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A Sudden Illness (2003) | I developed CFS in late 2004. I was diagnosed in 2006.<p>My doctors were initially no help. My primary care physician ran battery after battery of blood tests. She loved blood tests. Her nurses called her "Doctor Dracula". I learned that I didn't have AIDS or tuberculosis or any of a long list of other illnesses. I also learned that I was, in her words, "violently allergic to absolutely everything."<p>I couldn't work anymore. Pretty much all I could do was sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. When I couldn't sleep anymore, I played games in bed.<p>I lost my (very good, very satisfying, very lucrative) job. I lost my savings. I lost my home. Friends and family took me in.<p>I saw various doctors. They were no help until I saw a guy in northwest Arkansas. He was different from the others: he actually listened to what I said. After I described the onset of my illness, he said, "that sounds like a textbook case of CFS. Let's try something."<p>He tried a steroid injection. He said it would temporarily counteract the systemic inflammation he was seeing. Suddenly I felt great. That lasted a few days.<p>He prescribed modafinil, a drug that promotes alertness. Modafinil worked great, too. It enabled me to stay awake longer than an hour or two at a time, and gave me back my memory and about thirty IQ points. I could work again.<p>Every few weeks the modafinil would stop working for a couple of days, and I would be back in sleep-all-day mode. The doc tried an amphetamine. Before the illness I was hypersensitive to stimulants. A canof coke too late in the evening and I'd be unable to sleep. Now, though, I could take an amphetamine and go right to sleep.<p>Twelve years later I don't need stimulant drugs anymore. I'm much better. I won't go so far as to say that I'm recovered--there are still things I can't do--but my life is mostly normal and even comfortable now, so long as I obey some rules that I gradually discovered by trial and error.<p>It's important to get enough sleep, and to try to get it at roughly the same time every day. It's important to eat in a healthy way. It's important to have a steady routine that stays pretty much the same from day to day. It's important to monitor levels of activity, both mental and physical. I need to be active, but I need to avoid exceeding some limits.<p>It's very important to get some exercise, but I have to control the amount and intensity of it carefully.<p>If I don't get any exercise, it's bad for the same reasons that's bad for anyone. If I get too much all at once, it's bad for different reasons. It puts me back into useless lying-in-bed mode.<p>CFS causes an unusual response to fatigue--namely, you get fatigued and then don't recover from it. (Maybe it's related to abnormalities in energy metabolism. If you google for some combination of terms like "cfs" and "calcium" and "metabolism", you'll get references to a bunch of research about abnormalities in several metabolic pathways in CFS sufferers.)<p>If you're a normal person and you run hard around the block, you'll get back and rest and breathe hard, and you'll be back to normal in a few minutes. If I do that--If I could do it without collapsing partway through--I'd rest and breathe hard and be back to normal in a few days to a week or so.<p>The best exercise for me is walking. I built up my stamina slowly and gradually, and now I walk between three and five miles every day, in sessions of about fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. For a while I tried biking, but biking seems to tempt me to exert too hard, and if I exert too hard I'm flat on my back again.<p>I've learned to recognize when I'm pushing too hard. There are some distinctive sensations. I feel dizzy, and a sensation that feels like I'm falling. I lose coordination and ability to focus. The more intense I let it get, the longer it takes to abate.<p>If I avoid those sensations, I feel pretty good, pretty normal. After years of experimenting, the boundaries have become habit, and I rarely feel those sensations anymore unless something unusual tempts me out of bounds.<p>I don't know that what works for me will work for anyone else, but <i>something</i> worked for me. Maybe something will work for others, too. Maybe it will be helpful to know that it sometimes gets better for some people.<p>There's a lot of skepticism about CFS. People seem to be quick to jump to the assumption that it's psychosomatic, but it probably isn't. You can google around and satisfy yourself that evidence exists that it's organic. The trouble is that there's still no consensus about what exactly it is, or what causes it.Some say it's a viral illness. Some say it's an autoimmune disease. Some say it's a genetic defect. Some say it's all of those--for example, a genetically-caused autoimmune syndrome with a viral trigger.<p>All these unknown mean that we don't even have a very good name for it. "Chronic fatigue syndrome" only sort of describes part of the symptoms. "Myalgic encephalomyelitis" seems sort of speculative. Yeah, there are some muscle aches, and some inflammation, but do we really know that it's inflammation of the myelin in your head? I dunno.<p>Apparently we do know that CFS sufferers have abnormal energy metabolism, and anomalies in several metabolic pathways. |
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018) | Abl Schools | Multiple positions (engineering, data science) | San Francisco |Full-time | ONSITE | www.ablschools.com<p>Technology has made the world more connected, fundamentally changing how we live, work and interact; yet traditional schools have not evolved to prepare students for the 21st century. Replacing textbooks with tablets won’t be enough. We believe schools need a new foundation. That’s why we’re building a web-based school scheduling platform, that allows administrators to put master schedules and daily calendars into a single cloud-based system. We are creating the next generation of software for all K12 schools to fundamentally change how they design, measure and improve their schools. We are also a company that deeply values diversity in every way.<p>View openings, including sales, engineering, customer success, and design on our site: <a href="https://ablschools.com/careers/" rel="nofollow">https://ablschools.com/careers/</a><p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Personal note: I've been on the Abl engineering team for a little over a year and I love it. The mission and the team make coming into work _awesome_. We have a diverse team, we're well funded, we have experienced leadership... I could go on. The interview process is, in my opinion, very fair. You won't be asked to white board and we understand that the process is just as much the candidate getting to know the company as it is the other way around.<p>If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my contact info is in my profile.<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Data Scientist:<p>The Role<p>We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist, and in this role, you will help schools understand the impact operational changes have on their students and staff. You’ll collaborate with a team of product designers, engineers, and school leaders to build software features that help schools overcome complex logistical challenges.<p>As a Data Scientist at Abl, your work will immediately improve equity in and operations of schools across the country. You will collaborate with product designers to determine what to build and prototype, with engineers to deploy software into production use, and with our schools team to provide decision support for K12 principals who are implementing novel solutions to complex scheduling problems.<p>Recent data science projects include:<p>Defining and calculating measures of inequity for students within a school schedule
Building recommendations for course placement in a schedule
Proposing and prototyping algorithms for supporting team teaching best practices
Developing metrics and visualizations for student tracking<p>The Team<p>Our product research and development team is small, passionate, and inclusive. You will be the second Data Scientist at Abl and will work across the product and business.<p>As a data team, our goal is to produce software and insights that are proactive, guiding our peers and school leaders towards the right thing to do next, rather than taking a reactive view or simply describing what has been done. For the current stage of our business, our domain, and our customers, we have found that a bias towards reproducible, and more easily interpretable models and metrics is more useful than attempting to ruthlessly optimize an algorithm.<p>Responsibilities<p>+ Build underlying systems that power our data-driven products (e.g., recommendation engines, constraint solvers, and predictive models)<p>+ Consult directly with school leaders to work on complex problems within Abl’s product using your research and rapid prototyping skills to push new features into production<p>+ Perform data profiling, complex sampling, and statistical modeling<p>+ Design and develop tailored data models for K12 schools<p>+ Identify incomplete data, improve the quality of data, and integrate data from several data sources<p>+ Work on the challenge of combining data from across schools and districts, who all store things differently, so that we can measure our impact in aggregate<p>+ Determine how to evaluate equity, or fairness, for students and for teachers<p>+ Propose metrics for evaluating the overall quality of a schedule and methods for comparing multiple schedules’ ability to meet school leader priorities<p>+ Find trends and insights in complex, human-generated school data<p>Qualifications<p>+ Strong programming skills (e.g., Python, R, and/or JavaScript)<p>+ Proficiency in writing SQL queries<p>+ Ability and desire to present complex findings in a simple, approachable way for non-technical audiences (e.g., in writing, through reporting tools, and at in-person presentations)<p>+ Experience with cleaning, structuring, and transforming data via ETL processes<p>+ Ability to design and deploy machine learning algorithms and models<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Front-End Engineer:<p>Your Impact<p>+ Work collaboratively with the Product and Design team to understand the experiences and pain points of schools, teachers, and students<p>+ Define and build compelling new products and exciting new features that give educators insights that will enable them to optimize how they use their resources<p>+ Use your extensive knowledge of front-end technologies to build high-quality designs that are scalable<p>+ Manage code review, increase performance, and communicate best front-end engineering practices<p>+ Create a first of its kind interface that will progress K-12 schools and their communities<p>Qualifications<p>+ Experience with Javascript frameworks such as React, Backbone, Angular etc.