darkengine

The exact example you mentioned (a person's weight being taboo) was my first "culture shock" when learning Japanese. My mind was opened to the multitude of prejudices carried just by speaking English many times after that.

At one point I kept a Twitter account where I tweeted random thoughts about the world only in Japanese. Even though it hardly had any followers, there was something really freeing about this. It forced me to choose my words precisely (lacking a deep abstract vocabulary, it required careful perusal of the Japanese dictionary), and I also didn't feel subject to the cultural burdens of English (as for the burdens of Japanese, I wasn't yet aware of what they were). I definitely recommend to language learners keeping a little diary in their second language, once they get to a point where they are able to.

I get where you're coming from, but this website is called Hacker News. Getting around limits is a primary part of the tradition.

Japan's expressways are privatized and tolled per-kilometer. They are competing with long-distance train lines, so the toll is in the same ballpark as a train ticket (about 13000 yen or $110 from Tokyo to Osaka).

The privatization of the expressways was pretty much enabled by the viability of the rail networks, which are also mostly privatized, mostly profitable, and extremely well-built.

I'm the furthest thing from a lawyer, but "knowingly and intentionally" sounds to my lay self like it's a test of mens rea. If I were operating a Tor node in the EU, I would probably assume until stated otherwise that operating a Tor node remained legal, as long as I wasn't operating that node with the intention of circumventing the ban on RT.

Being able to send an SMS to a US phone number does not guarantee the ability to send an SMS to, eg, a Chinese phone number. SMS isn't even widely used in a lot of locales outside North America. Email works the same everywhere.

Peopleware is astonishingly relevant and short enough to finish reading over a weekend. Definitely recommend it to anyone starting a career in tech. Then give it a second glance 5-10 years in and see how many more workplace anti-patterns you recognize from your experience...

I have to agree, I have a lot of respect for McKenzie but this advice seems unwise. I've landed four jobs (including my longest-lasting gig to date) by sending in resumes to job listings without knowing anyone internally.

Is the code or any of the models available to the public? I'd love to mess with this on a local GPU cluster.

Not offended at all. I do see some Meditations showing through here. There is a lot of wisdom to be found in that work, and plenty of parallels to be drawn to the modern world -- Aurelius was, after all, dealing with the Antonine Plague just before dawn in the decline of the Roman Empire.

My biggest issue with Stoicism is that it is, at its best, basically therapy. Most of the advice in Meditations revolves around putting things into various perspectives that make a challenging situation not feel so bad. This can be quite valuable! However I think there's only so much therapy a person can do before they want to start actively changing their situation. I think the essay wants to go beyond Stoicism, to illustrate a radical path one can take to hopefully alter the circumstance of their existence positively.

I have absolutely no qualms with anyone who takes the "boring" path to provide for themselves or their family (to say otherwise would make me a hypocrite). However I think we tend to vastly overestimate what our needs are. The average yearly median in the US in 2019 was $35,977 according to the Census. This is the median, so 50% of the population lives on less than that! Probably most of the people at that wage want to make more (don't we all?) but I think the author is making the case for giving up on the luxury of tech pay in exchange for finding some actual purpose in our lives. I don't think that's disrespectful, it's just another option.

I know it's bad form to move so quickly into meta-discussion on here, but I feel a lot of the comments in the thread right now are endemic of a certain closed-mindedness that has, to me, come to define in part the Hacker News zeitgeist, which stands in something of a contrast to the site's supposed founding principle of intellectual curiosity.

There is plenty of prior art in Western (and other traditions of) philosophy in the spirit of this essay. Nietzsche and Bataille talked about work in a similar way. Cioran pretty explicitly embraced failure (or the risk of failure) as virtue, as this work does. This essay seems to be saying something like: take a big risk, quite possibly fail, live your principles even if it means being an "outcast", commit to it, and who cares what other people think, because in doing so you will find your people. The response in here seems to be "look at this guy taking big risks and failing, what an outcast." Of course, that is surely the point.

I have, as I'm sure many on here have, found success in grinding away at boring problems, suppressing any kind of "call of God" or desire to do something larger, so we could build a nest egg and stable future for ourselves with MAGMA money. This essay is sort of a direct assault on the aesthetics of that approach. As for me, I have grown quite tired of it, so this piece does resonate with me.

Satellite phone subscriptions aren't cheap, but chucking a Baofeng in the car pre-programmed with some repeaters along your route (CHIRP can do this) is free.

I definitely think you are on to something. However, while I don't know about China, in Japan I do know that premarital sex is not stigmatized and even first-date sex is not unheard of. It's true that marriage is seen as a benefit to women in Japanese society (women face severe career barriers in Japan), however I am hesitant to paint it in terms of "women date/provide sex just so they can get married," given not only their attendance at matching events, but also the prevalence of host clubs, yumejoshi, and other symbols of female sexuality that don't seem to be as common in the West. Women don't get anything out of that type of thing other than fun.

The student dating event I described was among university students, so 18-22 age range. Japanese goukon are usually among the working crowd, but they're not exclusively for >30.

If women in east Asia actively seek out partners because they feel pressured to get married, could it also be said that men in the West actively seek out partners because being a single man is seen as loserish or otherwise low-status? I'd buy this being a part of it. I also don't want to discount more intrinsic motivations too. Most people have a sex drive regardless of any obligations felt from society -- that is an undoubtedly biological component.