A related idea that I'd like to see more people do. If you have 10-20 tweets on a subject, plug the holes and turn them into an essay on the real internet. My first step in writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763 was to copy a bunch of tweets into a doc.
Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.
I started POSSE microblogging. My website has an “etc.” section for tweet-like posts. It relieved the pressure to create HN-worthy posts every time. It also gives me a place to share art and links.
I think most great parents didn't feel ready, and in some sense not feeling ready is evidence of the kind of conscientiousness that makes you a great parent. I think it is a valuable service to push people who want kids but aren't sure when to have them to have them earlier than they otherwise would. You never know how difficult it will be for you until you start trying.
I’m about to become a parent, about 10 years later than I’d have liked. Main reason for that is just not meeting the right person, pandemic, money etc.
But I only feel ready now. I’m a late developer in general (aren’t all software engineers haha arf) and I honestly felt too free spirited in the past. Many friends had kids a decade or more ago, and they are looking forward to their kids leaving home so they can travel etc. But I’ve already done all that, I have nothing to devote my life to now other than work and family.
In my case at least, being ready was a real thing. It’s really about maturity and having had enough of a life myself.
Providing food, clothes, health and shelter? My parents weren't ready. I interrupted my fathers dream he was on track for, but only later learned about by doing the math in his rare moments of nostalgia after a cancer diagnosis and given a handful of years to live. My parents did a hard pivot and worked 3-5 jobs between them at any given time to make ends meet because his sense of duty to the family he wasn't ready for. I rarely saw or interacted with them, but gained valuable experience in navigating the world independently and being responsible for myself. I had good parents -- I was fed, clothed, housed and healthy enough to make it to adulthood and move out on my own after high school.
This part stuck out:
There are good reasons to wait, [...] My children have not had to live with parents who are working 15-hour days, the way we worked in our 20s, or who are financially desperate, as we might have been if we’d been paying for children on the salaries of our 20s. Our professional standing allows us to skip work for pediatric appointments or parent-teacher conferences. [...] I got a promotion [...] when it was time to buy a piano. We all sit down together for home-cooked meals most evenings and talk about things.
That must be nice, but I wouldn't know. My youngest sibling does though, their grandchildren knew that with them when they were younger too. My parents finally built up the stability that gave them time -- as I was on my way out. I have no idea who they are, nor they me, that was not our relationship -- I had that with my grandfather, but only briefly. And I would not trade that decade for anything in the world, except maybe to have had that with my parents, even if only for a few years to get to know as a child should. My youngest sibling got the great parents because they were ready to be by that time.
You get to be a great parent because you can spend time with your kids -- whether you "felt" ready or not you were, but maybe consider that's because the time you waited gave you the time to spend with them. You're looking at it in terms of maximizing years. Having more years doesn't mean anything if they can't be quality years.
the question is if this is not survivor bias - 'Those were great parents and they where not ready so' doesn't implicate that most people that are not ready will be great parents.
It also what you want to optimize for. I would prefer to have hordes of good parents that just only dozens of great one in society. We most likely can also say: "Most worst parents didn't feel ready"
> This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
I'm describing my impression of other people's experience there, not mine, (note the word "exclusively") the sort of downside I see of living an inward life of hedonism.
This essay was in part an inspiration for my (much more upbeat) essay which was on here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763, and I linked it at the end, but I thought it deserved a submission on its own.
I find your essay more downbeat. I actually disagree with it too, as it misses the fact that children aren’t really aware of their lives in the same way adults are. Life begins at 18 imo.
The graph is just to clearly convey the idea, not to give it any more connotation of rigor than the idea itself has. The idea has a long enough history and enough research behind it to be in psychology textbooks and be referenced on Wikipedia, but it seems to resonate for some people and not others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#:~:text=Propor...
I wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo...
I certainly think hijacking our short term rewards is a big part of it, but in addition, that hijacking prevents people from putting in the effort that make collective alternatives competitive.
Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.
> because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade.
It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens". I wish the web was a -bit- way more like git. It should be easier to crawl the web and serve it.
Say, you browse and get things cached and shared, but only your "local bookmarks" persist. I guess it's like pinning in IPFS.
Yes, I wish we could serve static content more like bittorent, where your uri has an associate hash, and any intermediate router or cache could be an equivalent source of truth, with the final server only needing to play a role if nothing else has it.
It is not possible right now to make hosting democratized/distributed/robust because there's no way for people to donate their own resources in a seamless way to keeping things published. In an ideal world, the internet archive seamlessly drops in to serve any content that goes down in a fashion transparent to the user.
In my experience from the couple of times I clicked an IPFS link years ago, it loaded for a long time and never actually loaded anything, failing the first "I wish we could serve static content" part.
If you make it possible for people to donate bandwidth you might just discover no one wants to.
I think that many are able to toss a almost permanently online raspberry pi in their homes and that's probably enough for sustaining a decently good distributed CAS network that shares small text files.
The wanting to is in my mind harder. How do you convince people that having the network is valuable enough? It's easy to compare it with the web backed by few feuds that offer for the most part really good performance, availability and somewhat good discovery.
There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.
> and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another
This only manipulates the children references though, never the item ID itself. So if you have the item ID of an item (submission, comment, poll, pollItem), it'll be available there as long as moderators don't remove it, which happens very seldom.
Submissions put in the second-chance pool briefly appear (sometimes "again") on the frontpage, and the conversation timestamps are reset so it appears like they were written after the second-chance submission, not before.
I suppose they want to make the comments seem "fresh" but it's a deliberate misrepresentation. You could probably even contrive a situation where it could be damaging, e.g. somebody says something before some relevant incident, but the website claims they said it afterwards.
I think the reason is much simpler than that. Resetting the timestamp lets them easily resurface things on the frontpage, because the current time - posting time delta becomes a lot smaller, so it's again ranked higher. And avoiding adding a special case, lets the rest of the codebase work exactly like it was before, basically just need to add a "set submission time to now" function and you get the rest for free.
But, I'm just guessing here based on my own refactoring experience through the years, may be a completely different reason, or even by mistake? Who knows? :)
There is some action that moderators can take that throws one of yesterday's articles back on the front page and when that happens all the comments have the same timestamp.
I just wrote a novel at 41, and am starting the process of trying to get it published. Almost everything about aging in the article hit home, but something that struck me very differently about writing, is that I'm not trying to be "recognized." I made something I think is beautiful, and I want to share it with people. Hopefully one of the benefits of aging is being less dependent on others' judgement.
Red winged blackbirds are another all time favorite of mine. It is so startling when you see their wing colors flare, and hear their strange polyphonic song. I wish I got to see them more.
Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.
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