insights into the human condition expressed in modern times. This desire was ultimately what drove me to move across the world, channel my energy and curiosity into learning a productive and marketable skill and ultimately make something of myself.
Humans have evolved over millions of years to be a goal-seeking, load-bearing species not content with mere survival. Our predecessors who were cool with hunting and gathering and spending all of their waking moments trying not to die have by now been largely subjugated out of existence by nations, civilizations, and religions / ideologies expressing a moral obligation to have dominion over the earth. In a world with unprecedented surplus for the select few of us who are privileged enough to complain on the Internet about feeling lazy but not quite knowing why or what to do about it, is psychologically debilitating to focus all or most of one's attention on meaningless noise. We need more than that to achieve a life worth living. All of the world's major wisdom traditions contain this grain of truth, either expressed implicitly or explicitly. I believe that there is an evolutionary reason why these traditions have persisted for the thousands of years they've been with us; adopting them has clearly bestowed some advantage, over many generations, in adapting to one's environment - and, perhaps more importantly, molding it to one's desires.
Best wishes for the author in finding their passion and purpose in life that will propel them out of the realm of survival and into the realm of thriving.
I don't remember the original source, but in Leslie Lamport's Specifying Systems book, he quoted someone saying "Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is."
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.
While it is obviously not unrelated to the pandemic chaos, there is a deeper issue. As Nassim Taleb has often pointed out, the same things that make a system "efficient" also can often be viewed as making it fragile. "Just-in-time" means "no buffer". We have, for decades, been doing as much as possible to make all our economic systems as efficient as possible, which is to say with no extra capacity.
Thus, if it had not been the pandemic, it would eventually have been something else. Sooner or later, there is always a shock to the system. If you have made sure that every step in a long complex chain is optimized to have very little slack, the thing you have optimized for is fragility.
When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation.
> Well, root out the real causes of burnout.
I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come up with it, in fact some wise person here on HN stated it:
Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off.
You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn't matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory.
On the other hand, if you work like a dog on a feature and it gets cut at the last minute, or its success is undermined by some VP's dumb idea, it sucks. If that happens over and over, without a win, you're burned out.
The solution is to get a win. Work on something that you can succeed on, and succeed at it, and get rewarded for it. Could be a big thing, but even a small thing is good enough. Sounds easy, but not always even possible in a badly-run organization.
I've always thought that the "Myth of the Lone Genius" is a bit of a "motte-bailey" format argument, where an aggressive, undefendable stance is advertised, and then when challenged the person who is making the argument retreats back into a more believable stance. The bailey, in this case, is "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true.
I believe people that make the bailey form of the above argument want to believe that they're important, and want their contributions to be measured on the same scale that great people's accomplishments are measured on. If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".
(Passing comment from a phone, so forgive the brevity.)
The key predictions one typically calculates using quantum field theory are scattering amplitudes. Let’s consider both gravity and one of the other forces in the “weak”/perturbative limit — flat space time and force carriers as (quasi)particles Eg: photons, gluons, etc. Now let’s compare the algebraic expressions for the scattering amplitude in both cases (final answer after pages of calculations).
For gluons it turns out there is one piece due to how the gluons are moving when they collide (kinematic piece), multiplied by another piece for the charge they carry (aka color); surprisingly the two pieces have a somewhat similar form if you squint (called “color kinematics duality”). Also gluons are spin-1.
Now, gravitons don’t carry charge, but they’re spin-2. If you look at the algebraic expression for the amplitude of scattering gravitons (after a much more tedious calculation) — lo and behold — it looks like it just has kinematic-like piece multiplied twice! (and no color piece.)
This is what is commonly referred to as “double copy” (of kinematic term) or “gravity = gauge (force) squared”.
This is one of the seminal papers; it’s very short, and has very few equations (but they’re written in a very abstract form) — feel free to stare at them if you like: https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.0476
Valuable anecdata. News is defined by conflict, (literally, no conflict = not news) and this shows how headlines that express the most conflict get the most clicks.
The integrity issues come up when even though the facts reported are real, the conflict that frames them is manufactured - and this is why people reject news. They don't reject it because of fake facts, they reject it because of fake conflict. When I want the real news, I go to fringe websites, because they get the real conflict right, and if I need details and facts, I can look those up. The reason they get the real conflict right is because by definition the fringe lives in that conflict, and they are the real anti-establishment that creates a counter balance narrative, whereas a conflict produced by setting mundane events and facts against the backdrop of an ideology designed to manufacture conflict is unreadable tripe.
If I needed to sustain the dissonance of establishment narratives, I would read the NYTimes to keep up the appearances, but since my livelihood and aspirations do not depend on that, I have the freedom not to engage it. If you think you are being played and manipulated, watching these A/B tests should be enlightening.
If this article resonated with me any more strongly, I'd shatter like a wine glass.
I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I've learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all.
Reddit's never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That's enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can't compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I'm never going to be as good as that guy playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren't any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious.
It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn't used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever.
