> "Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet"

At the end of one of her interviews on youtbue, Kelly McGonigal explains that -- paraphrased -- being praised to the face creates an intimate context around the praiser and the praisee, in which it's the praiser that sets the tone and initiates the dynamics. In a way, they find themselves in a position where they evaluate you. This is why taking praise gracefully is not trivial; people being praised usually show bodily signs of stress. It takes a real effort for the praisee not to dismiss or belittle their own achievement, just to get out of those dynamics as soon as possible.

At the end of said interview, the host praised Ms. McGonigal to her face. In response, she drew his attention to the fact that while he was talking, speaking those words of appreciation, she swallowed. The act of her swallowing was a kind of stress-relief (IIRC). (I'm sure we can all relate to choking up slightly when praised to the face.) She highlighted the dynamics of being praised to the face live, mid-interview, through her own reaction.

You may be avoiding sharing your wins with others because you instinctively might want to avoid the situation where others qualify you. In that situation, you experience being the subject of an evaluation, and that -- i.e., being talked about -- might feel like a subordinate position to be in, even if the judging is 100% positive. My remedy is to just yield, lean back, give in, permit the other person to be in control, allow them to have all power in that context, and just bask in the glorious warmth they're sending your way. It can be an experience that you remember for decades after, and you're going to start to crave it. (Peer recognition can be a huge motivator, i.e., doing things for recognition. Whether that's good or bad, is a separate topic :))

> For a long time, I’ve been this person for other people, but don’t feel like I have anybody to do this for me.

For the longest time I was this and unfortunately I got bitter over time. But then a couple of years ago I got back into the mindset again. A few bad years later I realized that the more happy you are for your friends, the more happy you are. Do it for yourself and nobody else.

I’m so glad that line helped. It was a last minute addition, and I was thinking about how so many of my friends just don’t share the awesome stuff they do with the world. Share more!!

I have borrowed some "wisdom" in how particles interact. They exchange particles back and forth which strengthen their interaction. That's what I do generally in real life. I sort of share happenings in my life as a sort of nano-influencer within my group of friends. I would say the advice in the blogpost works, sort of. Even if my "contributions" go into a blackhole, I think atleast the ephemeral Universe is watching what I do.

Ditto.

What gets me is when I have a few times found the people I am hyping for are actually putting me down, or selling me out to management.

There's nothing wrong with being humble. It only takes one small display of pride to make most people quietly hate you. For example, I opened this blog post and within 20 seconds I loathed the person who wrote it. I find your approach to be much more decent.

Well, I'm glad you had this realization, and I'm excited for how this will turn out for you. Sometimes you have to show your friends you're excited about something for them to be excited in turn.

Good luck!

Let's take this to the extreme, you just won the lottery, which one of your friends will you tell?

How much of it is some form of a subliminal superstition where you feel that if you tell your success, your success will be jinxed?

It's interesting - had they acted this schadenfreude out at all? Or did this confession come completely out of the blue. From what you said, it is the latter - and if so, should this person be judged for this unappealing inner thought, if they take pains not to let that thought influence their behaviour or actions?

I’m curious about how this came out and what the fallout was. If you feel like sharing.

I wonder how this applies to the army. In the army, the people around you in the same situation as you become your mates, and seeing them suffer or die has a big effect on soldiers.

I'd say spending time together forms / ends up in bonding, and those friends aren't friends (although the English-American definition is more like 'peers' anyway); they're former friends. People you used to spend time with. If it comes to school and work, there's competition. Lots of it. In the army, not so much.

Goodness, yes. The last time I put (genuinely constructive) criticism in a peer evaluation, it turned out to be the only non-positive thing that was said about that coworker. So it became a focus of his yearly review.

He later told me about how his review went (casually at a conference; he had no idea I was the source), and I fessed up and clarified what I actually meant. The HR process had twisted it to a much more extreme version of what I was getting at, completely undermining the utility of the feedback.

Nowadays, I'm just gonna give perfect scores and if I have feedback that needs to be given, I'll just tell the coworker directly. (And if I'm not comfortable doing that, then the feedback probably isn't important enough.)

For real. I have bought a car and the same day discovered a minor issue, I had to get it fixed next day. I rated the service 8/10, it was excellent otherwise. Next day I get a very apologetic call, begging me to change my rating, because anything less than 9/10 triggers some kind of investigation process. I said screw it and took the survey again, I'm not going to ruin someone else's work because of this.

