I've been thinking a lot about this recently and it's led to a few personal realizations about my identity of being a "night-owl". I also greatly value night-time, and it took me a while to realize why.
If I had to to try to summarize the core, it would be that I've been conditioned through school/society/work over decades that the morning is for fulfilling responsibilities to others. Only when school/work/chores are done, could I exercise any autonomy to do whatever I wanted (seeing friends/playing videogames/programming/night-life/etc..). Naturally, I ended up with at _least_ a moderate pavlovian response to the end of the workday.
The one thing I absolutely couldn't shake was that by the end of my workday, my "fulfilling responsibilities" energy felt completely drained -- leaving me in a cycle of "wake up, immediately go to work, finish work exhausted, veg out on whatever interest my brain has until very late and go to sleep anywhere from 12AM-2AM" with little time to maintain _my_ life up to the standards I set for myself.
I also interpreted threads like this one in the way you do:
> Should I really give that up so I can be more productive at my day job?
No, absolutely not unless that is a personal goal of yours! Maybe this isn't true for you or others, but I _do_ feel recharged in the morning. In a very general sense, there is somewhat of a clean slate mentally in the morning that my wife and I call the "good brain". Anxieties that I fell to sleep with are often resolved, pessimism might be reframed into cautious optimism, that tricky programming (or interpersonal!) problem has had some fog clear out of the way, etc...
This led me to realize that my sleep schedule _was already_ optimized for my employer's benefit. Get out of bed, and take that fresh "good brain" to work and drain it. The way out of this for me was to slowly transition into earlier mornings to get a few hours of orientation in the morning where I can use my fresh energy to do something valuable _for me_ instead of the company I am working for.
Nowadays I'm up at 4-5AM without an alarm clock which leaves me 2-4 hours to get ready and do the things I feel I need to do. The head-start feels really nice.
I feel similarly and agree about the responses. I typically avoid political arguments or heavily opinionated conversations. Maybe it's because I'm still young (I'll be 30 in a couple years) but I don't think this makes me an unenjoyable person to be around.
I like having _good_ conversations, and can still have them about controversial or opinionated subjects. If I don't know enough about a topic to offer my opinion I like to ask questions that will offer some insight as to why the person feels so strongly. Usually (not always) when someone feels very strongly about something, there is some kernel of truth somewhere that will at least be interesting. It's fun to at least figure out _why_ people think they way they do.
I used to have a bad habit of being a devil's advocate. I'm sure it was annoying when I was even younger, but I've found that faking (exploring) an opinion can help give the conversation some depth. Nowadays I do that less, but can get away with it if I preface it nicely enough.
I have a hard time agreeing with this statement. I don't doubt that there have been some unnecessary charges against parents, but I don't believe that there are any strongly enforced laws regarding this. There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived. Whether they are walking to school or walking around and playing with friends.
There was a case in Maryland about this a few years ago that blew up into a big deal [1]
> Back in December, Rafi and Dvora made national headlines when police picked them up as they walked home from a local park. The children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, subscribe to the philosophy of “free-range” parenting, which holds that children develop self-reliance by exploring their neighborhoods or riding public transportation on their own, if their parents judge them ready. [...] After the first incident, Montgomery County Child Protective Services investigated and found the senior Meitivs responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect.”
> A few states have laws stipulating the minimum age when a child can be left home alone. In Illinois it is 14, in Maryland, eight, and in Oregon, 10. Maryland’s law further stipulates that a young child left in the care of a person under 13 is “unattended.” Many more states offer home-alone guidelines, which vary as widely as the laws do (age six in Kansas, age 12 in Mississippi). [...] In most cases, whether such home-alone rules extend to outdoor spaces is something lawyers could argue either way.
"Unsubstantiated neglect" seems to mean here "we don't have enough information to come to a conclusion, further investigation is required."
I would also add that CPS investigations are holistic, and look at the totality of the children's care. It is possible for them to investigate something innocuous but discover other problems.
Agreed, I think the relevance of the example is that in some parts of America, unsupervised children are to be investigated, not left to their own devices as unsuspicious.
Parent of my original comment states "There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived," and that's something that's changing in America as families don't want to deal with the possible legal consequences that may arise.
But like, I can send 6 year old to store and I am 100% sure there will be no investigation. Neither holistic nor non-holistic. Just me and no problem at all. No question about anything. No stress no meetings no questions no knocking on the door when I just want to chill and watch TV.
Parents are routinely investigated or get police contact because of this. Of course, being America, it varies a lot from place to place (you probably won't have a problem if you're in an extremely rural place and your kids are playing around in the 40 acres that is your backyard, but in a conservative suburban subdivision you certainly can have CPS investigate just for letting your kids play in your back yard).
As for "always", things were definitely nothing like this when I grew up in the 80s. This isn't the same country I grew up in.
The article you cited says: "The police officer left with a curt nod and without filing a report." And "agree[d] that this was a little ridiculous." It was officially marked a "non-event".
The whole point of the story is that it's not illegal. An inappropriately nosy neighbor caused a stir, and that sucks. But there's no reason to escalate and downward spiral the situation by countering with factually incorrect claims.
It's a record of a "non-event." It's precedent of an accusation against the mother being illegitimate, not a black mark against her. Though I'm sure she obviously wishes the incident had never happened.
Either way, though, it's still not in support of calling it "illegal" to have your kids playing outside unsupervised.
I agree with you that this isn't the same country you grew up in. I'm only a decade behind you, and the country is certainly not the same country that I grew up in either!
The common nostalgic "this isn't the same country I grew up in" topic just gets brought up all of the time, I'm guessing because it garners a lot of clicks from us who miss our naive childhoods but I just don't see it being as illegal as you do.