I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn't constantly surrounded by the world's best X for all possible X. I'd like to get back to that state, but it's really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately choosing to be unaware is not the same as actually being unaware. It's another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can't go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a "New Sincerity" post-post-modernism, which isn't the same.
The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don't know if I've ever tried to articulate this properly, but today's progressive liberal culture is possibly the most confining culture I've ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher.
The values it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are good values.
But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I don't tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian.
Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now. I'm straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored.
But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it's kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there's still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn't care less about liberal culture.
It feels like we're policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren't the problem in the first place.
Replying to the article I thought this would be, rather than the article that’s here:
I feel this really hard right now. I’m in a polyamorous relationship with a married woman; I live with her and her husband.
I’m trying to build a practice around writing every day. I found a hole in the functional programming literature that I’m well suited to fill. Every time I sit down to write, words are flowing effortlessly, and I’ve gotten positive feedback so far.
What I find is that engaging with day to day, normal relationship affirming behaviors (“good morning!”), going on dates, etc edge out space in my head for this other thing. I have space to think deeply about one and a half things. Frequently I feel like I need to disconnect from her emotionally to have space to think about anything else.
I haven’t ever heard anyone else describe this experience. I wonder if others experience this?I thought this article might be about it. I have a lot of symptoms of high functioning autism, though, so maybe this is just the less maladapted version of getting upset that I can’t go read train schedules.
Meditation and mindfullness are free. You really don’t need an app. What you need is a book to get started and learn: Cudalasa’s Mind Illuminated is absolutely life changing.
When it comes to mindfullness, there is a lot of bullshit out there. As an objective and critical person, I find it hard to trust anyone. If you’re in the same boat, delete all these apps and buy a copy of Cudalasa. Once you’ve internalized the method of meditation, it’s there for life.
"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, the cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand."
That's me. I was recently fired for having severe narcolepsy. (Irony: The medication that might help with this condition for the first time in my life arrives tomorrow, a few days before our health insurance runs out.) It's been surreal to be excluded from most life aspirations due to being unable to participate in the 9 to 5 that society expects. Part of why it's hard is that no one can relate to this at all. When you throw your back out and are unable to work, people understand. When you arrive at 1pm because you have no memory of waking up and turning off all three of the alarms you'd set, no one cares why. You're damaged goods.
A basic income would at least assist with searching for my next job. My wife and I are now in a situation where we either start receiving income within three months max, or completely run out of money.
I know intellectually what needs to be done: Port a webapp from an older framework to a next-gen framework, then write a detailed post about how it was done and what the benefits were. That would be enough social standing to at least get some freelancing gigs.
Trouble is, I'm completely frozen. It's not quite fear -- closer to profound loss of hope. When a medical condition excludes you from society, it's easy to let it get the better of you, or feel bitter. Those are precisely the opposite feelings that will result in income.
In that light, it's not strange that a $3,000 bill would reduce someone's performance by 40%. Even if it's not a disaster, you end up wishing that you could take your wife on that honeymoon you've talked about for four years. When it took 6 months to save up $3,000 dispite a decently high salary, you know that your future will never be free from the "money problem," and that it will permeate every aspect of your life.
So what do you do? Try to be intelligent, of course. Try to see your situation as amusing. Amusement, yes; anger, no. It's easier to deconstruct a problem when it feels like a puzzle rather than a prison.
Easy to say that. What do I do? Pull up React docs while trying not to cry.
None of my ambitions matter anymore. Life is a years-long process of trying to recover from a tailspin. I'm 28; blink a few times and I'll be 50.
A basic income might help. When the company fired me without notice, they mentioned that our health and dental insurance will expire at the end of the month. This translates into a few things: (a) an extra $350/mo of bills, which accelerates our impending bankruptcy; (b) choose to remove my wisdom teeth and get a root canal right now, this week, which will knock me out for at least two weeks when I have to perform, and will cost at least 15% of our reserves anyway, so I'm not going to do that. Maybe it will result in messed up teeth for life, but that's an abstract problem that Future Me will deal with later.
On the other hand, maybe a basic income would hurt. I don't want handouts. I want to participate in life and to add value to my pursuits, just like you. It's easy to imagine feeling like maybe this basic income should be my lot in life. At least if I know we'll hit a brick wall in 3 months and that my wife won't be able to graduate, I can sort of force myself to try to use React / etc, and to otherwise hustle.
But I miss being 13, when life was an endless intellectual playground, and that "forcing yourself to have fun learning a programming framework" was an absurd contradiction.
Why post this? I don't know. It's not a sob story, and it's not really a warning. It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this. But at least it won't seem so mysterious that a $3,000 bill can subvert you.
There is a recent study on this showing how this form can provide better results in the brain. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S305047402...
In general: Omega-3, bcomplex with choline etc all have studies. Really it depends on the individual and what their genetic weakest issue is. Its old and boring, but eat healthy, don't eat before bed, exercise (dance!), and get good sleep always apply.