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> This kind of sensational event is what social media was designed for

I agree with you! It's much harder to do viral tictoks with harmed israelis, because they built a marvelous defense system, so palestinian rockets (or terrorists) just don't get through.


I feel like that’s a bit like saying it’s fine for an adult to kick a kid. The kid was asking for it after all, even if the adult was never in any danger.


So you say that palestinians as a society are politically incapacitated like kids, and should be governed by some external authority until their society matures enough to self-govern?


I didn’t say anything like that. That’s what you heard.

In the analogy you make I think it’s more likely we need to call CPS.


> CPS

> Child protective services (CPS) is the name of an agency responsible for providing child protection

> Child

(c) wiki

Well, if you compare them to kids, doesn't it mean that they don't have the right of self-governance, as kids don't have full legal rights/responsibilities?


There should be a balance between workers bleeding dry in capitalism, and workers don't have (good) jobs because it's too much hassle with "regulations and labor protections", and is not worth the outcome.

Really, if in a (over)socialist country I have an idea to build my personal wealth, why would I give jobs to all these protected guys, if I can leave them jobless, and get €€€ using minimal team I can assemble. Ideally - being solopreneur at all.


> There should be a balance between workers bleeding dry in capitalism, and workers don't have (good) jobs because it's too much hassle with "regulations and labor protections", and is not worth the outcome.

I happen to know quite a few people from Germany. All things considered, there are good jobs and they have decent living standards.

> Really, if in a (over)socialist country

Germany? (Over)socialist? Are you high?

> I have an idea to build my personal wealth, why would I give jobs to all these protected guys, if I can leave them jobless, and get €€€ using minimal team I can assemble. Ideally - being solopreneur at all.

By all means, do it. What are you waiting for?

Fact is there is money to be made by employing these "protected guys", they are certainly not jobless.


> Germany? (Over)socialist? Are you high?

(from what I researched) To the extent that Germany wouldn't allow me to invoice foreign company as a freelancer, because it's considered false employment. The state is so nanny that wants to impose their labor protection and social security on people who visibly don't want it. In other countries, I observe there is a kind of "social contract" (at least for programmers) to allow people work through business entities, pay less taxes and get less protection, if they're competent enough to make this kinds of contracts.

> Fact is there is money to be made by employing these "protected guys", they are certainly not jobless.

They are. Portugal and Spain impose a lot of socialist regulations backed by high taxes, yet they complain about brain drain (pt) and unemployment (es). People don't want to come and open businesses to these very attractive places for relocation. Instead, cold small Estonia gets their startup boom, surprise-surprise.


> They are. Portugal and Spain

Shifting goalposts much?

Somalia probably has no worker protections (it barely has a government), and it's not a thriving job environment.

If we are to just name countries without any criteria, two can play this game.

By your measurement, nordic countries, the Netherlands and so on should be depressing nightmares with hordes of unemployable people, given their strong labor protections. And surprise, they are not.


> sane error handling?

Golang _has_ sane error handling. It just considers errors a normal and expected situation.

When you perform a http request, and the result is successful you expect the result to be assigned a variable, right? Then why would you expect non-successful outcome to be returned in a different way? Why is it different? Why do you unwind the stack? Something terrible happened? Definitely not, it's as real life as 200 OK.

For unrecoverable things golang has panics, and if you don't like the idiomatic way of handling errors, you can just throw them like exceptions.


100% agree, and Go gets oh so close

But the correct and only sane way to do this is Either<Error, Success> that you can then pass on, map over both or either of the two, flatMap to chain with other Eithers, fold into a single thing etc etc. Not endless sprinkling of

if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

everywhere (and no, those operations are not obscure, esoteric or difficult to learn or understand - they're the same for other types like Option, List etc and are trivial to learn in a day for people who aren't familiar with them)

+ not making the compiler distinguish between null and non-nully values (as eg Kotlin, Rust and Haskell does) in itself as well is inexcusable for a modern language


Btw, tried to implement Result[T] flatmaps etc, it looks uglier than err != nil

func myfunc(url string) Result[string] {

  tup := FromTuplePtr(http.Get(url))

  return FlatMap(tup, func(r http.Response) Result[string] {

    return Map(FromTuple(io.ReadAll(r.Body)), func(b []byte) string {

      return string(b)

    })

  })

}


I agree that the type system should be better. And for some reasons, golang didn't even implement proper tuple types. However, now with generics, you can actually do Result[T] with all functions you described.

