5 ms·

> I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid. It's funny and beaut

by Panino 7y ago

> I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid. It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life. It seems there's a lot of interest in gardening / food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it's totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and apply that knowledge whereas many others clearly don't. Just like a person who doesn't understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won't first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results. As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they're back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!

tvanantwerp 7y ago
Moments of whimsy are some of the most important. It was a moment of whimsy that led to me studying abroad in college, and another moment of whimsy that led me to meet my wife while I was there. Couldn't have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than "yeah, I guess I'll give it a go" that shaped my entire life. And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  I ultimately owe my software engineering career to wasting time posting on a phpBB for a webcomic.
- mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
  Indeed. For me that moment was a single split second where I decided to email my would-be wife. I almost didn’t, but decided to anyway. Of course, I have no idea how life may have played out had I not made that decision but here I am now, some thousands of miles away from my home country, from country I grew up in and in a new place I call home with a little kiddo that makes every day worth living. Funny how a single moment decided all of this.
- xmprt 7y ago
  Moments of whimsy with a bit of perseverance. Without the second part, you're just a wildcard.
  - samirm 7y ago
    Maybe that's the point. Wildcards sometimes succeed just like that.
- munificent 7y ago
  Fredkin's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox
- Retra 7y ago
  Isn't that just confirmation bias though? If you hadn't made those decisions you just as likely could have met someone else some other way, married them and been just as happy or successful.
  - Scarblac 7y ago
    Yes, but it contrasts nicely with those "where do you see yourself in five years" interview questions. Life doesn't usually work like that.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Well, I met my wife on a train, in 2009. I was supposed to be on a plane, and she lost the previous train, and jumped in a random car in the train I was in, and there was me. Go figure :)
- piccolbo 7y ago
  Check survivorship bias. The name refers to deadly scenarios, but what is fundamental to it is a bias in reporting that depends on the outcome of interest. The concept was first hammered out observing that warplanes never got hit in the engines -- well, the ones that made it back at least. Some people thought the areas with the most damage should be protected. Wald thought otherwise and it's him who is remembered to this day. "Moments of whimsy" are like anti-aircraft ammo. They hit everywhere, randomly. But we only report those that are associated with a life change.
hopler 7y ago
It wasn't long ago when the knowledge that food is made of plants that grow on dirt was common knowledge, not a life hack. Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework.
- cosmie 7y ago
  > Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework. They still do, depending on where you live. My daughter brought home a sunflower seed from a field trip last spring. By the end of summer we had a 7ft tall sunflower growing next to our deck. This year we have several more already sprouting in that area. It also had a side effect of really enhancing the plot of pretty terrible clay soil we plucked it in. Lots of herbs we attempted (and failed) to grow last year are already starting to flourish this year in that spot.
munificent 7y ago
> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life. I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago. It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time. Life is weird, man. Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.
- rak00n 7y ago
  How did a bitchy comment lead to all that?
  - munificent 7y ago
    I was working at EA at the time. I got into the game industry because I loved making games. But I wasn't on a game team at work (which was good, because it meant I had a sane work schedule). And EA's employment contract basically forbids you from doing hobby game stuff in your free time since they would own the results. So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that. Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you." Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no. I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.) Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one. I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun. However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join. That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast. But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
jedberg 7y ago
> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life. My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided "you know what, it's on the other side of the country but I'll just sign up and figure it out". Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that's how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gitgud 7y ago
  Wow was that when Reddit was starting out, or more recently?
  - trevorcreech 7y ago
    jedberg was the first employee at Reddit
  - chasontherobot 7y ago
    jedberg is one of the original reddit peeps, he started in early 2007 I think! He is also one cool frood. Hi Jeremy!
    - hguant 7y ago
      Does he keep his towel on hand?
  - jedberg 7y ago
    That was in 2005. I joined in 2007.
kelnos 7y ago
I often marvel at the seemingly trivial events that greatly shape my life. Just thinking about my professional life, I have: My first job out of college happened because I met and befriended one specific person in college (was there for 5 years). My second job (and first startup) happened because I went to a 4-person dinner/game-night at a friend's (who I met at that first job) house, and talked to one of the other attendees who was interviewing at this company, and was willing to refer me (was barely there for a year and a half, but it fundamentally changed my view of work and employment). Fast forward, and my current job (nearly 8 years now) happened because I checked an email account that I hadn't looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I'd usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I'd used that email address as the recovery account, many years before. Obviously there was more to it than those single events, but each of those things were essential in opening up the opportunity in the first place. My personal life and social circles often grew from similar simple, one-off, surprise events.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
if you're looking to sell whimsy on the internet momentofwhimsy.com is still available. and you don't even need a whimsy packing shed.
AareyBaba 7y ago
I also planted the store bought green onions and it worked fine until the aphids showed up - how do you control them? (they reproduce profusely and asexually basically cloning themselves)
- djrogers 7y ago
  My grandpa swore by Sevin, and my father in law uses diluted Dawn soap. Based solely on the chemical content, I'd start with the soap. Also - predators. You can buy ladybugs in most garden centers for almost nothing, and they eat aphids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Literally.
radnor 7y ago
Yes! It's easy to regrow kitchen scraps and so few people know anything about it which is a shame. For anyone interested, I recommend the book "No-Waste Kitchen Gardening"[1] for some useful tips. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitchen-gardening https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitche...
keerthiko 7y ago
I'm moving to New York after 6 years in San Francisco in a similar moment of whimsy, next month, and I have only loosey-goosey reasons to do it. It's weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it's really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I'm keeping my fully remote-friendly job) as some people seem to think it is! I really hope more people do it more often! It's a very effective and wholesome way to foster understanding and spreading of good ideas, and dampening the damning effects of a lot of tribalism in today's political climate.

