Ask HN: What Are You Thankful For?
Figured this could kick off some thoughtful discussion and connection. I am thankful for my coworkers. I'm the kind of software engineer who is a mad scientist in disguise. Bridging dissimilar message busses with data-driven Lua scripts. Creating a Jenkins SCM plugin that exposes the sources packages of a Debian repository (complete with binary dependency tracking) as an organization folder to turn it into a package builder. Improvising a Git proxy/cache with a hundred lines of Bash to lessen the load on the lab uplink (still load-bearing to this day). Writing a toolchain in Python that takes OpenAPI documents as an abstract syntax tree and run passes on it to parse, validate, aggregate, transform and format it for various needs (such as generating C++ code for data models, dataframe bindings and so on). Delinking programs back into object files and creating Frankenstein monsters from salvaged pieces, and somehow landing a poster presentation about that at ACM CCS 2025 as a hobbyist (this one outside of office hours, but it still triggers brain meltdowns when I talk about it). And so many, many more sins. I honestly don't know how they are putting up with the incarnation of chaos that is me. I am grateful for this: My kids have their health and they have friends and a school within walking distance. Both me and me wife are employed. We have enough to provide for our family. No bombs are falling over our heads. There are lots of other things to be grateful for, this I feel is the foundation. My water heater is dead so I only get room temperature water from the building’s boiler. Showering is dreadful. I am thankful that for the last 30-odd years I could always get hot, drinkable water just by opening a tap. I never even questioned it because it was so reliable. I'm thankful that I managed to stay single, no divorce, no kids, money in the bank. And I essentially retired in my mid 30s, thanks to my dad who left me some money after he died, which I invested and did ok. Retirement. Even on a very limited pension. Gaza is not being destroyed relentlessly on a daily basis. Of course part of that is because it's already obliterated. But what a nightmare it was, and as a US taxpayer I was complicit. Okay here come the downvotes. So be it. The majority of the massacre being over because of how many are already dead is not something I’m exactly “grateful” for. Nope, same here. But the attacks on neighbors hasn't stopped there. Or here Yes