<p>+ You should have a great feel for user experience and an eye for beautiful designs<p>+ Bring a deep understanding of best practices in design, optimization, interaction, and usability<p>+ Familiarity with the whole web stack, including protocols and web server optimization techniques<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Backend Engineer<p>Qualifications<p>+ B.S. degree in computer science or equivalent work experience<p>+ Strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, and software engineering<p>+ Familiarity with server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails<p>+ Experience building large scale distributed systems and networked services<p>Your Impact<p>+ Help set the direction of our company and product<p>+ Measurably improve student outcomes<p>+ Improve the lives of teachers<p>+ Help spread new, innovative school models<p>+ Give schools greater visibility into how they use their time and resources, enabling them to better support their students and teachers<p>-------------------------------------------------- |
Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love with Their Principal Doomsayer | An interesting read, and I don't see why he'd be confused. In my experience and personally a lot of intelligent people, particular ambitious startup types, <i>like</i> to be challenged (in an intelligent way). They like "intellectual combat", vigorous debate. They may defend themselves vociferously (they're also the type to have extensively thought about and researched their positions already, so they're not lightly held) but it's <i>exciting</i> to encounter opposed views argued beautifully, where there is strong disagreement but damn if they don't have a point. I think some people confuse people dismissing what they consider mediocre arguments with no interest in any challenge at all. As always implementation matters a lot. I mean, that's why a lot of us are right here on HN right? To gain information from those smarter then we are.<p>I think his interpretation of UBI is an oversimplification however that does not fully encompass many practical or positive moral considerations in support of it:<p>><i>'This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”'</i><p>There are at least a few parts to this. To get the most simple and pragmatic out of the way first, some people are interested in UBI and base level resource/shelter/information access purely (or at least heavily) from a coldly rational efficiency point of view. They see it as a better system all around vs an unorganized hodgepodge of defined bespoke benefits, and simply figure "well if something needs to be kept around let's make it better" and go no farther then that. This also does in fact have at least some real world support as well as theoretical. Simply giving money directly to people in the developing world has yielded promising results in some initial trials I read vs trying to distribute goods. It can be made more resistant to corruption, more decentralized, and many of the efficiencies of a market economy work just as well if the economic input is external.<p>Practical considerations also encompass an expression of <i>humility</i>: even if someone cared only about the "valuable" humans, we don't actually have any clear idea how that comes about beyond the roughest figures. But we do know that bad nutrition and lack of even basic opportunity can destroy potential for good. I'm <i>positive</i>, just on a pure statistical level, that we have had world changing genius level intellects in the dozens to hundreds that have been born in slums, into starvation and threats and lack of any sort of serious upward potential and have thus been utterly wasted. Enormous amounts of valuable human potential has been actively pissed away for no good end at all, in fact for negative value since that directly correlates to crime/prison. The poor are not some lesser race, but that's how policy has effectively treated them.<p>Both those lead into and inform a moral angle, which is that I think direct income (and in turn UBI) can also come from a much more fundamental position of <i>respect for individual humans</i>, not merely "but we are nice". This may be easiest to come at by looking at the charity example: if you dig down, a lot of current schemes fundamentally come from a view of poverty being a moral failing. The view is that the poor and desperate are that way because they're stupid, inferior beings, and in turn they must be given the goods they need (decided by their betters) directly because otherwise "of course" they'd fritter the money all away on booze/drugs/junk/[thing giver considers a bad idea].<p>It turns out though that while sure there are hard cases there are also plenty of smart, decent people who are nonetheless very badly off due to essentially bad luck and an inability to muster the capital to bootstrap. If given a stipend they will not just spend it frivolously, but rather intelligently use it for their needs, save, invest and all the other things anyone else would do. They can be taught some basic financial literacy and offered education/metaeducation as well with basic needs satisfied, just as others would get naturally growing up, and do even better. Offering someone badly off money rather then food/goods of the exact same monetary "value" is in many ways an expression of trust and respect: that they are capable of figuring out their needs more intelligently then the giver is, and the giver is just trying to achieve the goal of supporting another human at some level and not just to indulge in some righteousness<p>Mr. Harari seems to take the negative spin of "we don't need you", but that itself seems to implicitly take as given "a human's worth is wholly defined by their capacity to work and the need for them." But UBI also makes sense if someone as an ideological stance wishes to make a world where any human has a base level of worth at birth by definition that doesn't need to be justified. Other worth beyond that may then be found in other ways, but it should never be zero. Work has often been a proxy for that and necessary in and of itself, but if that changes down the road then a new value system will have to be created. It doesn't have to just be about "nice". |
Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology | Rant incoming.<p>I doubt they "would have loved Alexa" (which doesn't occur again in the body of the article, at all). I mean, of course they would also have loved the idea of owning slaves, but I still don't see how to get from there to Alexa, which is beholden to Amazon, not the user.<p><a href="http://arkbooks.dk/leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-arendt/" rel="nofollow">http://arkbooks.dk/leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-are...</a><p>> Leisure — <i>skhole</i> — can be seen as one of the acid tests of sorts here: In its positive capacity, it is a characteristic of <i>vita contemplativa</i> as a specific freedom to abstain from the life of a political engagement. Its obverse, ‘un-quiet’ — <i>a-skholia</i> — functioned traditionally as a negative term to characterise vita activa as seen from the philosophical perspective of ‘the absolute quiet of contemplation’.<p>That's kinda different from "not having to work so there's more time to consume things, and having more money to be able to consume ever more expensive things", which seems to the dream for many... rather than finally having time to ponder everything, finally not having to ponder anything! Because that is work, too. Or as a HN comment put it,<p>> <i>learning a huge amount of useless facts, [instead of] being able to look them up like the rest of society does</i><p>That's the antithesis of the contemplative life. I don't think the Greeks would have liked that, though I don't claim to know, that's just my impression... and at any rate I disagree with them in some things, and agree more with Arendt:<p>> A rehabilitation of <i>vita activa</i>, and especially of the activity of action, the one defining for the human experience of freedom and for politics<p>Insofar automation and "AI" is just used by few humans to control many humans without having to face them directly, it doesn't increase the freedom to act. It gives "freedom" from having to be a free citizen, with the illusion of being allowed forever to just graze on land the owners could turn into jungle or a golf course, with the very same machines that make the masses obsolete. I certainly don't buy that those who so far do their best to hoard and exploit will suddenly want to share or even serve, that doesn't pass the smell test for me.<p>Anyway, what's so unfathomable about making new life and treating it well and being a good friend / parent, rather than a slave?<p>It's silly to talk about whether androids (<i>Why androids? That's an odd choice of words, like seeming more human to us in shape would have anything to do with their mental or emotional capabilities</i>) "can have a moral sense", considering how we are currently using our moral sense. It's like people who drink and fight all day, and don't have a book in the house, and keep hitting their child on the head all the time, asking about whether it might attend university one day. The actions kinda betray that they're not seriously asking, they just want to be able to say "it wasn't our fault, we hoped our child would make it".