This may sound flippant, but one real option is to just quit doing so and not start again.
Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.
(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)
Unfortunately, we've reached the point where a generation of new adults take janky technology as normal, both as consumers and producers.
Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.
So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.
Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.
> Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects
Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality. Nobody who's ever seen really fast performing software, software that didn't crash unexpectedly, software that didn't eat your battery and storage space, software that wasn't exploitable by a 14 year old in their basement, software that didn't leak personal information all over the world. No developers who have counted CPU cycles or took the time and effort to keep a for loop in a single page of memory. Neither developers nor consumers will even believe that software can be great.
>Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality.
Please tell me, when was this mythical era? Most software has sucked and been balls forever. Windows, why is my screen blue? MacOS, why do I have a bomb icon? Linux/Unix, why don't I have desktop apps and why doesn't my sound card work?
Almost all corporate/sold software is laden with too many untested features, and always has been. Fast purpose built software is uncommon as your average user wants features.
You're right about the individuals you're calling out, as well as some others, but I don't think it's fair to say "most" tech leaders.
It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.
Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc
Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.
And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
Market/fund investment for us normal folk is so passive and disempowered that it really does amount to gambling. You put some share of your hard-earned wages in and hope for the best.
It's been shown to be a mostly rewarding strategy over the last century of so, averaged out at least, and so of course it's not really a foolish bet for most folks, but it's not the only way to secure one's financial health and isn't the ideal one for everybody.
Scrappy hustlers, skilled trade workers, and (SMB-scale) entrepreneurs in particular can often see a better return by investing in themselves and in ventures in their own community, where things are not so passive. Likewise, people with modest dreams and a preference for stability often might prefer securing a paid off house, car, etc before throwing too much money into the casino -- even on good bets. And others with strong and healthy family bonds benefit most by prioritizing enrichment and opportunity for family members who can be trusted to return the favor in less flush/capable times. etc
Many young people have only really been exposed to the idea of market investment as a retirement strategy, and its a good one for many, but there are a lot of roads to staying financially healthy through late life.
> entrepreneurs in particular can often see a better return by investing in themselves and in ventures in their own community, where things are not so passive.
You don't understand the power of diversification in portfolios. Yes, there are plenty of individual ventures that will return more than an index fund. But individual ventures are fundamentally volatile. They are volatile because human beings are not machines. People burn brightly and then burn out. People push hard and then fall sick. Cultures and institutions and trust are painstakingly built, and then wiped away in an instant by ideologues.
As an individual investor, you have your labor and your savings. You cannot productively diversify your labor, but you can diversify your savings.
yes, diversification is the basis for sound investing.
yet, if you look at all people and companies that have grown extremely rich extremely quickly, there is one very common factor: they didn't take money out of the company, but reinvested every single penny. thats the way you can outgrow your competition which doesn't do the same thing. failing businesses are often those that paid too much to their owners.
> reinvested every single penny. thats the way you can outgrow your competition which doesn't do the same thing
First of all, to reinvest, you need to have some profits in the first place. Even getting to the point of having any revenue at all, you're losing 90% of entrepreneurs just to get there. Second, among those 10% of entrepreneurs who get to the point where they have any revenue (let alone profits), it's sheer hubris to think that you are unique or special in reinvesting; most entrepreneurs are not seeking to take their goose's golden eggs while they are the size of peas.
There are very, very, very few entrepreneurs who pass survivor's bias to talk about their golden eggs.
That's not being financially healthy. That's far closer to gambling than investing in a diversified portfolio is. Just because you add the potential for an extremely high return does not make a strategy financially healthy.
Plenty of businesses also fail. In fact a large chunk do.
Starting a business is one of the most risky things you can do. Much more risky then having a diversified portfolio. However the rewards can be amazing given the relatively small chance it hits jackpot.
To rip the bandage off: you got really unlucky and you're going to have a very hard time finding a worthwhile job in the industry any time soon.
Between layoffs and the economic contraction that garnered them, plus prevailing interest in exploring AI for junior-level tasks (regardless of its wisdom), there's just not going to be demand for inexperienced software engineers for a while. If you do manage to find opportunities, they're most likely going to be the marginal cast offs that were left to rely on you as a last resort for some reason, not the enriching or exciting experiences you want to have.
Only you know what your alternatives are, but you should probably just assume that good work won't be coming and focus your job hunt elsewhere. If you're really passionate about the industry, you can think of the next few years as a kind of self-administered graduate program where you keep your skills fresh and develop new ones while you attend to some other day job.
