I don’t think anything will help the author as much as giving a bunch of money away. I grew up in a community where I met good number of very rich people with inherited wealth and every one of them is depressed or has some other issue—hypochondria, feelings of inadequacy, or some strange striving for significance through conspicuous consumption which is, of course, ultimately unfulfilling, etc. The root cause in all these cases, in my view, is the money. Just give it away and face the fear of engaging with the world again.
Thanks! On mobile, I just open the page in the browser. There's a Safari extension that works on mobile for iOS that enables you to save links [0]. I haven't bothered to get the Chrome extension to work on mobile yet.
The late Derek Parfit explores numerous answers to these questions in his paper “Why Anything? Why This?”[1]. It’s hard to give a quick summary of the paper, but basically a lot of different views are considered—theism, atheism, brute fact view, etc.—and in the end Parfit seems to suggest that the existence of the universe would be somehow non-coincidental if one appeals to simplicity in ruling out or deciding between competing explanations.
I believe I can answer the question 'Why Anything'.
See my other post in thread outlining my 'Actualization Theory'. I think there's a 'ground state' of 'possible worlds' that must exist by virtue of logical necessity and some of these get 'Actualized' (become 'actual worlds') over time via the emergence of complexity (including minds and consciousness).
What I'd say is that "existence" is not binary, but rather a matter of degree, and reality is 'still under construction': the ultimate ends of the universe are the explanation as to why this universe: it's a teleological answer. The universe has to be such as allow for the existence of observers and is fine-tuned for life (because mind contributes to the ongoing 'actualization' of reality).
I used to think the same. I too find my job to be easy and sometimes feel like we have this secret in the software industry that our work really isn't all that difficult these days, with so many hard problems having already been solved. I say this as a senior SDE in big tech.
But, after watching a close friend, who is brilliant—she had gone to a top 30 college undergrad and had top SAT scores—go to a coding bootcamp (the same one I went to) and fail to switch careers I started to think differently. For some reason, I find the work easy and interesting, but many others do not.
I do agree that many more people are capable of becoming developers than choose to do so. But this fact may not be as interesting as it sounds. Many people just don't like coding. Many just don't want to spend their days writing code, even if it pays well.
I don't mean to downplay irrational reasons why people choose not to pursue software. The industry still has a lot of negative stereotypes about what the work is actually like that prevent people from giving it a try, but, more and more, I've noticed that, even among people who know such stereotypes are false, many just don't want to do the job, even if they could.
I just find it hard to believe that the typical office worker likes their job enough to do that, but would find software development at ~double their salary not worth it. People don't want to spend their days in Excel either, but millions do.
Hi HN, I built yagss because I wanted to build a couple simple websites that are mostly just markdown, html, and css. I thought there would be a tool I could use that would make this easy but I couldn't find one that checked off everything I was looking for, so I threw together yagss over the last couple weeks.
I know, I know—there are so many static site generators. Still, I just wasn't satisfied with the available options. None seemed to support cache-busting and minification without a lot of setup; and many seemed to have significant requirements for building themes, many of which didn't make sense for my use-cases.
Yagss uses Jinja style templating, has a built-in cache-busting mechanism, minifies output by default, and has a few other features that aim to make it easy to throw together a simple website without having to figure out too much config.
I hope that yagss might be useful to a couple other people out there with similar requirements for their projects.