> in itself as well is inexcusable for a modern language

In Go, you can assign nils only to pointers


What language typically returns the `Either<Error,Success>` you refer to here? I get (and love) the idea but have never seen it in official documentation (sure I could go off the beaten path and implement in my language of choice).

Also, did you come up with this on your own, or were you exposed to it?



not as many languages as you'd hope unfortunately, but plenty do (see eg other reply you got, there are more still including F# etc etc)

+ other languages get close, eg Kotlin has nullable types (which is a poor substitute) and Result (which is also poor because it's not a true Either)

that said lots of languages these days have libraries that do it (Arrow, Vavr and countless others)

IMO the killer simple language that Go tries and fails to be would be something like a Kotlin+Arrow with heavily reduced syntax and features, eg

no exceptions (use Either or a correct Result type)

no loops (use map, fold etc)

no nulls (use a correct Option/Maybe type)

etc etc

= in such a language, we learn that methods return things, those things will be what they say they are (guaranteed by the compiler), they will tell you what you can do with them, and if a program compiles, you can be pretty damn sure it works as intended

insert "all the languages are broken, I should create a new language" meme here...


C# gets pretty close with NRTs, pattern matching, terse record declaration and task-based async syntax, lambdas and Result libraries if you like those. Also nicely builds to self-contained binaries, both JIT and AOT.


> Why do you unwind the stack? Something terrible happened? Definitely not,

Definitely do.

In Go we just have to emulate it, badly, by manually writing code to forward the error up the stack so you can finally top-level print “error bad thing happen” or maybe some unholy stringification of wrapped errors possibly collected along the way.


Please explain how errors are fundamentally different so they require drastically different way of returning.


I still can't understand how anyone designing a language can defend self-rolled stack traces as a good thing.


You can in theory unwrap them but that seems to rarely be something people use in the real world


Knowing about South Korean work culture and years of cramming required to join it, what is the purpose of bringing kids there?

If a culture claims to be so hard-working, so smart, but fails to construct an environment where people would like to bring new people, it's absolutely normal that it is going to die out together with the carriers of the culture.


Such a good point.

For all the pride that South Korea has around its successes, how good of a society can it be, if it is an abject failure when it comes to repopulation?


I call it bullshit.

Arguments like "more progress" and "more geniuses" would make sense only if global population manages "geniuses" and "progress" efficiently. Which in fact is completely opposite. Homo sapiens brains are evolved for small population size, and unable to comprehend the modern structures involving millions of people. As a consequence, billions of already existing humans still don't have access to proper education, economy or tech scene to unlock their potential. So the more humans you bring, the more potential Einsteins will stuck in Congolese villages, that's it. Even "developed" countries, from what I observe are quite far from the ideal talent-unlocking - they still have crowded classes, non-motivated teachers and fixed curriculum. So millions will be (and already are) also stuck in "boring 9-5" "paying their student debs" even don't knowing their full potential.


The world is not awful. The world just is.

It's just humans create environment they don't understand and can't handle, and it takes them a lot of time and effort to even somehow organise it on a small piece of a land. And then it ruins, and then they construct it again, and cetera.


the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"


I mean, if you're rejecting that humans assign values to things around them, then nothing is anything.


Well, humans love too much assigning values to things around them, randomly-emotionally, and these values tell more about flaws of humans cognition, not the things itself.

Say, one of cases of judgement about about "world" is something like "world became a better place" usually feels like a person thinks that some fundamental constants has changed, and changed irreversibly. So before humans managed to enslave and kill each other but now magically stopped. Slavery no more, democracy! And then putin starts a full-scale invalion on Ukraine, it's exception. And when exception turns into rule everyone forgets about their misprediction and postrationalises the new agenda (it was obvious that it's going to happen), it looks funny.


> How would you take care of your mental well-being?

Practicing/developing own philosophy, similar by the vibes to stoicism/buddhism, so I don't get broken enough to require a mechanic to fix me.

I find it very funny that nations who brag about having "science" and "technologies", proudly dismiss religion, but yet unable to come up with anything comparable to philosophical or religious systems, not talking about 100x improvements that terabytes of "scientific knowledge" bring.


I believe it is quite an advanced field involving neuroscience and human emotions. Hard to diagnose, treat, and measure. Not enough scientific research has been done in this field, and far from coming up with any solution. I guess we normally do not pay enough attention to our mental well-being. But, I always feel managing emotions and stabilizing our feelings is a great place to start.