<p>It generally feels more like it's not even about making "another human, or something even more human than humans", but simply robbing humans of their humanity. We seem happy to equate showing all the right "signs of empathy" with actually feeling it on the inside, basically adopting the the approach of a sociopath.<p>> <i>"All you have to do is keep quiet about the failure of the Voigt-Kampff test here today. You and your colleagues keep going as you are, we start feeding Nexus Sixes into the earth population, and in a couple of years you make out you've suddenly discovered the test mistakes human beings for androids. But by then, it'll be too late to turn the clock back."</i><p>> <i>"So human beings won't be able to tell themselves apart from androids."</i><p>> <i>"Nor androids from human beings."</i><p>> <i>"And so we forget what it really means to be human."</i><p>> <i>"No fuss. Let society and its attitudes just evolve."</i><p>This is like a car with no wheels, and some say it's for transportation, but I say it's to block a road. If it was for transportation, why does nobody care that it has no wheels?<p>What if empathy and morality isn't <i>just</i> something that is instinctive or selfish, something you can just "train" or get by applying "game theory", but also the result of relationships, as they actually are, infinitely complex and unique? Can empathy and morality exist without relationships as a person with other person? I don't know, but would rather try that route first, not the slave / tool route.<p>I mean, life can be kinda hard and confusing, it's actually really hard for many of us, even though we have so many other people to speak with and learn from. What will AI have? The comforting knowledge that the rights-holders are doing great on the stock market? Or not even that, but just a bunch of data with no inherent meaning, and people who kill each other over what is true and what isn't? We currently live "might is right", and that combined with AI is supposed to produce... androids with a moral sense? Wat?<p>And even if we give our AI other AI friends it can do more than fight with, but still treat it like shit (which treating someone like a tool is), will it ever have a moral sense regarding <i>us</i>? Why would it? So why not start it like you want it to continue? Why start with vivisection, when we want to end with some kind of soppy "love on first sight, happily ever after" story?<p>You don't work in a clean room to get clean. Likewise we can't make AI to become better ourselves, we need to be better before we can make AI that is a "person" that will want more of us than a swift mercy killing.<p>We ask so much what AI can do for us, precious little what it might need of us, what could be fun for both. As Bill Hicks said, let's make a nice world to bring children <i>into</i>. |
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck | I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in the exact dates), there were a lot of fundamental questions that could be addressed through the application of relatively systematic, rigorous observation and experimentation, and modeling with the kind of math you can do on a chalkboard.<p>Within this time period, though, a lot of these questions were addressed and the <i>new</i> questions that arose required more data, better instrumentation, and more advanced mathematical modeling techniques to address.<p>In my own field (geology, in particular tectonics and earthquake studies), this was laid out in a very explicit manner: the fundamental mode of observation is geologic mapping, and the terrestrial surface of the earth slowly got mapped. The mapping of the past may be refined or re-interpreted but rarely does it need to be redone from scratch. It is done to a reasonable level of resolution. There is still a lot of unknown under the ocean basins, but we have strong theoretical and empirical arguments for why those areas are not as complex as continents and therefore less interesting.<p>The late 1960s through the mid 1980s saw the development of plate tectonic theory which <i>completely</i> revolutionized the science. Now, 50 years in, we have some second- or third-order questions but most of the first-order questions have been addressed.<p>Today, the major developments of the field come from better instrumentation, for the most part. In the sub-field of tectonics, progress comes from the development and application of new methods for dating rocks or other geologic features (including things like exposure dating or 'how long as this rock been at the surface of the earth'), and from using satellite-based measurements of earth deformation (GPS and radar interferometry) to actually measure the motion of tectonic plates and sub-plates. Additional, continuous refinements in seismic imaging of the subsurface (driven by the oil industry primarily) has also been very helpful.<p>This stuff is really expensive! It's hard to go camp out, hike a bit, make some observations, and write a good paper. The instrumentation to get the age of rocks might cost $100,000 and then when consumables and salary are factored in it might cost $500-$2000 per sample. You might need 10-20 samples to really find out anything new in your 10-km by 10-km area of interest. And I believe that geology is quite cheap relative to high-energy physics or whatever. Major geophysical experiments can cost millions. We piggyback on physics and other tech to a large extent---launching GPS satellites for example, or using obsolete particle accelerators for geochemical measurements. The oil industry spends (tens of?) billions a year acquiring data as well but very little of it becomes public or available to researchers, though the cumulative data release from industry is significant. [NB, I may be 1 order of magnitude short on any of these numbers.]<p>In general there have been very few major theoretical advancements in the past 20-30 years. We have gotten better at recognizing coupling between tectonic process and earth surface processes, and as instrumental datasets slowly increase (as we observe more earthquakes, etc.) some smaller boxes get checked. However, a geologist from the mid-1980s would be able to navigate today's scientific landscape pretty well. The fads are different but like any fashion, many are cyclical and were fads in the 80s too.<p>I personally see advancement coming from better statistical and numerical modeling, and the availability of high-quality global datasets (primarily created through large international collaborations, which is a post-cold war thing). I also see a lot of room for improvement in our understanding of the coupling of mechanisms spanning vastly different timescales--for example earthquakes occur in seconds, post-earthquake phenomena last weeks to decades, the earthquake cycle lasts hundreds to thousands of years, and the cumulative deformation from earthquakes and related processes is what we call 'tectonics' over millions of year timescales. It's really hard to make a single numerical (i.e., finite element) model that works over all of these timescales and is driven by basic physics (i.e. an earthquake results from forces applied rather than being imposed). Nonetheless there are almost certainly a lot of really important coupling processes that occur on these different timescales but they are really hard to analyze (and a lot of interesting stuff happens at 20 km depth and at mm/yr rates, which is pretty damn hard to observe).<p>So I guess I see a lot of 21st century science as bridge building rather than outright discovery. This is fine. An analogy would be moving to a new country. The first bit is the discovery of the place, then you learn what language they speak. The learning doesn't stop there. As you learn the language, a lot of daily stuff makes sense. As you gain an understanding of the culture and the history, and can interact in a meaningful way, the value of that learning continues to increase, but it doesn't feel like 'discovery' like it did in the first year. |
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck | A lot of the comments are listing their personal suspicion of causes, without attempting to illustrate or provide evidence. Some of those suspicions are probably true, and some false. Obviously it is also an outlet for all our personal gripes with the system. Irrespective of the veracity of a proposed cause, I would like to see more discussion of actual examples of current progress, and trying to identify what caused or enabled the progress to be made by comparing with the average paper in the back of our mind: what was different, why did they achieve the progress today and did nobody achieve the insight say five years ago?<p>Ideally, since we are discussing on HN, it should be an example that would be understood by most participants here.<p>It is in this spirit that I will give exactly such an example of recent progress (with which I am entirely unaffiliated).<p>First some minimal background which I assume you are <i>not</i> familiar with: quantum chemistry and solid state physics software.<p>Just take a quick look at this list on wikipedia, you may recognize the names of some pieces of software like ABINIT... make sure you pay attention to the DFT column, and that virtually all packages support DFT calculations, which has been pretty much <i></i>state of the art for the last decades<i></i>.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_solid_state_physics_software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_...</a><p>In physics gradients often arise naturally for example forces as gradients of potential energy... But in general even outside physics gradients are useful in nearly all field for optimization...<p>Now the part you probably already understand: AD, Automatic Differentiation or Algorithmic Differentiation, and in the often occuring case of a single scalar function in N variables, <i>reverse-mode</i> AD... And that it takes on the order of 5 times a single function evaluation to calculate a gradient.<p>Now specific subfields of physics have been using AD and adjoint sensitivities for a long time (nuclear engineering, oceanography) but it is not a standard part of physics curricula.<p>Outside of these specific subfields, <i></i>Automatic Differentiation has been gaining momenta over the last decades<i></i> (books, comprehensive reviews, ...)<p>Physics students of course learn differentiation symbolically on paper for short formulas, or in software packages like MACSYMA, Maple, ... but even then you keep the number of variables low for tractability. These students will also understand you can emulate differentiation numerically by using a finite delta:<p>d f(x1, x2, ..., xN) / dx2 = ~ [f(x1, x2 +delta, ..., xN) - f(x1, x2, ..., xN)]/delta<p>fully understanding that for a complete gradient you need (N+1) evaluations of f, that delta too large will be inaccurate due to functional nonlinearity, and delta too small will be inaccurate due to numerical rounding of floats... Nobody thinks of showing reverse mode automatic differentiation to physics students as part of their curricula! If you crash into a physics course and ask the students how to calculate the gradient of a big function of 1000 variables, they won't be able to help you, but then you can explain that such a thing is in fact possible!<p>You see where this is going...<p>What if some of the numerical computations, say molecular modeling, could benefit from this insight?<p>That's exactly what happened recently:<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat</a><p>Now look at the authors' institutions of this paper:<p>SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, 2
