We are building the IFTTT for blockchains - a tool to query, trigger and automate blockchain data :) [0]
We recently raised a $3M seed [1]; it's 9 of us at the moment and we are working on pretty fun stuff: rebuilding our frontend from the ground up, new GraphQL API, adding a ton of features to our real-time monitor backend - it's still very early from both a code and product perspective.
We are fully remote and we try to get the team together every few months, usually for crypto conferences around the world. Previous get-togethers include Sardinia (Italy), Lisbon (Portugal), and Denver (USA).
We have a bunch of open positions [2], feel free to apply there and send me (CTO, co-founder) an email at manlio at hal.xyz with a [Hacker News] tag in the subject to make sure your application doesn't slip through the cracks ;)
Crypto experience of any kind is a plus, but if you're intrigued this can also be an excellent way to get your foot in the door.
Happy to chat if you have any specific questions re the product, the industry, or anything else.
I was taken aback by how incredibly naive/amateurish most of the answers so far are, but I'd rather upvote and try to highlight this post instead which is excellent and very insightful.
An extra piece of advice for anyone serious about learning meditation:
1. You'll need a teacher. Find your local Buddhist centre and chances are they'll have classes focused on teaching beginners. You simply won't learn by making something up yourself and calling it meditation, or reading stuff on the internet (including my answer) - you'll need both guidance and someone to look up to. I can't stress this enough: even the Buddha himself had teachers :)
2. "Meditation" as a technique is obviously found in countless religions and other secular systems, so that some people claim you can learn "mindfulness" as a stand-alone tool, without the Buddhist package that usually comes with it.
Although it might be possible to a certain extent, the understanding you'll have of the practice will be immensely impoverished. You don't have to become a Buddhist to practice meditation, but without some Buddhist context you'll limit yourself to an extremely diluted, dumbed-down version of the real thing. So I'd recommend you start there, and in time you'll carve your own path.
The first and fundamental question you want to ask yourself is not how, but why: when your reasons are clear, the path naturally follows.
I can see three strands:
1. For health reasons. This is IMO the weakest reason. I'm not interested (nor qualified) in starting an endless debate about the health risk/benefits of meat; but if you only want to eat healthier is best to start with the obvious: cut sugar, snacks, sodas, sweets, junk food and deep fried; eat more low-GI and greens, etc.
2. For Ahimsa [0]. Ahimsa is a beautiful and subtle topic, but broadly speaking it means that you try to minimize the amount of suffering caused by your actions. Buddhists (as well as Socrates) believe we constantly fail to understand that our actions have consequences. Ahimsa is about getting in touch as best as we can with these consequences, and act accordingly to our insights.
3. For environmental reasons, i.e. reducing your ecological footprint. This has some overlap with Ahimsa, but the reasons are practical rather than ethical and there are exceptions: in terms of sheer sustainability, battery farmed chicken might be OK (maybe, I don't know).
Whatever your reasons are, it's something I believe is worth thinking about.
Here's reason #4. You'll look younger, have better skin, and live longer. Vegans typically live 15 years longer and don't have many of the degenerative diseases which are caused by meat and dairy.
I was pushing my parents to let me become vegan when I turned a teenager. I stopped eating meat on my 16th birthday despite their assertions that I would die. Gave up dairy a few years later, which I only ate because the dairy industry's advertising is so damn strong.
I'll turn 46 this summer, so it's been almost 30 years, and people think I'm 10-15 years younger. Teenage girls still try to pick me up. My fiance has been vegan for something like 20 years and is 40 this summer. Last year, two high school kids invited her to the prom.
And reason #5, which was the primary reason I went vegan, followed by having a sense of ethics and feeling it was wrong to enslave, torture, and murder animals, because meat is yummy: Eating rotting corpses is pretty gross when you think about it.
I'm telling you the reason that I went vegan at 16. And those were the main reasons. Though at the time, I called it grody, but I'm not sure of the correct spelling.
Animals start to decompose at the moment of death. The meat at the supermarket has been dead for how long? Days, weeks? It is in the process of rotting, just not visibly so. Much of it is actually spoiled, but I've read 70% of meat in supermarkets is treated with carbon monoxide to keep it from going brown or grey. You might not like it, but it's a very valid and important argument.
