ptk921's comments

ptk921 | 1 year ago | on: The Myth of the Second Chance

A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.

Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!

Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.

I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"

"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."

My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.

ptk921 | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

Looks interesting, I'm excited to try it out. I had trouble parsing the "Understanding Mood" paragraph. Consider this a pull request.

> What if you could get a mood score for emails you receive or send? A way to quickly sense check what you are about to send without your bias emotion or when receiving an email remove your current mood or maybe a currently negative relationship with the sender.

ShouldISendIt provides a mood score for emails you send or receive? When sending, quickly get a sense of the mood that your message communicates from an objective algorithm. When receiving messages, our tool can help you see past your current disposition or preconceive notions of the sender's intent.

ptk921 | 8 years ago | on: Building for the Blockchain

Hi Api. Your questions are _spot_ on!

Speculative investing + skyrocketing valuations does encourage highly motivated reasoning-- a unique kind of confirmation bias:

"This technology MUST be the answer to all the problems of the future because I'm getting wealthier TODAY!"

Irrational exuberance is rampant.

That said -- the recent New Yorker article on Estonia's digital society [1] covered that country's usage of a blockchain to manage patient healthcare records.

> the backbone of Estonia’s digital security is a blockchain technology called K.S.I.

K.S.I. from Guardtime [2] is an enterprise permissioned blockchain that is less decentralized than bitcoin and ethereum. Still, its exciting to see that Estonia is leveraging immutability and (some) decentralization to build a secure persistence layer that provides data provenance and a log of data access for management of their citizens' personal data, including healthcare records.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di... [2] https://guardtime.com/technology

ptk921 | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Trailer Swift

Built on the road from Seattle to SXSW. Rails, heroku, backbone, bootstrap. Location data from Google Latitude.

TODO: incorporate some lightweight analytics so we can work on new Trailer Swift records.

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