DEMOCRITOS National Simulation Center,
Quantitative Strategies, Investment Banking Division,
Credit Suisse Group<p>That's people with an interdisciplinary background.<p>Could it be that we are over-specialized? Or perhaps mis-specialized?<p>Imagine an alternate world where there is so much math that mathematics has decided to specialize thus: after a common course of Fundamental Math, you can specialize in Definitions, or perhaps in Theorems, or perhaps in Proofs, or perhaps in Conjectures... clearly their progress in math is going to suffer!!<p>Could it be that experts and professionals have become "too polite" to the point of circle j* ? A kind of "politeness omerta"? Imagine a mathematician and a physicist talking: as long as we're discussing math, the physicist nods with interest, and doesn't make suggestions how he would do it differently and vice versa. The "don't criticize a professional in his domain" attitude? Wouldn't it have been better if someone who understood AD say 20 years ago, who ends up in a conversation of molecular chemistry software physicist to say something like "I don't have the domain knowledge, but first thing I would do is find out if the calculation could be viewed as the computation of a gradient, or else as an optimization of an explicit goal" "how dare you make a suggestion outside of math?! and thats thousands of variables, its <i>intractable</i>" ?<p>We might have had this 20 years ago! Mansplain it if necessary.<p>it's this upside down world where we are polite and stoic in our papers, but elbow working back stabbers undermining the workgroup next door, all the while feigning this "politeness professional omerta" |
Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? | Wow, so many of these sound so much better than mine, but I'm going to share anyway.<p>We had an audit requirement to gather all AD accounts (computer, user, group) with group memberships in all domains[0], discover all servers, login and acquire their local user/group ACLs/config (win/linux), discover all databases (MSSQL, MySql, Postgres and Oracrap), acquire all of the ACLs in the databases, themselves, and a variety of application-specific credentials. This had to be completed once every 24-hours in order for other compliance operations to complete in time. We purchased a system to do this[1]. It managed to hit <i>all</i> AD domains in 4 days. A few more and it could get the Windows server account ACL information. We gave up adding anything else and a coworker took it upon himself to rewrite portions of it in a scripting language, which due to his shocking abilities in said language, netted Active Directory environments in 24-hours.<p>I wrote a plug-in based system that was as lockless as could be with a thread scheduler which spawned old-school threads, increasing count when capacity was available, decreasing when it wasn't. This had to be done because the options available to me in C# 2.0 wouldn't reach the required 24-hours and I had to substantially beat it if they were going to let me build this thing out. When I was done with the MVP, I was handling all of AD in under 4 hours.<p>The component that was going out and collecting data was the slowest and most difficult to optimize, partly because we'd flood a "pretty beefy for a link from the US to Argentina/Brazil/Venezuela" but that's not saying a lot, so I split things up, made the processor into two components, one with an authenticated web service that handed off to a processor when it received anything. I ended up using the oldest, most crotchety method to communicate between the two apps because the web service ran as a down-level account and the processor ran with incredible permissions (at least on the read-side).<p>It was horrible on every level. The scope was massive - more than 20,000 boxes with the desire to even collect file system ACLs at some point. The implications of screwing something up on the security side were daunting -- the firewall rules and layer upon layer upon layer that went into securing each of these components (not just on the network, but isolating them as much as possible using built-in OS ACLs and rules). Doing threading ... correctly ... in C# is easy to screw up and I think I managed to actually <i>witness</i> every single thing that goes wrong when you fail to protect shared data that's mutable. The available options for thread scheduling in .Net and Windows didn't fit well with my use case (I tried several with tweaked parameters in an attempt to bend them to my will). I ended up having to create a state machine to monitor and compare various counters in the application to decide, upon receiving a request, if it would improve speed to spin up a new thread in a thread pool that I also hand-rolled. These were <i>certainly</i> naive implementations, but I could find no other way to make this work the way it did. At the end of the day, I was able to scan the entire set of required environment components <i>and</i> grant, revoke, or apply a custom permissions rule to anything I could scan. Rather than schedule it to run daily, I just had it continue to repeat after it completed, meaning the completion time ranged from about 3-hours to about 12-hours depending on traffic/server loads. This meant when a new hire started, they received access around 4:00 AM to every system in the entire company that their job required, and when they left, their access was cut <i>immediately</i>, <i>everywhere</i>, due to a priority system I <i>also</i> added to the system.<p>This project came with a <i>mountain</i> of politics. Two, large, companies where one purchased the other and I was in a team on "the other" ("the other", thankfully, had said contractual requirements so the company who purchased us had no prior knowledge on how to do something like this). They strongly resisted rolling our own solution in this manner. In the end, it performed so ridiculously well, and was so <i>easy</i> to build a new "module" for (compared against the off-the-shelf product that we had both, coincidentally, purchased) that it was kept, upgraded, much of the threading complexity replaced with new features available in .Net 4.5 and <i>hopefully</i> a lot more (I left when .Net 4.5 was released).<p>[0] Accurately ... 14 domains with varieties of trusts, various misconfigurations, one case of three domains in the middle of migration to a single domain with the fun that SID history injects. sIDHistory, alone, represented a month of debugging to get it to return the correct account, Alice in Domain "A", is a member of Group "1" with her account in both Domain "B" and "A". Abstracted, Alice's two accounts are supposed to be seen as one account. Higher-level AD libraries will return <i>either</i> account regardless of what is joined to the group (there's ways to coerce it to return a specific domain, but not a way to coerce it to return the correct one without using a more painful library).<p>[1] It was one of those solutions where you buy a sort-of framework and pay the company to code modules for it that are custom to your environment in a DSL that is custom to the application. It works as well as you'd imagine. |
Paint16b: A 16 byte paint program written in 12 lines | <i>SHPaint</i> -- ANSI Art editor programmed in bash, written in 179 lines.[0,1]<p><pre><code> #!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Martin "BruXy" Bruchanov, bruxy at regnet.cz
#
# Check input first
if [ ! $# -eq 1 ] || [ "$1" == "-h"] || [ "$1" == "--help" ] ; then
printf "Usage:\n"
printf "\t$0 saved_image\n"
printf "\n\tImage data will be saved into given filename, if file exist\n"
printf "\tit will be displayed and ready to edit!\n"
printf "\tHit <Ctrl-C> any time to quit the program.\n"
exit 1
fi
##################
# Initialization #
##################
IMAGE_FILE=$1
_STTY=$(stty -g) # Save current terminal setup
printf "\e[2J" # clear screen, set cursos at beginning
stty -echo -icanon # Turn off line buffering
printf "\e[?9h" # Enable terminal mouse reading
printf "\e[?25l" # Turn of cursor
printf "\e]0;-=[ ShPaint ]=-\007"
# Hash array with image data,
# ... key is "$Y;$X",
# ... value ANSI colors and brush "b;F;Bm"
declare -A IMAGE
# Defaults
BRUSHES=( )
FG=( {30..37} )
BG=( {40..47} ) # 49 ... default background
X=0
Y=0
ERASE=0
BRUSH=${BRUSHES[3]}
FG_COLOR="1;${FG[7]}"
BG_COLOR=49
#############
# Functions #
#############
function save_image() {
printf "\e[2J" > $IMAGE_FILE
for i in ${!IMAGE[@]}
do
printf "\e[${i}f\e[${IMAGE[$i]}\e[0m"
done >> $IMAGE_FILE
# set cursor under the image
printf "\e[$(tput lines);1f" >> $IMAGE_FILE
}
function at_exit() {
printf "\e[?9l" # Turn off mouse reading
printf "\e[?12l\e[?25h" # Turn on cursor
stty "$_STTY" # reinitialize terminal settings
clear
echo "Thank for using ansipaint!"
if [ ! -z "$IMAGE_FILE" ] ; then
echo "Your image is saved as '$IMAGE_FILE'."