Well, ancients managed to find damn good heuristics without all our knowledge and science. And we entire have a country proud of their universities, you know, ivy league branding and stuff, and they can't even take over the baton, just reprinting old books.

[I mean the mental firmware to not get broken. When it is really broken, I feel often it might be hard to climb out without a dedicated help of a _psychiatrist_.]


I believe research related to mental health is lagging. While ancient therapies may have been effective in the past, we're now living in a completely different age, and coping strategies and treatments need to advance accordingly. It can be very challenging to fix things when they are truly broken. That's why starting with mental well-being is crucial for taking control of it and building resilience. Don't wait until things are truely broken.


Well, I'd argue that fundamental things changed at all. On the contrary, humans got rid of their usual stressors like death, hunger or sickness. So maintaining mental health should be _easier_.

The new things of 21th century might me discipline of dealing with unnatural abundance of pleasure/information/change/people, but simple countermeasures already pop into my head without too much thinking, like abstaining from read news or social media.

Or learning to ignore the cultural values spread by random people around. Homo sapiens are known for unconscious masochism by accepting harmful values and proudly battling them :-) I moved to Southern Europe, and I find it funny that people here are more joyful and content despite they earn less $$$ than citizens of depressed hardworking superpowers. Of course, they may have their own problems, but even on the subconscious level their facial expressions or postures perceived as noticeably relaxed.


I agree, fundamental things haven't changed much. However, cultural and social factors significantly impact our mental health. There is research available on these social factors if you Google it. The US, with its advanced economy, science, and technology, being an immigrant country, has benefited from life sciences and medical advancements. Despite this, we grapple with a society that is more complex than most. For instance, a less family-oriented culture and individuals with more mobility mean we receive less support. While support is a crucial factor in counseling treatment. This leads me to think that learning coping strategies through many single one-session counseling sessions might be more useful and practical than opting for a long-term treatment plan that delves into the past to explore correlations :)


It's not migrants who created fiscal and bureaucratic hell that disincentivizes people to open companies and employ citizens / become self-employed. It's government that was democratically elected by citizens itself.

Foreigners, on the contrary, often work remotely for other countries, so they don't steal job from Spanish citizens. It's hard to survive in Spain without Spanish, so it's strange that natives lose employment battle to people who don't know the language.


A democratic nation with powerful economy and complex social rules. Parents push kids to study hard in school. Kids learn a lot, so they pass exams, create smarphones, robots, yet unable to create an environment where people would be motivated to bring their kids and wouldn't be as stressed or suicidal. South Koreans on HN, any ideas why? ;-)

For me personally, South Korea is a great example, how entire nations of homo sapiens can be unconsciously cognitively trapped, and in how technological progress, science and ability to solve differential equations !== wellbeing.


It is my thinking that successful religions are built on at least one tenant of "have kids and teach them the religion" otherwise as social complexity grows we tend to forget the have kids point and the society falters, and this has been an issue with humans for much more than the modern age.

I'm not saying religions are right or closer to some ground truth here, but evolution does hing on the point of requiring reproduction of some type.


From my knowledge, religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents. "Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state. However, there is a problem. The way religious community organised at least empirically somehow matches human biology. E.g. small tribes, support, shared ideals. However, it turns out, modern humans have around-zero practical knowledge how to build a "modern" successful state for millions of individualists that would adequately respond to all changes/challenges. Yes, there are countries that were lucky to get a ~d20 roll~ stable democratic govt at some point. But if you look closer, even in these "developed" countries feedback loops are often extremely slow and clumsy.


> religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents

Really? Is daycare cheaper for Christians? Are Christian families (causally) less likely to have two parents working full-time? Because it seems to me that slogging your ass to church every Sunday to be told you're not Godly enough and should vote Republican just seems like Yet Another Fucking Thing that working parents have to do each week, on top of everything else. Do you have any, y'know, evidence at all, that religious parents have more of a support network around them than non-religious? (And that this difference is due to religion, not confounding factors like socioeconomics?)

> "Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state.

Another hot take, eh? Any evidence for this one either? This is an unbelievably over-simplistic take. I guarantee whatever trend you think you're seeing here is just as prevalent among the highly religious. If you want to know why individual communities are breaking down, you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws than just deciding it must be the godlessness of those heathens causing all the problems.