I can google around for all sorts of "florida man" stories. Just because I can find some very weird and newsworthy stories, doesn't mean that everything and everywhere is like that. I can probably live in Florida and have a normal life, and raise my children however I would like.
I'm curious why you're inherently unlikable. Are you are rude to people in real life? Does talking to people online allow you to filter what you say (therefore you can catch yourself before you say or do something off-putting)?
I understand that you are not fans of Facebook. But couldn't this be a good opportunity to show Facebook users that there is an alternative out there? I'm just not sure that restricting users who primarily use Facebook oauth does any good, to me it feels like a wasted opportunity!
I think the only reason to include FB OAuth is if it allowed such users to integrate the service with FB Events (which, AFAIK, isn't possible with their current API).
I'd say it's a given that FB users also use Google, and would be just as likely to use either service's OAuth.
I think that's a safe assumption. Anecdotally though, I prefer to stick with one service and if I was offered options that didn't include my primary choice I might be reluctant to sign up. I just don't think that intentionally walling out a group of potential users is a great idea if you're trying to expand your audience.
I tried to quickly find some numbers on distribution between them. Although I didn't find anything concrete, it seems to be Facebook > Google > LinkedIn. I would actually love to know more about this. Maybe someone with more experience has some more data?
A short PIN seems nice for personal use (maybe on a self-hosted service) but wouldn't a short PIN allow people to potentially guess random PINs and download files that they shouldn't have access to?
The hope was for the time limit to help improve those odds, but, yes. It was also not really intended for anything truly sensitive.
The motivating case was when you're in physical proximity to the destination device, but don't have any account linkage between the two (not even messaging/email/social accounts that are connected). The original idea came from university computer labs: transferring homework between the lab computer and a personal one was a pain. I had to sign into dropbox in the browser (and 2FA), or attach it to an email, or carry around a flash drive (which wouldn't work on phones), or whatnot. Just to move the file three feet. A glanceable code with no sign-in bridged that gap.
Other use-cases include people you don't know very well (and therefore don't have an email, phone number, etc.). We demonstrated the prototype to a crowd by uploading a file with the code visible on the projector, and suddenly everyone in the crowd had the file. That was pretty cool.
I appreciate your diligence, but I'm having a real tough time following any argument you are making. I feel like you are receiving downvotes because you come off as sounding secure in your perspective but your arguments appear rather aimless.
You're right— I wasn't really building up to an argument. I criticized my parent post and then essentially made an assertion that the ‘#learntocode’ meme is essentially bad faith, and gestured at what seems to me to be the obvious motivation for that.
Part of the reason is that I haven't done a comprehensive historical investigation of the meme. What I have done is actually read the handful of articles that I've seen used to support it (here and elsewhere), and examined who have been involved in propagating it, and drawn a conclusion that I think is pretty obvious if you know the terrain.
Like a lot of HN comments, it was something that I hastily typed at work in between other tasks. I'll think about returning to the subject for a more thorough examination if I have time. :)
I agree with the GP in that the average at home chef doesn't need anything more expensive than a $45 Victorinox 8" chef knife. With moderate to proper care, you can keep a cheaper knife very sharp.
While you may be statistically correct, anecdotally my family has hurt themselves way more often with sharp knives than we have with dull knives. It's probably due to being used to a dull knife before switching to a sharp one, but I still can't stand by that adage from our history of personal use at home!
I always find this very interesting. You feel strongly enough about your point that you need to say it (albeit using a throwaway account). My reaction to your point as well as some comments above about an influx of immigration is that I think it is worth discussing. Instead of discussing it though, you make a quick remark that intends to blame wage stagnation solely on the enfranchisement of women when the issue is very likely more complex and can perhaps can be resolved without alienating and stripping the rights and agency of 50% of the population.
But the quick remark and the way you phrased it makes it seem like you just have something against women in the workplace, I'm guessing you feel threatened in some way. I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that you think the abolition of slavery also affected wages similarly.
If I had to to try to summarize the core, it would be that I've been conditioned through school/society/work over decades that the morning is for fulfilling responsibilities to others. Only when school/work/chores are done, could I exercise any autonomy to do whatever I wanted (seeing friends/playing videogames/programming/night-life/etc..). Naturally, I ended up with at _least_ a moderate pavlovian response to the end of the workday.
The one thing I absolutely couldn't shake was that by the end of my workday, my "fulfilling responsibilities" energy felt completely drained -- leaving me in a cycle of "wake up, immediately go to work, finish work exhausted, veg out on whatever interest my brain has until very late and go to sleep anywhere from 12AM-2AM" with little time to maintain _my_ life up to the standards I set for myself.
I also interpreted threads like this one in the way you do:
> Should I really give that up so I can be more productive at my day job?
No, absolutely not unless that is a personal goal of yours! Maybe this isn't true for you or others, but I _do_ feel recharged in the morning. In a very general sense, there is somewhat of a clean slate mentally in the morning that my wife and I call the "good brain". Anxieties that I fell to sleep with are often resolved, pessimism might be reframed into cautious optimism, that tricky programming (or interpersonal!) problem has had some fog clear out of the way, etc...
This led me to realize that my sleep schedule _was already_ optimized for my employer's benefit. Get out of bed, and take that fresh "good brain" to work and drain it. The way out of this for me was to slowly transition into earlier mornings to get a few hours of orientation in the morning where I can use my fresh energy to do something valuable _for me_ instead of the company I am working for.
Nowadays I'm up at 4-5AM without an alarm clock which leaves me 2-4 hours to get ready and do the things I feel I need to do. The head-start feels really nice.