I see it as an argument to have kids earlier, which is rare outside of just "cus we did in our day". I feel there was a cut off maybe 90s someone has a baby you honour them 2000s onwards you feel sorry for them! Everyone wants freedom and pleasure because nothing lasts forever (!). So within agnostic/atheist etc. with the no kids movement it is good to have a balance and then people decide what to do. Make a decision considering the tradeoff.
I (male) was very lucky and this made me realise. Had kids lateish (30) but that is due to finding soneone to do that with took that long. Being shy etc. But now I feel in 40s I am too old to have a baby! I glad I didnt wait too long.
Or dont have kids at all which is fine and max on the freedom to do whatever life. I think I agree decide if you want kids then if so have them early as possible but under proviso of a good relationship and no major issues like drugs/alcohol/violence etc.
Out of curiosity, what kind of physical shape are you in? I’m nearing 40 and have wanted kids my entire life, but similarly, haven’t found the right partner. If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself. But I’m also in excellent physical shape and feel no physically different than I did in my 20s (other than being stronger and more coordinated now).
I have health issues so there is that. I think most 40 yo if they go to the gym on a good routine can have the energy. Add in a reasonable job (not an AI startup with a hammock in the kitchen). But 40 you are rolling the dice. 40+ you can die from things and it is not unheard of. It is quite old in a way. You can also have issues unexpectedly that depleat capacity.
Just reread your comment. Don't kill yourself!!! Help raise your niece or nephew or friends kids. You can pass on social inheritence! And you can work in a cube at Google and send half the money to kids charities.
> If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself
sperm quantity and quality decreases with age. studies exist that suggest higher risk of autism when father's age >= 45.
you're not too old, but you should probably test & freeze some good sperm before you might actually be too old by the time you find the right person. this way you won't ever feel like you're too old to have kids. then the question becomes more of "how long and in what manner will my remaining health allow me to enjoy them"
I had kids 'early' for my peer group (early 30s when most are pushing 40) and there is a noticeable difference in the amount of energy I have. It's not playing games with kids (the stereotypical keeping up with the kids at the park) it's that early years of childhood mean that you have 5+ years of bad / shorter sleep and get sick more than you probably have since you were a child.
For most applications 1 location is probably good enough.I assume HN is single location and I am a lomg way from CA but have no speed issues.
Cavaet for high scale sites and game servers. Maybe for image heavy sites too (but self hosting then adding a CDN seems like a low lock in and low cost option)
Security. I host personal sites on Linodes and other external servers. There are no inbound ports open to the world. Everything is accessed via Cloudflare Tunnels and locked down via their Zero Trust services. I find this useful and good, as I don't really want to have to develop my personal services to the point where I'd consider them hardened for public internet access.
Then I log in to Linode or whatever and open a hole up in the firewall. That's easy. But Cloudflare rarely goes down, not really something I worry about.
When you have a simple tool you have written for yourself, that you need to be reliable and accessible but also that you don't use frequently enough that it's worth the bother of running on your own server with all of that setup and ongoing maintenance.
The DX is great: simple deployment, no containers, no infra to manage. I build a lot of small weekend projects that I don't want to maintain once shipped. OpenWorkers gives you the same model when you need compliance or data residency.
It cares if your smart. Hence leetcode etc. You need to be practiced for that.
It also helps to be connected to get your CV top of the pile.
Yes most of us are commodities. But in some ways we are not. Two engineers, same creds, one knows someone who works at the company for a warm positive intro. This is not fungible.
> It cares if your smart. Hence leetcode etc. You need to be practiced for that.
It’s not to detect how smart you are. Leetcode screening is passed via memorizing patterns and masturbating for hours on sample tasks. It has nothing to do with smartness nor with real work.
Your assumption is wrong.
Leetcode is to filter in more disciplined and agreeable folks, who are ready to struggle through whatever meaningless bullshit company come up with. Its a loyalty filter mainly.
Originally it was intended to detect geniuses, but this is not relevant for 20 years now.
We are commodities. It doesn’t mean personal contacts don’t matter. Same way as you will likely buy a barrel of oil from someone you know rather than not. But there is no point in systemic markting efforts to promote your specific oil vs others of the same grade.
Yes, but leetcode shows some level of smarts. It is not something most people can do.
Like I guess 5% of the population could actually do well at it given the time, practice and motivation. Might be 75% for programmers, granted. But companies dont want people who are unskilled.
Anyway yes the oil analogy is close but it is more like too many people are selling fools oil, and your oil is real and so you vouch for it. So oil is not fungible and the vouch means alot. But vouched and proven oil as a class is fungible. Almost everyone is fungible, you can find another Steve Jobs (they did, Apple is doing well after all) or PoTUS. Maybe entertainment is the exception e.g. Taylor but even then if the job is to sell music she is fairly fungible. Other singers do that too.
Your generalizing about the fungibility of labor yields nothing. Every
successful hire is a unique mix of right place, right time, right man.
You control what you can.
That is largely true across a variety of sports. eSports like Starcraft typically peak between 18-22, and it's possible the real age is younger but minors are usually excluded from pro leagues because they can't sign contracts. Gymnastics seems to peak between age 13-16; it was enough of a problem that the FIG set an age limit of 16 so the sport wasn't dominated by prepubescent girls age 13-14 (18 for men because the events tend to be more strength-based than coordination-based). Top table tennis players usually tend to start between 4-6 [1] and win their championships around their early 20s. [2]
There's some lag between starting and being world-class simply because continued practice makes you better. Plus, you get much better at sustained focus and being able to connect disparate training experiences together as your consciousness develops in the teens.
Part of the gymnastics thing is flexibility of the young; if toddlers could be coordinated and strong enough they’d likely dominate as they can contort their bodies into positions impossible for adults.
IMO there is also muscle memory, strategy ect. Being able to process more information doesn't mean it's processed better, the contrary actually if you think about processing times
They invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses.
This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...]
> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know
Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.
So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
It wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
Online ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
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