I worked for several years as an independent contractor; when my last big project ended several months ago, I decided to take a sabbatical for the climate. So far that has meant spending more time with my kids, learning to compost, building some new raised garden beds, mending some clothes that I previously would've replaced, reading more books, and various other little things. I plan to start volunteering soon with the local tool library, and there are tons of other things we'd like to do to reduce our budget and carbon footprint, when we can get to them.
I know not everyone can afford to "just take time off" but among those laid off from a tech company and browsing HN, surely some fraction of you could afford to do the same. You will still have a career to come back to if you spend a year turning your attention and energy to the climate crisis. BUT if you're under 40 or so (I'm 37), you may find that there is not a recognizable planet to come back to if you continue to focus on your career until the retirement age we were brought up to expect.
Sounds sublime... connecting with nature, your family and your local community.
We don't really need much to have a good life.
Just wonder whether we'll be able to escape our current destructive economic and value system and move towards a more circular economic system[0] on time to keep global warming increase under 2C.
But for that our value system needs to change first... getting away from the 'more more more' value system and focusing more on what you wrote about. Would be great for example if we had a richer reuse and repair economy.
When my wife and i decided to try this, we figured we had runway to live without dramatic changes to our standard of living for 3-4 years. The initial period we agreed on for the sabbatical was 6 months and we've extended that to 1 year. Of course, we are intentionally changing our budget and standard of living along the way. Most likely I will not go four years without working, but I may spend some time exploring other work options before I hang my shingle out for software projects again.
Gotcha. I’m 27 and have quite a bit of cash/investments and also interested in taking a sabbatical to study my own stuff for a bit without the distraction of work. Good to get ideas of what other people consider comfortable to do.
better to let those who want to see the list decode it themselves, than potentially expose someone to language that could deeply upset them. It's decisions like this that help make spaces like this unwelcoming to marginalized people.
This sounds really cool, and I hope it goes well. We need to work every angle we can to address climate change, and test as many ideas as necessary to get there.
My issue with this post is the claim that you will be making the world's first carbon-neutral houses. I understand the need for strong exciting marketing language, but, surely you mean something like, first modern Western-style carbon-neutral houses.
Thanks! Yes that's absolutely true, that could've been more specific. In the modern world almost every house needs concrete for something, at a minimum for the foundations.
It would have been a perfect opportunity to rename the project, but until then, in case anyone reading this isn't aware, there's prior work for a fork under a new name, as Glimpse -- https://glimpse-editor.github.io/
I can attest that Glimpse works as expected, and you don't have to wince when a client asks what tools you used.
I'm a full-stack developer with experience helping small businesses and startups launch, streamline processes, modernize outdated code, and more. Code-wise I'm most comfortable with PHP, Python/Django, and Javascript. Recently completed projects include modernizing a medium-large Django codebase in light of the Python2 deprecation, moving transactional emailing on a Django site from Mandrill to Amazon SES, and (soon concluding) helping a web phonebanking app manage their dramatic seasonal usage surge for the 2020 US elections.
I love new challenges and puzzle-solving. Limited availability through the end of the year but wider availability starting January. Read more on my website, or email me at noah@nthall.com to talk about your project!
Many have tried. There's a simple reason that you glance at but don't directly confront in your post. The "voting rings" you outline are actually a huge constituency, thanks to the outlandish concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of these few companies (I mean FAANG - YC has a huge and unique network but I don't suspsect it's anywhere close to the same scale in dollars or current employees). No site can keep out so many skilled and knowledgeable techies and expect to keep up the level of quality that HN provides. This is one of those cases where culture flows pretty clearly from material reality - you can't have a better site until the titans are dethroned and dismembered. So, if you want a better HN, don't build an HN clone! Build political power that will target monopolies, monopsonies, and anything "too big to fail" for levelling and redistribution.
It is simply not true that many have tried. HN has certainly not tried to solve this problem. They seem to be focused on much smaller problems, like preventing handfuls of friends from upvoting a GitHub project at the same time or Viagra spam.
As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.
No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.
That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.
> As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name.
I downvoted you. If it makes you happy, know that this downvote is completely organic.
I'm just annoyed by someone suggesting that we remove one of the real advantages of HN: availability of real pseudonymity.
Edit: I also sometimes vote in the same direction as supposed voting rings and I am starting to see Dans frustration with all these accusations.
I have been here for more than 10 years and I have started to get a feeling for some of the weird voting patterns here now. It has even gone so far that I am joking that I want do go to university to hopefully do a study of group dynamics in online communities :-)
I get the impulse. But think it through. There is no real possibility that the claim I made is actually false. Of course not every Google employee upvotes Google submissions and not every upvote is from a Google employee. But the influence is clearly large enough to have a huge amount of undue influence.
And how is:
1 point by starfox9833 (Google) 22 minutes ago
not pseudoanonymous? Google has 100k employees.
HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another. It also knows the IP addresses of users, which are often coming from FAANG corporate networks (at least pre-Covid).
It might cost some amount of theoretical privacy but gain us a huge amount freedom from the dominance of a few major organizations.
You are right that it would still be pseudonymous. Some problems:
1. LinkedIn is probably easy to game to create fake accounts.
2. HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another.
One of the really great things about HN is that they've been trustworthy (AFAIK). Unlike a good number of other sites they haven't done all the things they could do.
3. The more you do to identify users the lower concentration of really high quality users one get it seems. As newspapers decided on Facebook comments the only one that would show up to comment were:
- those who didn't realize or didn't care about the privacy implications
- those who just had to anyway because they felt so strongly about the topic
I don't think it's that easy to game LinkedIn accounts. Faking the account age and number of connections is non-trivial, for example.
I don't think it would limit the high quality participation, at least not by very much, and that could be mitigated. Maybe users that do not link their accounts could still comment but not vote?
There would definitely be some trade-offs but the current wholesale domination of corporations on HN is a huge trade-off in one direction as well. It seems a very high price to pay IMHO.
I know not everyone can afford to "just take time off" but among those laid off from a tech company and browsing HN, surely some fraction of you could afford to do the same. You will still have a career to come back to if you spend a year turning your attention and energy to the climate crisis. BUT if you're under 40 or so (I'm 37), you may find that there is not a recognizable planet to come back to if you continue to focus on your career until the retirement age we were brought up to expect.