I do the same. Doing HR’s job is not my job. And yet, some how I do. If I rated any satisfaction metric below 80% my manager’s manager would have him talk to me; there would be flogging until morale improves. It seems all a game of Emperor’s New Clothes.

Agree, I blocked it with uBlock

Agree. The article treats friendship as a career tool rather than a meaningful connection. Real friends aren’t just hype men or professional assets — they’re people who stick around through ups and downs.

> > It’s deeply believing that a rising tide lifts all boats. > I deeply believe that this is utterly naive.

While I don't fully disagree, I have often seen younger employees fall into the trap of overly chasing individual advantage over collective benefit. In other words, trying to be an all-star rather than a team player. Perhaps this is from schooling, where all that matters is getting an "A", but in the workplace it often results in being disliked and less likely to be promoted.

It feels like it’s probably most applicable to people who do similar work as you and who you talk shop with. I wouldn’t consider these work friends, which to me are people at the same place of work that you wouldn’t hang out with if not for work.

Relationships are of various kinds that extend in various dimensions. What the Author has talked about definitely sounds more like a "work-friend" relationship, but is not entirely separate from a "friend-friend" that you define.

> It’s deeply believing that a rising tide lifts all boats.

This is true, but with context. "Growth" and "Comfort" are two different elements of a good friendship. We can replace "rising" with "happy", and the same quote works for comfort.

Are both necessary? Depends on how you define "friendship". If comfort is the only thing, you dog can be a comfortable companion. But for a human friendship to last longer, both must enjoy each other company for longer time horizon, and that needs growth in both. This growth needs not be only in career, but mental too.

With such growth, envy can't come in and corrode the bond.

This sounds beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I think Jealousy is a useful and important emotional state in society, and to wish it away and suppress it only makes it show up in violent ways. Like all emotions, if we allow and appreciate (and share!), it flows through us and does not fester.

Have you made any friends online? A ton of my friends are people I interact with almost exclusively on discord

Personally, I wouldn’t normally think of a friendship as a “success accelerator” because that reduces a friendship to its material benefits. I think you can have strong and meaningful relationships without this aspect at all.

Still, I do want to acknowledge that if I’m in a position to help accelerate a friend’s success, I will. I don’t know whether I’d say I expect my friends to do the same for me since it’s so contextual. At the same time I would expect a certain level of reciprocity if they’re in the position to reciprocate, although I admit I’m struggling to articulate my expectations clearly, since they’re not simply one to one.

I think the contents of said blog post is material to the conversation at hand.

The opposite of a "success accelerator" hypeman would be someone that's constantly tearing you down, talking bar about you behind your back, and constantly and actively trying to get you to fail. If it's the contents of blog post that helps someone recognize such a person isn't really their friend, why is it even relevant what bit if media helped them come to that realization?

> Rooting for your friends is great. But people sometimes bond over wishing harm for their foes. Shared trauma does that.

Yeah this is way too common. And it’s not just trauma which does it. I think it’s its own psychological trap. I think the trap is a self reinforcing cycle of a few thoughts:

1. Other people are bad at things. Look at all the things others do which have flaws! You must be better than all those dolts.

2. You tell yourself you could do something better - but if you try, maybe it’ll have flaws too. Then you’ll be just as bad as anyone else. Uh oh.

3. So you don’t do anything creative, or take responsibility for anything. But you need a reason to tell yourself as to why you’re not doing anything.

4. It must be because other, idiot people stop you. Change is too hard. Doing anything would be “fighting against the system” or something. See point 1.

And the trap is closed. The only way to escape it is to do stuff that you’re bad at. And if you do that, you’ll find all the faults in your own work and feel terrible about yourself.

I think the bottom level of almost any company is packed with people who have this mindset. It’s a disaster on every level - personal and professional. And it’s quite resilient and contagious. People like that are always a little afraid that somebody will call them on it. So they need others to agree with them that staying small is the smart move.

Avoiding them is definitely a smart move. I’ve taken to sometimes needling people like that, just to rattle the cage and see what happens. “You’re so right about those flaws! We’d love your help fixing some of them?” / “I think your idea is wonderful! So what you’re saying is if we got Bob on side, you think we could do it? Let me help - I’ll set up a meeting. With the two of us, I’m sure he’ll come around!”

I generally hate being too positive. But I make an exception for this kind of subtle supportive bullying. This awful mindset can’t survive in the sunlight. It’s fun to see what happens!