It sounds like you'll never step into a church for a few months to learn this, understandably so. But the answer to all you're questions is obviously yes. Churches are generally tight-knit, welcoming, and very community oriented. They are a literal support network, that will often weekly hear out any concerns of people and try to help them. They often have more kids, so they help each other with the daycare of kids. They are more likely to prioritize single income households, and will move to places more accommodating to church support networks and single income households to live that lifestyle.


I'm an atheist and am very much anti-religion in that I think it's a net bad and imaginary in the worst ways, but I do think, just like any group of like-minded people, that it does support a social network. Religion provides a common ground and shared set of beliefs. It's the same way expats find each other in countries because there's some commonality, or how you go off to school and can find "your people".

As much as I'm not a fan of religion I can admit there are some good things about it and plenty of good people who practice it.


Religious people apriori have much better chances of building support networks than non-religious, just because they have tight trust-based community based on common faith. It's not slogging your ass to church, it's form of networking. Just a reminder, it's a frequent complaint in "modern age" about loneliness, especially on HN. And these people have their social time at least once per week.

Even more - if you come to a new country, you go to the local church, and voila, you got new friends. No need in stupid shallow "hi were are you from" meetups. Btw, I just realised that while expats in Estonia complained about loneliness, my jewish and muslim friends have zero problems with it, because they had their club by default.

There they could easily ask for advice, or get a recommendation for a trusted person to solve their problem. Cm'on, one of main ideas of religion is basically a form of psychotherapy, and the second big is helping each other. And imagine if the participating families are big. You'll have bigger chances of catching something rare like 5th son of your friend becoming a mayor and using this connection to promote your business.

Also, regarding help, I know a person who used a wonderful method of sending money. Just go to a sinagogue, give money and the recipient magically gets it at the other end.

> Is daycare cheaper for Christians?

It can easily be, and not only daycare. You know, like a discount for a good person from the ingroup. Also, daycare is a pretty modern concept made by "individualists". Usually people solve it by asking other members of family to help.

> you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws

In Korea? In Japan? Here in Europe? :-)


South Korea isn't special for having bad demographics, it's just farther along the curve.

Every single industrialized country is well below replacement rate TFR. The fact that modern society has this effect on fertility is something that every affected country is going to have to address sooner or later.


I don't think there's a monotonic curve where more development leads to lower fertility. Both Sweden and New Zealand have higher HDIs than SK, but their fertility rates are higher than many countries which are considered less developed

I mean, there's definitely a correlation globally speaking, but after a certain point of development (e.g countries with HDI 0.8 and above) it looks like the correlation isn't as strong

Edit: this Wikipedia page shows what I'm referring to, see section on Contrary Findings -> J-curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

You can see on the chart, for HDIs >= 0.8 there isn't a visible trend of decrease to the level where SK is currently


Swedish fertility rate could also be driven by immigration numbers. And considering a significant fraction of Swedish immigrants don't even know the language, that's definitely going to be a skewed number.


> significantly lags the US and China as a tech power.

> US and China

Notoriously famous for their awesome work culture.

No, thank you. Another useless tech doesn't worth my mental health. Especially with the ability of working remotely and not being tied to the local market.


The US isn’t known for workers’ rights overall, but tech workers in the US have great benefits and make 2+ times as much as tech workers in the EU do.


Switzerland has great workers rights plus salaries slightly below the median (in tech), but way higher for most other professions. Overall much better distributed wealth. Here you're easily getting 120k+ for regular tech jobs in your 30ies.

How people can (still) be in favor of hustle culture and work for companies that actively prevent unions and live in societies that encourage unequalness to such a great extend is beyond my understanding.


Every single person I know from my CS program in the US got a job paying more than 120k straight out of college. By their 30s they’ll be making double that.


> great benefits

You mean health insurance or pension plans? :-)

> and make 2+ times as much as tech workers in the EU do.

Phew, what is the purpose of this 2x salary, if you don't have time or energy to use it. To raise another generation of busy burnoutees? Or to buy benefits the European takes for granted?

From what I see, Europe actually has the opposite trend for switching to the 4-day workweek, instead of working hard @ buying big houses and cars.


The purpose of a 2x salary is to be able to achieve financial independence at a much earlier age and getting the freedom to retire anywhere you want in the world.


Maybe in terms of numbers but a huge amount of people I met in Silicon Valley with great pay and benefits seemed to be depressed.


what about the gap in disposable:

- income (factoring COL, insurance, and other budget items)?

- free-time (time off, work schedule)?


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