While you do so, you'll want to think about building a tangible and compelling portfolio the way any other early-career artist might, so that you can show it off when the market turns again (which it will). You might also casually monitor and apply for jobs/gigs just to test the waters here and there, but you're only wasting your own time and your own emotional reserves in trying to hold out for one.
Sorry I couldn't be more encouraging. You just got stuck with bad entry timing into an industry long beset by boom/bust cycles. We're in the bust now. You have to wait.
> there's just not going to be demand for inexperienced software engineers for a while
As I understand it, part of the layoffs is downsizing in anticipation of replacing paid staff with AI, but another part is payroll reduction by eliminating many higher-paying positions while opening up some lower-paying positions.
So I'd agree with keeping your day job while you continue to develop your skills and portfolio, and also recommend that you keep looking and applying for positions when they open up. Since you have a paying job already, you can treat it as a learning and exploration opportunity.
Thank you for taking the time to provide honest feedback. What you say makes sense; it's what I suspected but haven't fully accepted.
I do enjoy programming, so I'll continue that regardless, and in the meantime keep a casual eye out for opportunities. Thanks again -- this is valuable input.
> I am genuinely baffled as to how I could potentially escape this…
> My only exit is over employment or launching some successful business.
This reads like you've already reached the peak of your career at 28. Do you really feel that way?
That seems pretty unusual for a skilled worker, like you'd seem to be if you're able to bank 12k in savings per year already, and as most commenters on HN are.
More usually, you'd expect to be earning much more in 10 years than you do today and perhaps even a fair amount more 10 yeads later depending on what you're capabilities and opportunities turn out to be.
Do you not feel like that's in the cards for you? Why?
I work as a senior engineer in Germany, I make more than most people, but I find it frustrating that a new grad could make more than I do by virtue of living in the states for lower quality work.
My expenses are about 40% of my net income and yet owning a house or apartment in a city like Munich or Dublin and close to jobs looks infeasible unless I am married.
That of course excludes the fact that I don’t expect to live to see my 50s because of potential health concerns.
And of course, should I spend my 20s and 30s working for seemingly nothing?
That is the core problem, world is much fuller, quadruple that for any major city where most (not only) HN crowd finds good work unless remote. And unsurprisingly, almost everybody wants piece of that extremely limited pie that isn't growing.
> And of course, should I spend my 20s and 30s working for seemingly nothing?
Considering the sentence above you most probably shouldn't. Now how to get most out of such situation I have no clue since I know nothing about it, but some mode of frugal living with tons of personal time (spent ie outdoors) seems like best course. Or move to some cheap dirty tropical paradise that will cost you 500 euro per month and live with locals.
Personal 2 euro cents - maybe world changed dramatically in past 15 years in this regard but I don't think so, not Europe at least. When I was moving to Switzerland back then I had some limited savings (with rather modest mortgage elsewhere that was steadily eating that), I moved directly into Zurich (because its the biggest place and I know german good enough to pass interviews), while not having neither job already nor even a place to sleep. Literally one Saturday morning I stepped out of coach bus in Zurich bus station with big backpack and suit in envelope on my back. Adventure begins (or continues, see below).
First job - find where I will sleep tonight. Managed to find some student dormitory that was also open to outsiders during summer (lonely planet). Once there, started looking for a room to rent, found and arranged it in 4 days, it costed me 700 CHF per month, and this was central Zurich! Total monthly expenses were around 1100chf, very frugal period but I found it liberating. I walked around in forests a lot, took trains to Alps over weekends. Only once I had that place I started a job search (you need Swiss phone nr and be available for in-person interviews within a day or two), took me 2.5 months to find actually 2 good offers (this was quite recent after 2008 crash where folks were advising me against such risky moves, job market wasn't the best). Of course the uncertainty and dwindling savings + mortgage also put some pressure and uneasiness on me, worthy things in life never come without some effort and suffering.
Literally none of my peers wanted to go down this road, they had comfy jobs, but almost all wanted me to find them work in Switzerland once I had landed. LOL that's not how life (or moving to Switzerland) works. What helped me I backpacked through India for 3 months before starting all this after quitting previous job, so frugality was just continuation of already started trend. Nature is for free, so is exercise, and Swiss have tons of those.
What I want to say with all this - you have options, way more than you realize. Follow the path of your own happiness and fulfillment whatever it means for you specifically. Good luck
Remote work is the way out of this. It has the ability to free people from living near their workplaces that comes with a benefit of lower cost of living and higher quality all at the same time. However remote workers are fighting against big money that owns commercial real estate in the major city centers that will only bring profit if people spend time there.
