When your initial chemistry/biology/whatever latches onto a person and you're powerless to change it? That's a scary thought.

I'll be that weirdo.

Dogs seemingly are bred to love. I can literally get some cash from an ATM, drive out to the sticks, buy a puppy from some breeder, and it will love me. Awww, I'm a hero.

Downvoters hate having their double standard revealed.

You ran away, you spineless coward?

They only want to see somebody who can get working code and a glimpse of their thought process. But from 100s of mediocre examples, the better coder will have a "better thought process."

Same goes for dating. Of course people will swear up and down they "only consider personality." Turns out, they've met 10 other people with a better personality than you.

Just because they're "only looking for x" doesn't mean they'll accept anybody that clears the bar.

The ultimate read between the lines though is that "oh I'm only looking for xyz, nothing superhuman" in a process where you have 10,000 competitors and applicants will still require high performance on your part. It's just a nicety, a meaningless phrase.

There's not a more pragmatic measure of whether somebody can code than a track record of a successful code project used by other coders.

I do open-source and write blog posts to satisfy my own desire to publicize my work, and for exposure, and to put my skills on display. Not as a race to the bottom. I could have had a career without those things.

Young me would've enjoyed the process of building a thing, ignoring problems like maintenance burden, how fragile or brittle the new tool is, lessons learned from the old tool, etc. etc. (you know how it goes)

Current me will take a task and mull on it. No pen to paper for _days_, preferring a minor adaptation to the existing process, or discovering that the desire was misguided in the first place. The work not done and wisdom to not do it is worth its weight in gold.

Flip a coin whether I'll ace or fail a random leetcode question but after the one and only time my little monkey dance successfully got me into a "desireable" company, I started confidently rejecting other proposals to whiteboard me.

MMA fighters generally chase their own glory, to get their own hand raised in the ring. Not become a personal servant to another person's ego.

Par for the course at HN to have a "vaguely dislike-ish" relationship with Protonmail. Fastmail is the poster child of HN on the other hand.

I would guess the gist of it is that if you promise _any_ amount of security (or whatever feature), HN will nitpick you to death on not going 100% (despite the general improvement to your security). If you don't promise security at all, it doesn't matter that you're less secure than Proton. Something like that.