After losing my first chunk of cash during 2000 .COM crash I became be quite contrarian. Thought real estate is way too high, thought the stock market is nuts, bitcoin is a scam. Turns out the big crash never happened and everything ket going up. Three years ago for some reason I jumped into the stock market, bought a house, bought some bitcoin. Turns out so far the gains have been life changing. If I ever get laid off,I may be able to just call it quits and retire.

I still think the whole thing doesn't make sense but it seems economic fundamentals don't work anymore. Everything is a bubble.

You went long on some fairly general assets. That's not gambling.

The problem with gamblers is (for example) making risky bets on margin and ending up losing massive amounts of money because a meme stock lost 5% of its value during a normal market fluctuation.

Same. Friends who just threw money at stuff are millionaires, and I'm... not. Hard to just put the money in and expect more back when it took so much hard work to get in the first place.

If you haven't already, now might be a good time to sell some of that bitcoin

okay I don't comment on here often, can check my post history, but absolutely would not sell your bitcoin any time soon considering we have a pro crypto president and have an approx 40% chance of a bitcoin strategic reserve within the first 100 days. terrible advice tbh.

I think the word some is doing most of the work there. There are other investments, too, you know. Diversifying means you sleep better.

(Also, Congress just showed that many Republicans won’t listen to Trump, or Musk, when they have other ideas.)

I wouldn't sell any imo. if anything his conviction should have grown. sell now for what? to buy back higher in 4 years? diversifying in assets that historically perform worse would not make me sleep better tbh esp considering the events on the horizon for btc... nation states buying, US strategic reserve potential, microstrategy issuing 10b stock proposal, etf's buying at an alarming rate. Way too much happening imo to sell at the precipice of what very well could be the end of consumer friendly pricing for btc.

If you’re right that Bitcoin will go up forever, there is no need to buy any back because when Bitcoin goes up, it becomes a larger part of your portfolio. To rebalance your portfolio (get back to the same percentage), you need to sell, and there’s never a time to buy unless it goes down again.

But going by the price history, Bitcoin is very volatile, going down as well as up. Keeping it a fixed percentage of your portfolio would result in buying when it’s lower.

(Substitute any volatile investment for Bitcoin.)

Yeah HN has been giving this advice since BTC was at 60k.

And 30k.

And 10k.

Exactly me -- except still a contrarian.. Everything just goes up and up and up.

If you make a little effort it gets easier once you hit 50s or 60s. People in their 30s and 40s are very busy with family and work. This changes once kids are gone and people near or have reached retirement.

Even if younger, keep your mind open to finding friends that are more than middle-aged.

I am sometimes jealous of religious people. They have a clear vision of the meaning of life and churches give them a social group they can join.

Us atheists don’t really have something like that.

I wouldn't say that vision is clear. Not at all. It's constant thinking about faith, life questions, shaping values, etc. It's not easier path for sure.

> They have a clear vision of the meaning of life

What you describe is probably a minority amongst folks who claim to believe in a religion.

I've been further down that rabbit hole that most, so believe me when I say there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I’d be quite interested in comparing notes with you on this, I have also been very deep down this rabbit hole. Some dark, dark things happen under the guise of religion.

Look into the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I'm a recently retired atheist and moved to a new city. My wife was brought up UU and they welcome all beliefs. We started attending services at a local fellowship a month ago and have been welcomed and are starting to make some friends there.

As someone who has looked into it, it's unfortunately far from actually being a universal option in practice. I understand that my situation isn't typical, but the commute to an actually-inclusive UU congregation (there are "conservative" ones) would be a significant burden for me, whereas I could easily walk to the closest church that routinely funds "missions" to Africa to spread the "Good News".

Skill issue.

Plenty of atheists are capable of finding both meaning in life and social groups to join.

I think that kind of misses the point. Sure, of course plenty of atheists find meaning in life and social groups to join.

Point being, in a religious environment you don't have to have skill - the meaning in life and social groups are automatic and baked in. That's not the case for atheists so it's easier to get "left behind" if you happen to be "unskilled", as you put it.

I agree about skill. It’s just easier with religious groups.

Because they have a common goal. The challenge for atheists is to find group of people with the same goal as theirs.

I think this is a great effort but I wonder if they could have done something cheaper that can be put in many places. I am not sure how useful one super shiny crossing will be.

Sometimes one giant crossing is better than several-equivalently priced smaller ones, for animal behavior or geography reasons.

iPad has reached that state. The regular iPad and the Pro make some sense but the Air is in a very awkward middle.