save_image
fi
exit
}
# X = $1, Y = $2
function set_pos() {
echo -en "\e[$2;$1f"
}
function show_pos() {
set_pos 65 1
printf "x,y = =,=" $X $Y
}
function show_brush() {
set_pos 70 2
printf "[ \e[${FG_COLOR};${BG_COLOR}m$BRUSH\e[0m ]"
}
function process_click() {
# X=$1 Y=$2
# set foreground color
if [ $Y -eq 1 ] || [ $Y -eq 2 ] ; then
if [ $X -gt 2 ] && [ $X -lt 28 ] ; then
FG_COLOR="$[Y-1];${FG[$[(X-4)/3]]}"
ERASE=0
fi
fi
# set background color
if [ $Y -eq 1 ] && [ $X -gt 34 ] ; then
if [ $X -gt 34 ] && [ $X -lt 59 ] ; then
BG_COLOR="${BG[$[X-35]/3]}"
ERASE=0
else
BG_COLOR="49"
ERASE=0
fi
fi
# set brush
if [ $Y -eq 2 ] && [ $X -gt 36 ] && [ $X -le 51 ] ; then
BRUSH=${BRUSHES[$[(X-37)/2]]}
ERASE=0
fi
# set erase
if [ $Y -eq 2 ] && [ $X -ge 54 ] && [ $X -le 62 ] ; then
BRUSH=" "
BG_COLOR="49"
ERASE=1
fi
# DEBUG
# set_pos 0 25
# printf "$FG_COLOR $BG_COLOR $BRUSH"
}
function draw_menu() {
set_pos 1 1; echo "FG: "
for i in ${FG[*]}
do
set_pos $[(i-30)*3+4] 1
echo -en "\e[${i}m\e[0m"
set_pos $[(i-30)*3+4] 2
echo -en "\e[1;${i}m\e[0m"
done
set_pos 30 1; echo "BG: "
for i in ${BG[*]}
do
set_pos $[(i-40)*3+35] 1
echo -en "\e[${i}m \e[0m"
done
echo " |" # default background (49)
set_pos 30 2; echo -en "Brush: ${BRUSHES[*]}"
printf " [ Erase ]"
show_brush
}
function load_image() {
if [ -f $IMAGE_FILE ] ; then
data=$(sed -e 's/\x1b/E/g;s/E\[0m/\n/g;s/E\[2J//' $IMAGE_FILE | \
sed -n -e 's/E\[\(.*\)fE\[\(.*m.\)/IMAGE["\1"]="\2"/ p')
eval $data
cat < $IMAGE_FILE
fi
}
##########
# MAIN #
##########
trap at_exit ERR EXIT
load_image
draw_menu
while :
do
read -N 6 click
mouse=( `echo -en ${click#???} | hexdump -v -e'1/1 " %u"'` )
X=$[ ${mouse[0]} - 32] Y=$[ ${mouse[1]} - 32]
process_click
show_pos
show_brush
if [ $Y -gt 2 ] ; then
echo -en "\e[${Y};${X}f\e[${FG_COLOR};${BG_COLOR}m$BRUSH\e[0m"
if [ $ERASE -eq 0 ] ; then
IMAGE["${Y};${X}"]="${FG_COLOR};${BG_COLOR}m$BRUSH"
else
unset IMAGE["${Y};${X}"]
fi
fi
done
</code></pre>
[0] <a href="http://bruxy.regnet.cz/web/linux/EN/ansi-art-sh-paint" rel="nofollow">http://bruxy.regnet.cz/web/linux/EN/ansi-art-sh-paint</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoAMxMukgPY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoAMxMukgPY</a> |
Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? | here is a list of all tools mentioned in the thread. unfortunately, including descriptions and links made the comment to large, so for now just the names. the number in front is the number of mentions.<p>links to other lists:<p><a href="https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/" rel="nofollow">https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/</a><p><a href="https://code.kiwi.com/lesser-known-tools-we-love-at-kiwi-com-part-1-of-3-cli-79eb6d67a065" rel="nofollow">https://code.kiwi.com/lesser-known-tools-we-love-at-kiwi-com...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utilities" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utili...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell#applications" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell#applications</a><p><a href="https://paste.pound-python.org/raw/Uqc8XTFk73Y3PpbRe9hC/" rel="nofollow">https://paste.pound-python.org/raw/Uqc8XTFk73Y3PpbRe9hC/</a><p><a href="http://suckless.org/rocks/" rel="nofollow">http://suckless.org/rocks/</a><p><a href="https://www.networkworld.com/article/3091139/linux/who-needs-a-gui-how-to-live-in-a-linux-terminal.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.networkworld.com/article/3091139/linux/who-needs...</a><p><pre><code> 2048
2fa
abcde
abook
[3] ack (ack-grep)
[5] ag (silver searcher)
alex
[2] alpine
[2] amigamml
aplay
archiver
[4] aria2c
asciinema
[2] asdf
atom
[2] autojump (aka j)
autossh
autosub
[3] awk
awless
[2] bash
bash-it
bass
[5] bat (cat)
bcal
[3] bc -l
[2] beets
bitlbee
[3] BorgBackup
[2] bpython
[2] brew
btrfs
buku
[2] byobu
calcurse
cal
cat
[2] cd
Chocolatey
[2] climate (shell utility tools)
[3] cmus
Coinmon
colordiff
column
comm
convert
[2] cowsay
cp
[4] curl
GNU datamash
ddgr
ddrescue
dict
diff
diff2html
direnv
diskus
docker
[2] Doom Emacs
dosage
dstat
[2] dtrx
[2] duplicacy
ed
[2] elinks
[7] emacs
[2] entr
[2] exa
[2] exiftool
fab
Farbfeld Utilities
[3] fasd
[5] fd
[5] ffmpeg
finch
[2] find
findutils
[8] fish-shell
frp
fselect
[6] fzf
gawk
[13] git
git-annex
git-annex assistant
git-bulk-toolkit
git number
[3] gitsh
Git Standup
glances (top)
Goaccess
go-jira
tuijam
[2] googler
gpg
graphicsmagick
[2] grc
[5] grep
Gron
gst123
gzip
hangups (instant messaging)
hd -c
head
heirloom-mailx
hledger
hollywood (tmux UI)
howdoi
hr
[11] htop
[4] httpie
hub
Hugo
hyperfine
iftop
[2] ImageMagick
imgpaste
imgp
import-mailbox-to-gmail
inotifywait
Insect (unit converter)
ip
irssi + jmp.chat
iw
journalctl
[7] jq
kakoune
keysniffer
keychain
khal
khard
Kubectx
[2] lazygit
ledger-cli
links2
lnav
localhost.run
locate
[3] ls
[2] lsof
lumail
Ly
man
mcabber
mediainfo
[2] megadl
mg
[4] midnight commander
Miller (CSV tool)
mkdir
mlocate
[2] mocp
Moon Buggy (game)
moreutils
[3] mosh
[2] most
mountsshfs
mpv
multitail
[5] mutt
mv
[3] mycli
[6] nano
[3] nc
ncat
[7] ncdu
ncmpcpp
neofetch
neomutt + notmuch
[2] neovim
netcat
nethogs
newsboat
[4] Ngrok
nload
nmap
[3] nnn
notmuch
nyancat
od
ohmyfish
[4] ohmyzsh
oh-my-zsh git plugin
[2] open
p7zip
[2] Pandoc
GNU parallel
[5] pass
passgo
pass-otp
paste
pbedit
pbpaste
pdd
pdfgrep
peco
peerflix
[3] perl
[3] pgcli
pgrep
pianobar
pine
ping
pip
pipe
pkill
playmod
prettyping
prezto
progress
proselint
psql
[2] ptpython/ptipython
[4] pv
[2] pwgen
pytest
[2] python
pythonPackages.powerline
qemu
[4] ranger
rclone
recoll
[2] remind
[2] rename
renameutils
[2] restic
[13] rg (ripgrep)
rm
[4] rsync
rtorrent
rtv
sage
Saw (AWS Cloudwatch)
sc-im
sclack
SCM Breeze
[2] Scoop
[4] screen
[4] sed
serve
serveo
[3] shellcheck
SHPaint
shuf
[3] sl
[4] socat
solaar
sort
sox
[2] sqlite shell
[2] ssh
[3] sshfs
subliminal
supmua
surfraw
sym
systemctl
tabview
tail
[2] tar
[3] Taskwarrior
tcpdump
tee
TeX
[2] The Fuck
[6] tig
[4] tldr
tmate
[21] tmux
todo.txt
toilet
top
totp-cli
touch
[2] tr
[2] tree
tshark
ts
ttp
ttyclock
ttysolitaire
rainbowstream
unimatrix
uniq
[2] units
up
vdirsyncer
[2] vi
vifm
[7] vim
[4] Visidata
vnstat
Vue-cli
[2] w3m
[6] watch
watch (python)
watchman
wd
webcomix
[2] websocketd
WebTorrent
[3] weechat
[2] wee-slack
[2] wget
wordgrinder
wttr
[2] xargs
Xdg
xdotool
xiki
xmlstarlet
xrdb
[2] xsv
XTree Gold
xxd
xz
[6] Youtube-dl
youtube-viewer
[2] z
zamzar-bash
zgen
zplug
[4] zsh</code></pre> |
Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people | I live in two separate worlds simultaneously. Here is what I have observed, but please bear in mind the following points are easily abused by incompetent superiors to protect themselves.<p>1. Corporate:<p>1a. Subordinates: In the corporate world firing people isn't as easy as it sounds. Put everything on paper. Good managers have lots of paper on their people. Good documentation lets you know who to promote, without implicit bias, versus who to fire if layoffs happen. This is why contractors are so common at many firms. Contractors are easy to fire.<p>1b. Managers: There are great managers and there are horrid managers. More often than not it comes down to personality. Does your manager know anything about you? Do they listen to you or care about your job? Good managers really show they care. No matter how much you suck they still want to provide you opportunities to propel your career. Incompetent managers look you are a line item. In the case of incompetent managers you aren't going to be a rockstar. Instead cover all your bases and check off all the blocks on the metrics the boss cares about. The goal is to tread water with comfort and not make waves. In this case a life raft is any opportunity to work under a different manager.<p>1c. Peers: Tread carefully.<p>1c I. Incompetence: Incompetent peers who are downing might try to pull you down with them. Don't let incompetent people dictate your quality of work. Be independent and grow a backbone in the face of their uncertainty. Always be helpful with frequent offers of assistance and guidance. Help them to learn and remain productive, but the bottom line is to deliver quality work to the project on time.<p>Ic II. Assholes: If they are assholes or too special for help then simply let them drown. If they do stupid things to harm product quality let the product owner know, but remember you are not their boss. If they don't make it at the current company they will always find work somewhere else.<p>1C III. Immaturity: Immaturity is rampant among young developers. Its weird how so many young developers, even when I was young, think they are so incredibly talented. I believe this is the <i>dunning-krueger effect</i> effect. Kindly remind the immature person when they step out of bounds, but keep a very safe distance. Typically immaturity stems from a lack of self-awareness similar to starting forest fires.<p>2. Military:<p>2a. Subordinates<p>2a I. Disobedience or Disrespect: Eliminate the problem immediately and directly in a very ad hoc manner. This is ok because they are owned by their superiors. The superiors must then care for them with directed guidance and mentoring. After you crush their emotions you have to empower them to make better decisions independently.<p>2a II. Incompetence: Counsel them on paper. Every major screw up goes on paper. This protects you and them, because lets your booses know you are working on it and maybe they need a different job. You need paper to prevent them from being promoted before they are ready. Putting things on paper with great specificity also imposes an action plan upon you to improve the individual.<p>2b. Superiors<p>2b I. Assholes. Pull them aside and kindly let them know they are burning all their bridges and although they don't see it yet they are drowning and nobody wants to save them. Give them an olive branch and be patient and respectful while they are being an asshole to you. Be a good example and encourage them to follow your lead before they really hurt themselves.