To be happy, most people need a map to where happiness lies and a sense that they're in the right place on that map.
Insomuch as the only map most people now have points towards upper middle class consumerism, with a big house of their own, a well-stamped passport, and an enjoyable career that isn't too pressured, of course most people are going to be unhappy.
If we ever might pave a wide highway to that as a society, we're centuries away from doing so, not years. It's not a good map for current generations.
Without sacrificing the positives of secularism and liberal ideals of mutual respect and equal opportunity, we urgently need to figure out a new way to give people more reasonable maps about where they can find happiness without the consumer luxuries they'll probably not be able to have.
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
I think we need to be careful with the language like “this is what the users want” when something along the lines of “this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive behavior in users” is closer to the truth
Outside of legislation, there isn't a way to make a distinction. Corporations and most individuals are going to do whatever is legally permissible in order to maximize revenue.
And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.
As for a business model, I think that we should pay creators, either directly e.g. via Patreon, or slightly indirectly via smaller creator-led platforms like Nebula.
In the same way that compulsive gamblers "want" to feed their retirement savings into slot machines.
I think it's more fair to say that this is a behavior that is profitable to exploit if you care more about making money than what you do to your customers' or society's wellbeing.
An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.
An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.
HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.
Ideally, people posting a video link will include a short summary. HN is heavily text-based and unlike text links, you can't skim/scan and decide whether it's worth to spend 10 mins. It doesn't help that most videos are pretty information-sparse and should properly be a 2-3 min read.
Anyway, I don't mind the downvotes, but it'd be nice if people started including summaries with video links.
I disagree: I think it's a decent summary and it's convenient to be able to read it inline with the rest of the discussion without having to go fiddle with some LLM.
And I don't think everyone has an LLM just sitting around that can summarize a video from a link.
Having wasted 10 minutes of my life watching the video, it's also an accurate summary - "no, shipping has not stopped completely". I would not be happy if they'd just pasted it in without checking that.
Videos that take forever to get to the point are something I find incredibly annoying. Maybe you all have a lot more time on your hands to listen to people spend 5 minutes explaining simple charts.
With a written article I can read a bit at the beginning, skim the contents and still get an idea of what it's about and decide whether I want to read more.
Videos are much more difficult to skim or glance over and the beginning is often some boring intro or music or some dudes asking each other how they've been or something equally wasteful of my time.
I think you’re saying this jokingly but it would be an improvement. Most people don’t read the article. This is partially laziness but also has to do with consistency: I know what a Hacker News thread will look like and how it will perform whenever I open one, whereas a lot of the submissions are from sites that are borderline unusable without an adblocker. Posting the full article in the thread would be a vast improvement, but I can’t imagine it would be feasible owing to copyright issues.
You might consider using Sponsorblock. It has a highlight feature that often allows you to jump to the main point of the video as determined by user-generated submissions.
> An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.
A user shared a link. Another user provided a summary of that link. I don’t need the second user to provide his own unique take on the link.
> An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run.
You could make the same argument about throwing paywalled links into the Wayback Machine. It does not add a unique perspective to the discussion and anyone could do it themselves, but those links are almost always at the top of the thread.
Prior to the dot-com bubble itself, hype for the growing potential of the internet was modest and mostly in line with organic adoption and exploration. People at large weren't anticipating a revolution. They were just enjoying the growing areay of new products and opportunities that were appearing.
During the dot-com bubble, inasmuch as it represented a turning tide, this trickle had reached a tipping point and we witnessed a tsunami of innovative products that consumers were genuinely fascinated by. There were just too many of them for the market to sustain them all, and a correction followed, as you would expect.
This AI story is basically the opposite, much like the blockchain story. Many investors and some consumers who have living or borrowed memory of dot-com bubble or the smartphone explosion really really want another opportunity to cash in on a exponentially expanding market and/or live through a new technological revolution and are basically trying to will the next one into existence as soon as possible, independent of any organicity or practicality.
In contrast to blockchain hype, maybe it'll work here. Maybe it won't. But it's fundamentally a different scenario from the dot-com bubble either way.
There've been a _few_ of these over the last decade; _two_ attempts at blockchain stuff (an initial "use blockchains for everything" one, and a "use NFTs for everything" one a couple years after the first crashed and burned. And then of course there was 'metaverse'.
VCs just need to make sure there is enough hype by the time AI startups IPO, so that they can cash out. It's part of a bigger trend in finance, arguably caused by quantitative easing. It's why Uber could IPO, while they had never made a profit; but because of the hype, their stock price did great on day 1.
Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.
(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)