And as for feeling that it's unethical. We (people) enslave entire species, remove their body parts without anaesthesia, cage them in cells so small they can't move, force them to have babies over and over and then kidnap their children and eat them, grind them up, or enslave them as well. It's horrible. I think that anyone who knows what is done and argues, but meat is yummy or delicious as someone else did in here, is a sociopath. Can anyone who is connected to their sense of empathy be okay causing that much pain to other feeling beings?
> We (people) enslave entire species, remove their body parts without anaesthesia, cage them in cells so small they can't move, force them to have babies over and over and then kidnap their children and eat them, grind them up, or enslave them as well. It's horrible, and I think that anyone who knows what is done and argues, but meat is yummy, is a sociopath.
I produce my own meat, on my own property. Not in cages, no forced babies (chickens lay anyway), no enslavement (the arrangement is closer to me being their slave), and no 'body part removal.'
So many of your arguments are made up for non-commercial meat sources.
Also, do you not see how your language is just an attack on meat-eaters? You say you're just "telling us the reason," but you're not, you're making an attack.
You are part of a tiny percentage of people, so that doesn't really mean much compared to the billions of animals who are part of factory farming.
But, I applaud you for doing it yourself and think everyone should eat meat the way you do, if they must eat meat in the first place.
The "positive" stuff at the beginning were the unexpected side-effects. The attacks are answering the question that this thread is about. Why did I become vegan? That's exactly what I was thinking as a teenager, and continue to think 30 years later.
Is it an attack to say, "Take a look at the results of your actions. This is what you're a part of. This is the suffering you cause."?
Calling someone a sociopath might be an attack. lol. That comes from being attacked for being a vegan hundreds of times, just for not eating what everyone else was, when I didn't bring it up at all. When I explain why, I get, "but meat tastes good" (Subtext is, "so it's fine for animals and the planet to suffer because of factory farming, because meat is yummy"). Oh, well, that's fine then.
The attacks I'm referring to are the misuse of the term "murder", calling a couple hundred million folks "sociopaths," and the implication (which has some truth, no doubt) that those eating the meat are responsible for the mistreatment of animals and are causing their pain.
I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples where people who are a cog in a machine are not exactly on-board with the whole thing, yet feel powerless to stop it.
Diet is not something that everyone feels they can change on a whim. If it were, I suppose we wouldn't have an obesity crisis, and perhaps more people would join you as vegans, too.
The cultural pressure to eat meat is also a big factor, just as you have mentioned in your response here. Not just to be normal, but maybe to avoid hurting mom's feelings when she makes your childhood-favorite lasagna or something.
People use the same argument for eating meat (it tastes good) as they do for getting morbidly obese. Nobody wants to be morbidly obese or impose those kinds of health problems on themselves, so perhaps you need to understand that the issue is deeper than just "I do or don't want to hurt animals." It certainly is with obesity.
I've never actually called someone a sociopath when they said that meat tastes good as justification for eating it. But now that I think about it, justifying killing for pleasure (of eating) seems like a pretty good definition.
edit: i dont mean any of this to be combative or insulting, figured i would throw this in at the top in case someone doesnt make it to the end thinking i am trying to attack their ideology, just trying to get feedback on an argument i read long ago
what do you think about the argument that by removing yourself from the market of meat entirely, you do nothing to promote better lives for livestock.
By abstaining from meat, you do nothing to push the meat industry towards more sustainable and compassionate treatment of animals. You, being someone who is conscious of these abuses are in a position to push for change, but instead you remove yourself from the market entirely.
Ultimately, isnt refusing to vote with your wallet worse than voting for compassionate and sustainable production of livestock?
Wouldnt eating lab grown meat do more to end the suffering of these animals than not eating meat at all? since it would push an entire industry toward your preference of eating only that which was produced to your standards.
would the entire population of vegetarians and vegans combined buying only the most sustainable and compassionately raised meats be enough to effect the processes of major producers? Would this be a greater good than not eating meat at all? of course, this likely doesnt effect the decision on a personal level, but at scale does veganism help or hurt the progress towards more sustainably and compassionately raised livestock? (though of course if that scale were to include everyone, it would be no longer an issue i suppose)
of course this moreso assumes your overall goal is to reduce the suffering of these animals, or the suffering of all things as much as you possibly can- if your goal is to instead reduce the amount of suffering you directly cause, then this argument is meaningless.