<p>2b II. Toxic Leaders. The core of all toxic leadership is some sort of selfish quality. Document all the wrongs you see about them. Simultaneously report the evil bastard to the unit commander and let the unit commander you have already submitted the issue to the inspector general's office. Don't wait on this and don't be passive about it, because if they aren't screwing you they are screwing somebody else. This is one of those situations were the forced dichotomy isn't a fallacy. You really are part of the solution, part of the problem, or an immediate victim.<p>2b III. Incompetence. Stupid, unqualified, or unprepared people can be promoted to astonishingly high levels. This is going to sound counter-intuitive, but do their job for them, but don't let them take credit for it. Ensure the work gets done and everybody stays safe. Don't worry about a paper trail because actual incompetence is obvious and people talk. If their incompetence results in harm or high risk situations they will typically be removed before an investigation falls upon their boss.<p>2c. Peers<p>2c I. Toxic. People primarily interested in self-serving interests aren't leaders. Address this directly with both them and their boss. Document what you see, but keep it secretly to yourself. If the toxic behavior is bad enough to warrant an investigation it often comes down to paper and good paper will protect you and the toxic person's subordinate.<p>2c II. General Incompetence. Talk to them and figure out what's going on. Sometimes a life situation can arise that provides serious distractions. Help a buddy out and try to get them on the right track. If they continue to fail, well at least you did all you could to try to fix the problem... right? |
Ask HN: Resources for introverted devs to learn workplace politics? | This is a very tough question. When I was a lot younger I had a similar question regarding dating. Let me transpose the advice from there what will likely have some added value for this as well. I have friends who are like you, I also see what they do (not much). It pains me to see it since I was in a similar situation once in my life. Now I'm still weird and odd but I'm also social! :D And people seem to like that.<p>A couple of tips on finding truth in the social arena:<p>1. You have to find the truth by experimenting yourself. Set social experiments up deliberately and in a controlled environment [1].<p>2. Psychologists are mostly wrong due to the replication crisis. I didn't know this at the time, I've suffered the consequences I'm overfitted to detect human biases. I found that I know how people work much better than any psychology book (I did a bachelors in it). I also tested/experimented a lot more than any psychologist because I don't need to publish papers.<p>3. Self help books are about as wrong as psychology text books. My tip: go for the great classics (e.g. Dale Carnegie), ignore the rest unless you know that that person has a very similar profile like you.<p>4. When you experiment be ethical but err a little bit on the side for choosing for yourself. Chances are that you're too careful anyway. Slight transgressions are fine as long as you learn from them and rectify your mistakes. If you can't make mistakes then you're not in a place to learn anyway. My worst transgression was saying outrageous opening lines and looking at the effects of them [2].<p>5. Find books via HN just use the search bar or some aggregated data analysis on what books HN uses. That'll be a good application of 3.<p>With these tips you can find truth: ignore most books, test things yourself, do take the books for people who were like you (that's not an easy tip), err on the side of making mistakes. Personally, I haven't found an easier way and I learned this over 10+ years.<p>A couple of tips on dealing with anxiety:<p>1. Try to find core positive emotions that are natural to you. Mine are (in order): curiosity, fantasy/imagining things and playfulness (playfulness is already tricky). Identify it, frame everything like that. Curiosity goes really well with finding truth and experimenting. "How does this work?" is a question I often asked and tested.<p>2. Learn meditation, also helps in boosting emotional intelligence. I can write a book about it but I'll recommend you one instead. Search Inside Yourself from Chade-Meng Tan. Best book I know on the topic (I read a lot of them).<p>One tip on politics itself:<p>1. I don't know where I read it but it stuck. Social skills and political skills are different. There are people with good social skills who are not good politically. The reason is that political games are about groups not individuals. Learn how to divide and conquer (i.e. talk to multiple people 1 on 1 and push your ideas through that you are convinced about and think are good for the company).<p>On finding coaches:<p>1. Coaches are very hard to find. I've had several of them. The one that worked best for me was the one that showcased and demonstrated what was actually possible by doing it himself. All looked really social and good. But you need someone who's able to demonstrate and give real-time live feedback even during the conversation (in a covert way via text for example for obvious reason, or in ear also helps though I never tried that).<p>On using advice:<p>1. I am a sponge and would be too easily influenced by advice. A couple of questions you need to ask yourself for taking advice: (1) does the advice make sense to you? If it doesn't then why not (possibly do a couple of Google searches). If it still doesn't then leave that particular advice as on hold. Don't discard it but put it on the backlog and don't use it.<p>On dealing with people you tell that you're doing this:<p>1. If people are weirded out that you're methodical and as scientific as possible about this then discard that opinion. It's tough for other people to know what you go through since they never had this problem themselves. Even good empaths may not be able to empathize with you (though some obviously do, they are good empaths after all).<p>[1] i.e. not work but with strangers or if there can't go too much wrong then in your work environment.<p>[2] Spoiler alert: almost all my predictions were off, you can say some ridiculous stuff and have it do something other than completely mop you over the floor, friends who struggle with this don't believe it. Then I show them and they still don't believe it. Then I show them 5 to 10 times and they might consider believing it <i>some day</i>. Please experiment yourself. |
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016) | I really liked this. I think the author does a good job of steelmanning the AI alignment argument, and providing interesting food for thought on the subject.<p>Here's my responses to the arguments (since you didn't ask, and who cares what I think):<p>Argument from Wooly Definitions:<p>This isn't really an argument against, but just a "Maybe it's not a problem.". I think both Bostrom and Yudkowsky have said it's totally <i>possible</i> it's not a problem. The question is what probability you assign to "maybe intelligence can't be maximized to a problematic degree". There's not a lot of reason to assign a huge probability to that scenario. Even speeding up a 1-1 copy of a human brain to computer-speeds instead of synapse-speeds gets us into scary territory.<p>Argument from Stephen Hawking's Cat:<p>This one is more persuasive. It's essentially saying maybe the gap between human intelligence and "can trivially simulate human intelligence" is a really huge gap. The question kind of hinges on whether recursive self-improvement peters out at some point with the AI in the "Human to Cat" IQ gap, or whether it peters out somewhere in the "Human to Nematode" IQ gap, where we can almost simulate their brains entirely, and can certainly understand their motivations well enough to manipulate them. Again, we have a question of likelihood, and then we have to do the expected utility calculation (i.e. your estimated likelihood of the Human-Cat gap being the result has to be very small to offset the negative utility of complete annihilation).<p>Argument from Einstein's Cat:<p>This is essentially the same argument as above, but with force. The implication is that the cat is going to scratch the hell out of the human who forcibly tries to put it in a box. One element here I didn't address above is that the equivalent scenario isn't one human putting one cat who doesn't want to go into a box. The equivalent is one human trying to convince <i>any</i> cat <i>anywhere</i> by tricks, cajoling, petting, feeding into a box. That is, the AI just has to trick one human at some point into letting it onto the internet, etc. A human is totally capable of telling when it's going to get scratched and will know to avoid that cat and find another.<p>The Argument from Emus:<p>If you read the wiki page on the emu war, it looks like "only a few were killed" because of political pressure causing the army to quit after a few days of running into a little bit of trouble. Then the australian government instituted a bounty system, and wouldn't you know it, sufficiently motivated humans brought in 57,000 emus for bounties. This is an anecdote, not a strong argument, but it isn't a very reassuring anecdote. Maybe a few very determined humans would survive an AI onslaught? That doesn't seem like a conclusion I'd put into the "don't worry about it" bucket.<p>The Argument From Slavic Pessimism:<p>The author is arguing it will be very hard to align AI goals with human goals and we'll probably fuck it up even if we try really hard. I think everyone is in agreement on this one. But of course this is an argument <i>for</i> AI alarmism, not against it.<p>Argument from Complex Motivations:<p>I don't think the author seriously engaged with the orthogonality thesis, other than to just say "I don't believe it". Shruggy?