Just call people and talk to them, then you can get a read on their inflections etc, ask if it is ok to chat for five minutes. Don't just blast out IM's.

Stay away from headphones if you can or be very careful with them.

Construction industry seems to still be short everything, doors ,windows all those parts needed to build a house.

Seems doubtful this will last, given the rapidly decelerating housing market.

When is the last time you checked? Lumber tanked over a month ago.

Oh the HN crowd that is building check daily.

I personally check lumber prices daily.

What a strange sentence.

What does your construction industry do if not "construct" those things? Have they devolved to just being lego builders that glue together the work of others?

um, yes? Home building construction crews are not the ones making doors, or windows, or tubs/faucets/etc. They buy them as parts to be assembled into a whole. What did you think that the crews are pouring glass on site into windows, or firing up ceramic glazing ovens to cure the toilets and sinks?

In my country and most others, construction crews make windows and doors just like they make walls and roofs.

What a strange comment on the Hacker News, where everyone uses IDEs, debuggers, toolchains, profilers and other higher-level instruments to build products. When have you written your own hardware driver?

How many programmers do the low-level work on the "doors and windows" stuff? A tiny minority.

> Have they devolved to just being lego builders that glue together the work of others?

Uh, Lego comes literally from idea of using pre-made things to build a house. Lego was made from how construction industry worked.

Ever heard of BRICKS? Where you think Lego got the idea for it from ?

For enough money, you could certainly buy a custom house where all the wooden parts were crafted by hand... contractors have a price for everything.

The house will suck and you'll never be able to fix anything, but I'm sure you can get it.

Are you of the “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” persuasion?

Not that far, but I would need to buy an apple tree from someone and wheat seeds

DST gives you more light in the afternoon, people don't want dark at 4pm. It is a good system.

We have permanent DST in Argentina. We are in UTC-3, but we should be in UTC-4. It gives you more light in the afternoon. It's so good, that sometimes we apply DST^2 and get to UTC-2. (Note that the last time we applied DST^2 was in 2008 or 2009. But we may decide to apply it again.)

The problem is that once you are used to a permanent DST you change many of the schedules because there is plenty of light in the afternoon. Midnight is a prime TV time here! So DST^2 starts to look like a good idea.

Learn to play tennis. Take some lessons, don't worry if you are not very good. I guarantee you will meet someone, guy or girl. It is a great social activity that you can't do alone.

The tennis practice wall would care to disagree that can't be done alone. One can very much so spend months playing tennis and never once see or speak to another human being.

Edge has IE mode, you can run java applets there and all the old stuff.

Never heard IT to mean only desktop support, it is the whole thing.

Been waiting 25 years for that to happen

It is the weathly countries where people move out younger.

Great advice, learning another language gets your brain going and into social situations. He sounds lonely.