by Panino 7y ago

tvanantwerp 7y ago

Moments of whimsy are some of the most important. It was a moment of whimsy that led to me studying abroad in college, and another moment of whimsy that led me to meet my wife while I was there. Couldn't have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than "yeah, I guess I'll give it a go" that shaped my entire life. And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.

saalweachter 7y ago
I ultimately owe my software engineering career to wasting time posting on a phpBB for a webcomic.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Indeed. For me that moment was a single split second where I decided to email my would-be wife. I almost didn’t, but decided to anyway. Of course, I have no idea how life may have played out had I not made that decision but here I am now, some thousands of miles away from my home country, from country I grew up in and in a new place I call home with a little kiddo that makes every day worth living. Funny how a single moment decided all of this.
xmprt 7y ago
Moments of whimsy with a bit of perseverance. Without the second part, you're just a wildcard.
- samirm 7y ago
  Maybe that's the point. Wildcards sometimes succeed just like that.
munificent 7y ago
Fredkin's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox
Retra 7y ago
Isn't that just confirmation bias though? If you hadn't made those decisions you just as likely could have met someone else some other way, married them and been just as happy or successful.
- Scarblac 7y ago
  Yes, but it contrasts nicely with those "where do you see yourself in five years" interview questions. Life doesn't usually work like that.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Well, I met my wife on a train, in 2009. I was supposed to be on a plane, and she lost the previous train, and jumped in a random car in the train I was in, and there was me. Go figure :)
piccolbo 7y ago
Check survivorship bias. The name refers to deadly scenarios, but what is fundamental to it is a bias in reporting that depends on the outcome of interest. The concept was first hammered out observing that warplanes never got hit in the engines -- well, the ones that made it back at least. Some people thought the areas with the most damage should be protected. Wald thought otherwise and it's him who is remembered to this day. "Moments of whimsy" are like anti-aircraft ammo. They hit everywhere, randomly. But we only report those that are associated with a life change.

hopler 7y ago

It wasn't long ago when the knowledge that food is made of plants that grow on dirt was common knowledge, not a life hack. Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework.

cosmie 7y ago
> Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework. They still do, depending on where you live. My daughter brought home a sunflower seed from a field trip last spring. By the end of summer we had a 7ft tall sunflower growing next to our deck. This year we have several more already sprouting in that area. It also had a side effect of really enhancing the plot of pretty terrible clay soil we plucked it in. Lots of herbs we attempted (and failed) to grow last year are already starting to flourish this year in that spot.

munificent 7y ago

> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life. I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago. It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time. Life is weird, man. Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.

rak00n 7y ago
How did a bitchy comment lead to all that?
- munificent 7y ago
  I was working at EA at the time. I got into the game industry because I loved making games. But I wasn't on a game team at work (which was good, because it meant I had a sane work schedule). And EA's employment contract basically forbids you from doing hobby game stuff in your free time since they would own the results. So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that. Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you." Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no. I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.) Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one. I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun. However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join. That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast. But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.

jedberg 7y ago

> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life. My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided "you know what, it's on the other side of the country but I'll just sign up and figure it out". Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that's how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gitgud 7y ago
Wow was that when Reddit was starting out, or more recently?
- trevorcreech 7y ago
  jedberg was the first employee at Reddit
- chasontherobot 7y ago
  jedberg is one of the original reddit peeps, he started in early 2007 I think! He is also one cool frood. Hi Jeremy!
  - hguant 7y ago
    Does he keep his towel on hand?
- jedberg 7y ago
  That was in 2005. I joined in 2007.

kelnos 7y ago

I often marvel at the seemingly trivial events that greatly shape my life. Just thinking about my professional life, I have: My first job out of college happened because I met and befriended one specific person in college (was there for 5 years). My second job (and first startup) happened because I went to a 4-person dinner/game-night at a friend's (who I met at that first job) house, and talked to one of the other attendees who was interviewing at this company, and was willing to refer me (was barely there for a year and a half, but it fundamentally changed my view of work and employment). Fast forward, and my current job (nearly 8 years now) happened because I checked an email account that I hadn't looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I'd usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I'd used that email address as the recovery account, many years before. Obviously there was more to it than those single events, but each of those things were essential in opening up the opportunity in the first place. My personal life and social circles often grew from similar simple, one-off, surprise events.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

if you're looking to sell whimsy on the internet momentofwhimsy.com is still available. and you don't even need a whimsy packing shed.

AareyBaba 7y ago

I also planted the store bought green onions and it worked fine until the aphids showed up - how do you control them? (they reproduce profusely and asexually basically cloning themselves)

djrogers 7y ago
My grandpa swore by Sevin, and my father in law uses diluted Dawn soap. Based solely on the chemical content, I'd start with the soap. Also - predators. You can buy ladybugs in most garden centers for almost nothing, and they eat aphids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Literally.

radnor 7y ago

Yes! It's easy to regrow kitchen scraps and so few people know anything about it which is a shame. For anyone interested, I recommend the book "No-Waste Kitchen Gardening"[1] for some useful tips. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitchen-gardening https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitche...

keerthiko 7y ago

I'm moving to New York after 6 years in San Francisco in a similar moment of whimsy, next month, and I have only loosey-goosey reasons to do it. It's weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it's really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I'm keeping my fully remote-friendly job) as some people seem to think it is! I really hope more people do it more often! It's a very effective and wholesome way to foster understanding and spreading of good ideas, and dampening the damning effects of a lot of tribalism in today's political climate.