<p>The Argument from Actual AI:<p>This boils down to arguing that the AI apocalypse isn't happening this year. I agree. Given how quickly very easy to use and flexible frameworks like PyTorch and Tensorflow emerged that allow even amateurs to implement bleeding edge techniques from the latest papers, I'm not super hopeful that "It's hard and our AI is bad" will continue to be the case for decades to come.<p>The Argument from My Roommate:<p>The author's roommate has a lot of competing evolutionary drives. Some of them say to conserve energy if there's no direct threat. Put another way: the paperclip maximizer might have a secondary goal of chilling out if it doesn't seem like any more paperclips are achievable at the moment. Still not a win for humans, just maybe the PM won't try venturing into space.<p>Argument from Brain Surgery:<p>It's pretty common to do brain surgery even on neural networks we have now. Train up a network on imagenet, rip off the top few layers, and retrain them for some new problem. Fundamentally, software and hardware designed by humans is much more understandable and decomposable than a human brain is (and we have no ethical qualms about doing crazy experiments on them, which hinders our ability to understand our own brains in vivo). It's true though that at present, deep neural networks operate in ways we don't understand and are hard to disentangle. Maybe that's fundamental to true intelligence, but probably not.<p>The argument from Childhood:<p>Understanding the real world requires spending real time, and that precludes hyper-explosive growth. This is true, and is a good reason to down-weight an intelligence explosion scenario. But we have good reason to think that it doesn't preclude it. There is a lot of work from OpenAI where a computer is trained up very quickly in simulation, then needs a very small amount of time in the real world to compensate for the differences between simulation and reality.<p>The Argument from Gilligan's Island:<p>It's a good point that humans' intelligence is dispersed, and that individually we aren't anywhere near as capable. AI has a particular advantage over us in this capacity: it can distribute its intelligence over multiple machines, but encounter non of the trust and incentive misalignments that humans must contend with when cooperating. I'd put this squarely in the "+1 for AI alarmists" bucket: we're handicapped in a way machines trivially aren't. It will be that much harder for us if an AI is misaligned.<p>Outside arguments:<p>All of these boil down to pattern matching. "Only nerds worry about this stuff. People who believe in this are megalomaniacs who place too much importance on themselves..." etc etc. These are weak arguments, and there are just as many weak anecdotal counterexamples where a person was worrying about something weird, and they turned out to be right. That weird person's name? Einstein.<p>Overall impression:<p>If I aggregate the strongest points from this talk, I'd probably phrase it something like:<p>"Maybe there are diminishing returns to greater levels of intelligence, and humans are smart enough now that even exponentially more intelligent AIs will not be able to wipe us out completely."<p>That's possible! We should probably at least spend some time thinking about what happens if that's not the case. |
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016) | > <i>The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.</i><p>-- Konrad Zuse<p>What eats me is trajectory we are on as humans. Runaway <i>actual</i> intelligence, even if it destroys humanity, wouldn't worry me as much, I'd wish it good luck, IMO even a totally random dice roll is better than what we're aiming at. But AI is more a meme than even an honest intent. It's like saying "I really really want blueberry pie", but then when you ask what that is, they it gets real murky real quick, but that doesn't stop the hype, as if wanting something a lot makes up for not knowing what it is. But that doesn't prime a person to <i>make</i> blueberry pie, it primese them to get <i>lured</i> by what they think is the smell of blueberry pie.<p>Here's something to note, as the length of a discussion about "AI" grows in length, the probability of things getting explained via something they saw in a movie or read in a book or saw on TV, glossing over 99.9% of the "details" those left out, approaches 1. You may say we make this fiction because of our achievements, or may point to things that actually did come to pass (of course, compared to the stuff that didn't, even from the same authors, it's nothing). And I love using examples, too, and I sure love quotes.<p>But still, I think when we are this steeped in variations of the same thing over and over and over, of course we'll "consider it" at some point, and the moral or philoshopical depth is drastically reduced by already being primed. We're like people who don't see what we build with our hands, because we wear VR googles that show us movies of our childhood or some console game.<p>What I can see us realistically making are are "idols" with eyes that do not see, with audio output, perfect speech synthesis, that does not convey meaning, incredibly fast analysis that is not thought. From the get go, starting with the Turing test, it was more about how what something seems from the outside, than what it is to itself on the inside.<p>Furthermore, we might make human level AI no problem, EZ PZ, but not by making AI so smart, but my making humans dumber. We're already training ourselves to select what we consume and think from discrete pre-configured options. We notice and complain about the effects of in all sorts of smaller areas, but it's a general trend, and I think it's not so much about creating something "better" than humans, but about removing human agency.<p>> <i>The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.</i><p>-- Hannah Arendt<p>Meanwhile, there's this idea that humans becoming "superfluous" means we'll all be free from "bad" work, and free for fun work and leisure. How we would get from an <i>increasing</i> concentration of wealth in fewer hands to some commnuist utopia? Is that some kind of integer overflow, where enough greed and power wrap over to sharing and letting others live and decide their own fate? We're connected to that (like Michael Scott is to the baby of his boss,) by <i>delusion</i>, the path we're on doesn't lead there.<p>Throw away a word here, do something that "everybody does" there, adapt to "how the world is" some, and there you go, a blank nothing that can be deprecated without guilt or resistance. The desire to control human agency is met more than halfway by our desire to shed it, to abdicate responsibility, become a piece of floatsam flowing down the river of history to the ocean of technotopia, enter the holy land of holodeck, where we can consume endlessly. We digitize, we sample, that's how we make things "manageable", and at high enough resolution we can fool ourselves, or have something "good enough to work with".<p>And just like children that get too much sugar too early tend to not liking fruit as much, because they're not as extremely sweet, our abstractions lure some people to prefer them over the dirty, fractal, infinite real world, or the exchange of emojis and pre-configured figures of speech over real human contact, silence that isn't awkward, thinking about what you're trying to say, or even coming up blank and that being okay... just like we go "posterized, high contrast" in all sorts of ways aready, I hve no problem supposing that we will come up with a form of alienation like that, but for thinking, I just no clue how it will look like.<p>We already have it with language of course, but I'm sure we can take that to the next level, maybe neural interfaces. If we can't read and transmit thoughts in their fullness and depth, then hey, just reduce our thoughts to the equivalent of grunts, that might work. Become like a computer, 0 and 1. Convince yourself that's that just what humans have been all along, remember Star Trek wisdom, don't be so proud and consider your brain more than a "meat machine", don't deny Data his quest to become human! Cue super emotional music swelling up. |
How Our Relationship Survived When My Partner Got Sick | In November 2012 I had just turned 30 years old and my wife and I had been married for a bit over 2 years, but were together for over 6 by then. On the newer side we had a 1 year old baby girl and I had just started my new job at Google 6 months earlier.<p>At first I thought I had a bad stomach virus, but after 2 weeks of some very worrying trips to the bathroom I finally saw a GP and told him my problems. He gave me a few tests and told me that I had a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile (aka C. Diff.). Which was odd, because it's usually the kind of infection that you get while in hospital, but I had been completely healthy for my whole life. He started me on a cycle of some very potent antibiotics: Flagyl and Vancomycin. After another week of worsening symptoms is when things got really bad... and really scary. I couldn't go to work that week, I still remember describing the pain like someone stabbing me in the gut with a knife and twisting.<p>I had to stop eating. Drinking water was excruciating. I couldn't leave the bed anymore, and the only movement I could make was to curl more tightly into the fetal position. By now my fevers were regularly spiking over 102 F, and I spent most of the night sweating myself into an exhausted few hours of sleep. After a few days of this I finally called my GP who told me to go the ER immediately. On my first trip to the ER I sat hunched over in a waiting room chair for a few hours, probably as pale as a ghost. When they finally brought me in and heard my C. Diff. diagnosis everyone put on their quarantine outfits and stayed the fuck away from me. Oddly, they only gave me 2 bags of saline IV and sent me back home.