I've been looking for a 'Grafana for personal metrics' (eg. weight, personal finance, etc.). Does anything like this exist? Ideally very simple, stripped-down metrics/observability w/ ability to input data in UI or via API.
You may want to look into https://exist.io/. It's a very indie developer duo out of Australia (IIRC). And also IIRC they were looking for a buyer on Twitter some time ago.
First, the bad news: lots of comments saying stuff like "Don't have kids to fill a perceived hole in your life". In general, the advice "Don't do ____ to fill a hole in your life" is good for frivolous things, but I don't think this applies to being a parent. Parenting is a biological and psychological life milestone. To me it's felt more like leveling up my maturity than buying or achieving something. An analogy is something like going from relying on my parents to moving out and being independent. I realize this step isn't for everyone, but am skeptical about 95% of ppl so confident they don't want to take a step their linage has done for thousands of years.
Second, the good news: my experiences (and accounts of friends as well) suggests that attachment to a child is less biological and more developed than you'd expect. When my daughter was born she felt like a stranger; I didn't know her. The more time I spend with her, the more she learns and depends on me, and the more I grow emotionally attached to her. This suggests you'd get 98% of the parenting experience through adoption vs being a biological parent. You'd miss out on stuff like "o wow her eyes look like mine", but at least in my experience, this has been less important than I would've thought. The big stuff like seeing them learn, their innocent joy, and you 'paying it forward' in the circle of life would be the same. (NOTE: these are my 2 cents as a biological parent. It'd be worth reading some adoptive parent accounts as well). Also, if adoption is not for you, I'd still recommend getting involved in helping kids in some way (education, financial, etc.); again, what are we here for if not to help the next generation?
As a stepfather of a child since he was age 3 (age 9 now), I agree whole-heartedly with your second point. I have a very deep emotional attachment to him, and I've never felt like I'm missing out on anything because he's not my biological son. Full disclaimer, I have no biological children to compare my feelings/experience with. I don't feel the comparison is necessary, just adding that in case others feel it is important.
It's especially not true for frivolous things, go for it unless it will absolutely ruin your health or finances. Why would a nice car NOT make you happy? It might not give you lifelong fulfillment on its own, but then nothing will, you always have to find new goals and work towards them as a journey.
In my case the moment they put my son in my arms for the first time I felt instantly so much love! That tiny human being was suddenly the most important thing of my life!
> Parenting is a biological and psychological life milestone
Allow me to disagree.
First: there's no evidence of any change in your body, as a male, after becoming a father.
Second: supposing such a "wireless" change would happen, getting someone pregnant and immediately disappearing from their life would yield a perceptible change even with distance and no involvement with the life of the child.
Third: I personally think there's no innate drive to parent, and only an innate drive to mate; everything else is injected by society.
There could be a great discussion about whether male parenting and reproduction comes from the bio/psycho/social drives.
For this context, I think trying to make these distinctions is a distraction. By way of common sense, reproducing & parenting has been a HUGE factor in the propagation of human life (this is so obvious it's kind of funny to write).
No I just don’t have time to write an entire epistemological defense of “reproduction and parenting is a key milestone for humans”. It should be self evident. If you don’t think so, consider what happens if untrue (hint: no more humans).
Birth of the first (and only first) child triggers what might be the largest brain rewiring in males since pubety. Women don't seem to undergo a rewiring of the same scale [1].
To me, this makes sense, given how unusual the new skillset has to be compared to pre-fatherhood life (manipulations with the newborn, deciphering needs, new attetion patterns etc.).
In the same way dropping foreign aid on a country to ‘solve’ hunger can make the problem worse, EA money could distort market forces if it became big enough. I suspect it’s very difficult to find investments that return more net good than standard businesses.
Well, the google results when I initially posted it didn't even bring up the choice I would probably use (again). Which is C++ and either a custom hand rolled platform abstraction layer, or maybe something like QT if the application were UI heavy. Which from what I can see of the uber app isn't.
That is because its very well supported on both platforms, and one of the few language ecosystems that can actually create native looking/acting applications on both.
Yes, the initial development may be a bit slower, but that is common with C++ because what the smart people are doing is usually creating an application specific "language" out of C++. Then once that core bit is done the actual development would probably outpace many of the other choices. I've done this a couple times with native development toolkits, the "customer" in one case was really questioning how much work was actually going on when 1/2 way through the contract it barely had a single "screen" in a data collection/reporting application working. But, then another few weeks went by, and literally in the space of about 2 days the application went from looking like it had just been started, to being basically feature complete. That is because the C++ engine was complete and it took ~12 hours to fill out the few 10s of thousands lines of boilerplate ui descriptions that actually formed the UI (in that case it was a custom textish/declaritive application description language, most of the c++ code was parsing it and doing layout/drawing in response. Super happy customer too, once they understood that their inhouse "IT" people could update/change the app with little more than a text editor against some fairly simple to understand rules).
And many of the functions the GP was asking about are the kinds of things one could contract out. Aka, why not just use google maps API for the routing/etc.
Frankly, given what I saw a couple years ago when I went poking around in the iphone app store, it seems just about every region taxi company had reimplemented large parts of the uber interface in their own apps. Maybe not always as slick, but the core parts were in many of them, and I doubt random regional taxi companies can afford the engineering effort uber apparently is spending on.
> there's a natural "limit" on the happiness I can enjoy at any given moment
This is roughly my experience, although, you can choose between peaks & valleys vs emotional stability. Highs are generally followed by lows and vice versa. The classic rockstar chooses to swing wildly between drugs/sex/crowds/etc. and addiction/depression/death while the buddhist munk reaches nirvana by maintaining an even keel.
Keep in mind there are other life considerations besides 'happiness' of course:
1. retrospective life satisfaction
2. responsibility
3. morality
4. procreation
5. etc.
I don't generally trust psych research, but Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis is a good read on the subject. He highlights things that do/don't marginally increase baseline happiness.
> Here are the dragons: ... Buying a house or an apartment will disproportionately affect other areas of your life
I agree with the general caution about buying a property and the baggage it comes with. Unfortunately with kids there be dragons in renting as well: having to move when getting priced out.
That's a corollary: Don't have kids. They're like shooting your life in the foot with a howitzer. Also, don't get married; the author says they got lucky, but we'll have to see the long term before you can make that conclusion. In fact, just stay away from other people. They are an emotional and financial liability.
(This is sarcasm, of course, although I suspect the author is serious about avoiding things that many people find meaningful.)
> Unfortunately with kids there be dragons in renting as well: having to move when getting priced out.
And the cost of moving with kids is much greater than moving alone or as a couple. You will need to find new schools, activities, etc. It constrains your search space and will inevitably take a toll on your time budget.
The areas with decent schools etc also tend to be more expensive. When you buy property in such an area you can at least lock in a flat rate on your rent for the next 10-20 years or so, until your kids have grown up and can leave the nest.
So it does make a lot of sense to buy when you have kids. Either way, those "risky career moves" are anyhow much less of a good idea when you need to provide for a family.
Even as a couple it can be a challenge to move because of your career — it's rare that both partners get a career bump out of a joint move.
I (author) have a kid, a dog, an apartment and a summer house I inherited. I definitely speak from experience here and am not specifically against anything in particular, except rushing into decisions.
Houses have sizes, locations and whole spectrum of varieties that can be taken into account!
Any rules of thumb for how much cash compensation a founder can expect to draw in the first ~5 years of a successful startup? The stock compensation numbers make is sound like these founders are rich but it isn't liquid and could go to zero.
Do founders need to be independently wealthy before starting a company?
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