I'm honestly asking this, as its the only argument that i have found that sounds reasonable against becoming vegan, im not really trying to start a debate, i dont really have more to say than this, but its an argument that stuck with me the first time i read it and i very rarely have a chance to have a level headed discussion about such a topic (reddit isnt really the place for level headed discussion, and i am not aware of a nutrition or dietary equivalent to hackernews)
So famous it became a bit of a cliche. I read it years ago and it didn't make any sense to me. But now that I've been studying Buddhism and practicing meditation for a while I picked it up again and I found it nothing short of brilliant, packed with interesting insights on philosophy, the arts, theology, the history of mysticism and the quest for the meaning of life. I know it sounds trite, but I simply wasn't ready for it the first time.
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. [1]
I read this 10 years ago. It touched my heart back then and it did it again this time. It's one of the few works of fiction that changed, a little or a lot, the way I think about love, relationships, loneliness and happiness.
I can't wait to re-read it a third time, in 10 years.
Island by Huxley is also a fantastic book with great social commentary on the west vs. an idealistic society. It's interesting to see, for example, his early take on preventative vs curative medicine in "modern" society, or how education needs to be reformed. One of my all time favourites.
I wonder how much of Huxley's work is influenced by his friendship with Jiddu Krishnamurthi.
I am only marginally familiar with K's work but have no knowledge of Huxley's . Would be curious if someone who has read both can comment about the similarities/influences between the two.
I helped writing the Alexa skill for The Guardian [0], and I really didn't think highly of it, nor I thought I'd ever use it myself: the voice recognition is still poor, and it's difficul to understand what you can/cannot do with it. All in all, a big meh.
Then one day someone forwarded to our team this email, and it really touched my heart.
I am quadriplegic and the Amazon Echo has transformed my life. I haven't been able to open a newspaper for 10 years, but now I can!
[...]
Please pass this email on to all of those concerned at the Guardian... They need-to-know the difference that they have made".
I hit the front page with "Where is who is hiring hiring?" [0]
I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you" emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really good feeling (:
I got my current, first job through "who is hiring?" alone. The response rate was insanely high, I reckon >80% if I include the "thanks no thanks" answers. A few (obvious, but HN-oriented) tips:
1 - don't spam
2 - really, don't spam
3 - put in some effort
4 - keep it short
More often than not, you're given the chance to bypass the HR filter and get in touch directly with an engineer. This is key. Your default cover letter won't cut it, because engineers look for different things, so you want something tailor made every time. It takes some effort, but this will pay off.
Make sure you understand what they do, what they want, and what you can offer. Make sure you (quickly) go through the latter. You probably have something to offer even though you don't fit the profile they had in mind.
Make sure you know who you're writing to, and craft your email accordingly. Google him, go through their HN submissions/GitHub/whatever, get a feeling for what they might like.
Oh, and try to be nice and genuine, at this stage is a lot about people skills :) Good luck!
We are building the IFTTT for blockchains - a tool to query, trigger and automate blockchain data :) [0]
We recently raised a $3M seed [1]; it's 9 of us at the moment and we are working on pretty fun stuff: rebuilding our frontend from the ground up, new GraphQL API, adding a ton of features to our real-time monitor backend - it's still very early from both a code and product perspective.
We are fully remote and we try to get the team together every few months, usually for crypto conferences around the world. Previous get-togethers include Sardinia (Italy), Lisbon (Portugal), and Denver (USA).
We have a bunch of open positions [2], feel free to apply there and send me (CTO, co-founder) an email at manlio at hal.xyz with a [Hacker News] tag in the subject to make sure your application doesn't slip through the cracks ;)
Crypto experience of any kind is a plus, but if you're intrigued this can also be an excellent way to get your foot in the door.
Happy to chat if you have any specific questions re the product, the industry, or anything else.
[0] https://hal.xyz
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/hal-raises-3-million-from-coinfund-...
[2] https://join.hal.xyz/