I've met a few people that I like to describe as "walking Reddit". Chat with them and they'll always have a story or gossip that's engaging and somewhat infuriating or rage-inducing. One was a colleague who would telling me all the questionable and unkind things the managers in other teams were doing.

I eventually realised that these interactions weren't joyful... they were easy conversations, but they were also demoralising and lowered my energy. These days I try to "manage" my conversations with people like this by steering the topics and (gently) setting boundaries on what I don't want to talk about.

You're probably not wrong. I'm lucky and most of my guy friends are happy in each other's successes. There definitely can be an under current of something though (almost feels like skepticism) sometimes.

But to be fair, I've felt that vague "skepticism" at my own successes from some of my gal pals too. But at the same time, my friend group that's mostly women will definitely gas each other up more and seemingly show more genuine interest in each other's successes and genuine sympathy in each other's setbacks.

You could be right. It could also be that if your friend was supportive and was excited for you that you would still be motivated to succeed.

I have a feeling that you're striving in spite of the lack of support, not because of it. And also that your own creativity and persistence is able to turn lemons into lemonade. So whatever your friends gave you, you'd take it and make it work.

I'd say all of that is the complete opposite of what people do that are destined to fail.

> If you want to innovate and push boundaries, I'd argue that competition is a more significant driver.

Competition is great, but there's no reason it needs to be negatively tinged (as in your example). Two people can compete and push themselves hard to come out ahead, but also cheer for each other to do well. After all, if your rival sucks they don't really push you to get better, so cheering for them is in a way cheering for yourself too.

There's a huge difference between believing someone will fail and hoping that they will.

I need to learn from you. Also: good for you!

Yeah i only put the one line in there that talks about that: > people who are honest to your face and praise you behind your back.

I could have emphasized that more.

The way I try to do it is: if you think something nice, say it

That looks weird as hell. I love when people let their weirdness and creativity shine. Congrats on such a big project!

Sometimes my friends are away on long business trips, naturally their wives get bored, the headline made perfect sense to me?

I was thinking it was about ways to securely give friends root access to your home server

For anyone else wondering: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/root#Usage_notes

Nothing wrong with friends that root each other too.

Ok, I'll bite. Why? You happen to have a sort of antagonistic relationship with HN?

I thought it was about giving SSH and sudo to your friends.

I thought it was a peevish Kiwi joke about how people of other nations do not use words as they do.

I’m sorry that has been your experience. The culture you’re brought up in is hardly representative for 8 billion people’s experience.

I’m really sorry that someone betrayed/hurt you so much and I hope you are able to forgive them.

Ok, so maybe instead of friendship let’s call it platonic love.

I get your point, but we are herd animals. Today distance is bigger than ever so we are more often lonely. Some believe in gods, religions but I rather believe in people and make it a hill I’ll die on.

Thank you

He could have been a fraud or not, but you might have been missing his point.

Perhaps his point was that he just genuinely liked to be a decent human being instead of rolling into work each day with an attitude of "I'm better than all of you peons, fuck you and your families, may (deity of your choice) condemn you all to death and perpetual hellfire"

I've been in a position where I shouldn't have been before. I too was kind to everyone. Whether or not I was good at my job or role has no effect on basic human decency, or holding the door, saying good morning, or not cutting someone off deliberately in the company parking lot.

There's two kinds of respect - earned, and given. People seem to not understand that, and see no reason why they shouldn't slam the door in the person behind them's face. You can be kind to everyone, it doesn't cost you anything. Give people props when they deserve it, but don't smash the homeless dude on the street's face when you walk by him - he's human too.

You should support those who do good work, and call out those who don't. But you don't have to be an asshole to them, either.

As an Australian, "Root for your friends" has a hilariously alternate meaning.

Me too, reinforced by author's name :)

It's easier to get root on your friends than it is to get root on your enemies, because they likely trust you. This is why a central tenent of John Le Carre narratives is "fear your friends more than your enemies."

This often plays out in the blood sport of academic politics, incidentally.

inception is a form of code execution in their brain.

I offered to give root and/or ssh to a couple of friends, and they all turned it down. I don't really have any friends anyway.

Perhaps we can parlay this title into a video game. Or simply an alternate title for Core War.

sudo make me a sandwich

(xkcd.com/149)

I opened it up to look at the metadata, and I'm surprised OpenAI doesn't include any information like that (I believe ComfyUI generated images do by default). All it says it's by ChatGPT.

You can get the prompt in Japan, but it costs you. There's a whole studio behind it. These people also need to eat, you see.