The Air exists so the Pro can have expensive Pro features and the (null) iPad can hit an impulse purchase price point.

While those two are pulling in opposite directions, having nothing in the middle would leave a big market gap.

Air as an idea makes sense—with pro you pay extra for more power, with Air I thought the idea was you paid more for the same functionality, but in a thinner/lighter form factor.

Is it really just between the Pro and nothing at this point? Because that’s dumb if so.

What's this obsession with words about? "Sexual assault" instead of "rape", "romance baiting" instead of "pig butchering". "unhoused" instead of "homeless". Many others.

What do we achieve by focusing on words instead of focusing on the substance of the problem?

People still use rape but there's a thing there around understanding exactly what that might mean. I've been "sexually assaulted" but not raped, legally, because of UK laws.

Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes. But I'm not arguing this case because I don't trust that's a real issue you're raising given the others.

> Interpol argues that the term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."

There you go.

You're arguing this like this is instead of, rather than alongside, targeting criminals.

How victims feel and how likely they are to report issues is important. If you called fraud "scammed an idiot" would you get as many people reporting? Pig butchering is a shockingly dehumanising term.

> Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes.

My understanding of the word homeless depends on the fact that someone has no home. Can you expand on what you mean?

adjective plural noun: the homeless; adjective: homeless (of a person) without a home, and therefore typically living on the streets.

A lot of homeless people actually don't have a home. They do not live on the streets. They live on couches at friends houses, typically for short-ish periods of time. They don't have something you'd actually call a home. They just have short term living arrangements such that they're not actually on the streets.

So those would actually describe different things. Not everyone uses them consistently either tho to make things more confusing ;)

But then would you call yourself homeless if you had friends that let you sleep at their place? That feels disingenuous, there must be a better term for that. Like imagine that situation, if someone would ask you "are you homeless", and you have a place to sleep and say yes, isn't that strange? Perhaps I need to update my definition of common usage of the term but it seemed strange to me to use homeless for someone in, admittedly not the best situation, but with somewhere to sleep outside of a homeless shelter. Thanks for explaining.

It depends on the situation; I would absolutely consider someone homeless if they don’t know where they are going to sleep tonight, or three days from now, etc and does not have a safety net. A friend lets you crash on the couch a few days then back to sleeping in your car as your only option aside from sleeping in the streets - that’s homeless for sure in my book.

I would not consider someone homeless who chooses to couch surf around friends’ pads for a while as they figure out something permanent, but has options and means, certainly not homeless

Agreed. That's why my emphasis on the word home. You can have shelter, i.e. a roof over your head but you don't have what you'd call a home but you want a home. Shelter is also a loaded word, i.e. what about the "homeless" person that has a tent and is camping out in a rail yard somewhere? Is that enough "shelter" to count?

A "digital nomad" that crashes on a different friend's couch, possibly in different countries even every month by choice is not really homeless.

Someone that can't afford / find a place other than a friend's couch or their car is homeless. Even if he's not completely shelterless. Same with a homeless person sleeping in a homeless shelter. They have shelter. But no home. This one gets more complicated in terms of the wording because some of these homeless people have been doing it for so long that they actually seem to prefer to be home and shelterless in some cases. Sometimes they don't really prefer sleeping in a church entrance during sub-zero (C) but they prefer it over the rules or company in the homeless shelter (e.g. alcohol / pet related). These are many of the "living in the streets" people my parent commenter thought were the only ones that count as homeless I suppose.

That is the use of the term technically in the UK yes. You don't have a home. You're staying somewhere or sleeping somewhere but you don't have a home.

If you're sleeping in a homeless shelter, isn't that a place you have to sleep? Are you now not homeless?

"Rough sleeper" is the term for sleeping on the streets. That helps a key distinction between people who don't have a place they can rely on and people sleeping under bridges. Both are bad outcomes but require different handling.

It's tricky, but it is important to have terms that we can use for lots of technical things.

Think about it terms of how precarious their sleeping arrangement is.

Own your place? You're golden.

Rent officially? Probably have good tenant protection laws.

Anything else is subject to circumstances which might change with short notice. If you're crashing on a friends' couch you're one disagreement or girlfriend away from being kicked out.

It gives a group of people something to do and divert discussions from being about to the actual topic to how to talk about the topic. It gives them importance and they can actually hound out people who have experience with these because they use the older unapproved terms.

Most people I know who were once called 'handicapped' did not like being called 'disabled'

That’s how it feels to me. Calling out people over incorrect words is easier than working on issues but still feels good.

In this particular case, "Interpol argues that the term [...] [deters] people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."

We can argue about whether or not that's true, but it seems to be at least not just cosmetic in intent.

I don't know about unhoused but the other two seem like genuinely useful improvements in terms of communication. I don't think using words that better communicate the idea has a negative effect on working against the thing.

George Carlin explained it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0

Was going to post this if someone else hadn’t already

As someone not immersed in US media slang, I do not know what "pig butchering" is (or at least that is not what is meant here) while I have a fairly good idea about "romance baiting".

That is probably not why Interpol wants that though.

And I agree with you about the other examples.

I thought it involved pork. Clearly these people aren't paying for a quarter cut they won't receive.

The scam, and the term to describe it, is believed to have started in China, so the phrase is not American.

I don't know about this specific example, but the concept is sometimes referred to as the "euphemism treadmill", which suggests a sort of cyclical nature to it.

Politicians in Germany now sue citizens if they call them an idiot. No joke weekly some average joe gets his house raided and searched by police because he posted online that politician X is an idiot and has to pay a hefty fine.

Ice on the cake are the 13 year olds which use the “wrong” party political hashtag and get their house raided.

Words and names are powerful — this is something that I've found over and over again as a programmer. If you can find the right name for something, then the abstractions immediately become clear.

This isn't unique to programming

It’s not new: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

Try to call something done to new born infants "mutilation " or "brutal sexual assaukt". Technically it might be correct, but not many people can stomach it.

Isn't sexual assault and rape very different?

If you kiss someone who doesn't want to be kissed then you've sexually assaulted them but you've definitely not raped them

> What's this obsession with words about?

There's a few different cases here, but the general principle is that, for many people, words carry emotional or semantic connotations, and we want to use different words to manage these connotations.

1) For the "sexual assault vs. rape" case - Some words may be more unpleasant for many people to hear. Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault," so may use the latter in situations where we prefer not to elicit a strong emotional reaction, such as in a professional or therapeutic environment.

2) For the other cases - many people find certain terms more dehumanizing than others. With the homeless example, many people feel that "homeless" has become not just a descriptive term, but a term that carries connotations such as "crazy," "disgusting," "failed," and maybe above-all, "other" - outside the realm of people we consider "us". In contrast, the term "unhoused" carries more of a connotation of a temporary state a person is in, rather than an inherent label or trait of that person.

There is certainly a treadmill phenomenon to this - in a few years, if "unhoused" catches on, and if homeless people are still dehumanized, it's likely that the word will take on a dehumanizing connotation and many will seek to replace it.

> What do we achieve by focusing on words

All that said, while I think language is important, I do agree with you that there is an excessive focus on language and an inadequate focus on actual solutions. I would say that the current economic system and power structures make solving these problems very very hard, and as a result many people focus on policing and adjusting language because it is something that they feel they can actually change.

> Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault,"

IMHO the action being described evokes an extremely strong emotion, and therefore so too should the word we use.

I think that's a valid opinion and it's probably true that it's euphemized too much.

Sexual assault has a broader connotation than rape too.

If I hear homeless I hear "home" + "no". If I hear unhoused I hear "no" + "house". To me they are the same. Also why when someone says "the X word" and I have to hear it in my head I don't get their point, for all practical results you still said it as I now have it in my mind - BTW I'm not advocating for saying the word, just don't say it at all though. Language is tough man, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker.

Your POV is valid here - that's why I tried to say "for many people," because I know not everyone would have the same reaction. I do think that a native speaker would pick up more on these connotations.

And a lunar eclipse only during full moon…. These constraints made it easier to predict eclipses in the past.

I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear. A lot of the infrastructure may also be done by AI instead of some dude writing tons of YAML code.

The infrastructure is not a 'some dude writing tons of YAML code'.

CRUD apps should already be disappearing. You should be using a framework that auto-generates the boilerplate stuff.

> I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear

How does that make any sense? How is AI, and especially GenAI, something that is by definition fallible, better in ANY way than current frameworks that allow you to write CRUD applications deterministically with basically one line of code per endpoint (if that)?

My plan is to retire in 1-2 years, take a break and then, if I feel like it, go all in on AI. Right now it's at that awkward spot where AI clearly shows potential but from my experience it's not really improving my productivity on complex tasks.