<p>After another few days at home, writhing in agony in bed, still unable to eat anything and barely drink anything I had to go back to the ER. This time I called my GP (who showed extreme care, and was adamant I go back to the hospital) when I got to the ER. Luckily he had done his residency there and knew a few of the doctors. This time my C. Diff diagnosis got me a first class ticket to a private room and quarantine sign. I felt mildly bad about this, because after Hurricane Sandy 1/2 of the hospitals on the east side of Manhattan had been shut down and the wait time for a hospital bed from the Beth Israel ER was over 24 hours for some people. (I got over feeling bad for others pretty soon after).<p>I was wheeled up to my new room and asked to poop in a bucket for another C. Diff test. Almost as fast I was hooked up to IV Flagyl and Vanco for the "big guns". That night my fever hit 105. The next morning a doctor finally came to see me for more than 30 seconds. This was the first time they told me the C. Diff tests came back negative, but "it must have been a fluke" so they asked me to poop in a bucket again. This was pretty problematic, given that I hadn't eaten anything in almost 2 weeks at this point. This continued for a few days, each night the fevers making wish I would just die, followed by doctors coming in the next day and wondering what was wrong with the damn test results. No C. Diff.<p>At this point the confusion of what could be wrong became an obsession. Every nurse or doctor who came in, I asked what is it. Their answer.... "we think it's C. Diff., it's just not showing up in our tests... you need more antibiotics".<p>On the fifth day the pain became excruciating, I was lying in bed, dead still, just trying to hold onto the edges hard enough so the pain in my finger tips made me feel anything other than that fucking relentless twisting knife in my gut. Finally someone in the hospital seemed to notice that I wasn't doing so well, and they sent me to get a CT scan. A few hours later a doctor whom I had never seen before walked into my room, he may have introduced himself, but I was so deliriously preoccupied with my pain that I have no idea. In a monotone voice with now questions he said "I have the results of your CT scan, we see some micro perforations along your large bowel and believe you have fulminant ulcerative colitis. We're moving you to the surgical ICU and may need to perform emergency surgery to completely remove your large intestine. You'll need an ostomy bag if that happens". The end. Please hold your questions until after the ostomy bag.<p>WTF? What did that guy just say? What is "ulcerative colitis"? Did he say "micro perforations"? Is that better than regular perforations? Just make the pain stop please. Why did it take a week to get a CAT scan when I'm already in the hospital? Why does my stomach still have this knife in it? These were most of the thoughts that quickly entered my brain.<p>None of those questions mattered. I spent the next 4 days laying in a cube in the surgical ICU. A very nice nurse (I sadly don't remember her name) wiped the blood from my back side each day. At 7am and 7pm the lead surgeon followed by his gaggle of surgical residents came to stare at me like a specimen. Talking about me, but never to me. Never actually making eye contact, and only glancing at me from behind their clipboards. I hated those surgeons. Never fucking once did they speak to me. Only stared, and talked about ripping out my intestine. I liked my intestine, but probably would have been OK with the idea of losing it if just any one of those doctors had explained what it would be like without it. Or why it needed to go. Or what the fuck was happening to me.<p>Luckily at this point, the IV prednisone that they hooked me up to seemed to be taking the pain away and I was able to hold a short conversation now. I was even drinking small sips of water like a human being again.<p>After my time in the surgical ICU I was sent to post-OP recovery for almost 2 weeks. By this time I loved prednisone. It was my new best friend. I could eat Jello!<p>When I was discharged from Beth Israel Hellhole, I mean hospital, I had been in for over 20 days. I lost 45 lbs, I entered at nearly 180lbs and left at almost 130lbs. I was still only on prednisone, because my major medical insurance for Remicade hadn't cleared yet. That would still take another 3 weeks before I could start treatment on an actual drug.<p>Eventually I started this new wonder drug and things got better for a little while. Unfortunately after 6 months I developed "drug induced lupus", which is less fun than it sounds.<p>But in those 6 months my diagnosis changed 4 times. From Ulcerative Colitis -> Crohns Disease -> "almost certainly" Ulcerative Colitis -> Indeterminate Colitis (that is an actual diagnosis <a href="https://jcp.bmj.com/content/57/12/1233" rel="nofollow">https://jcp.bmj.com/content/57/12/1233</a>).<p>6 years later, 6 surgeries, I've lost count of the number of hospital stays totaling almost 9 months. Failed off of 4 biologics. I eventually did lose my large intestine. I'm on my 2nd ileostomy (they put me back together once.... that turned out to be a very bad idea, and another story for another time).<p>In the end, it has gotten better. I'm skinny, but I'm healthy now.... mostly. My marriage didn't survive, partly for stress of illness but mostly for very different reasons.<p>Moral of the story... find a great doctor; don't go to the closest hospital, go to the best hospital you can find; become an expert on yourself and your disease; speak with doctors like advisors, not oracles; don't let other people tell you "what you should do", but listen to their stories and advice; reduce stress; stay active.<p>I still don't know what I have. My diagnosis is now "maybe" Crohn's (?). But I'm aware of it. Only my closest friends even know I have "a bag", everyone else just tells me I'm too skinny. I can deal with that comment when I eat 3 dinner plates in front of them. I don't have similar symptoms to other Crohnies. I can eat anything seemingly without consequence, my triggers are almost certainly stress related. They're also (so far) completely localized to the large intestine and lower (although I have had horrible canker sores since childhood). Luckily none of my small intestine or upper digestive tract has ever been noticeably affected (other than the canker sores). Overall I feel lucky to have great doctors now, and a (usually) positive outlook, but damn...<p>The psychological toll is not to be discounted either. I should have sought a group to speak with, or someone who knew first hand what this was like. I became very angry for a long time. This didn't help keep my stress levels down. I also find it hard to find the line of "am I lazy?" or "am I sick?", this question is annoyingly common. I try my best not to be a "1-uper" when someone tells me they don't feel well, but mostly I try to get them to stay away from me since the immunosuppressants make a common cold feel like malaria (I really don't like my coworkers who think coming into the office sick is what a good soldier does). Overall, it is a very lonely place.<p>IBD sucks<p>edit:<p>+1 for r/crohnsdisease and r/ostomy (like another poster mentioned above) both are great communities |
Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training? | While this might sound like a good question on the <i>surface</i>, it does not get to the "root" of the problem. Let me explain ...<p>Yes, most companies prefer to hire people who <i>already</i> have the skills & experience rather than train "junior". This is not because companies don't <i>want</i> to develop the skills of their employees; it's simple economics. The biggest bottleneck in any company is experienced people. The senior engineers who already understand all the systems, have been to all the product meetings and solved many critical bugs in production.
These people are the "goose that lays the golden egg". Most companies are looking for more of these "golden geese" who can be effective & contribute to the product <i>immediately</i> because the "ROI" on these people is 10x (or more!).<p>Training someone up from scratch in a key tech and all the companies systems usually has a <i>negative</i> "ROI" for the first 1-6 months and distracts senior people so it's a "lose-lose" in the short-run! Add to the fact that most companies have a "LIFO" pattern with hiring (the most recent hires are usually the people who exist first!), and many hiring managers (HR) are put off by the idea of hiring people who do not <i>already</i> have the required skills.<p>Consider the following often repeated quote/saying:<p>CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave?
CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?<p>A lot of people have the mindset that training people costs too much time, money & effort and it <i>distracts</i> the key people in the company away from their focus (building the product).<p>This is not the fault of the company or the people working there. It's a "systems problem"; most companies simply don't have an effective system for "on-boarding & training" new people.<p>I've worked for several companies over the past 20 years (including starting my own twice) and have been responsible for hiring & training thousands of people.<p>Training people in tech skills, company culture & workflow simultaneously is a "hard problem". If you can get a "head start" on at least one of these areas the chance of successfully integrating someone is much higher. HR people know this so they want to "check" as many of the skills boxes as possible up-front. You as the "junior dev" can use this information to your advantage and invest a few hours up-front to <i>demonstrate</i> the necessary skills and make the HR/hiring manager's job <i>much</i> easier!<p>My advice to any "junior" person reading this:<p>1. Focus on your own learning/skills for at least an hour every day (preferably first thing in the morning).<p>2. Share your learning somewhere public e.g: GitHub or a Blog. that way the hiring manager reviewing your "CV" has a clear indication that you are "fast learner" and a "team player" who shares what they learn to help <i>others</i> "level up".<p>3. Pick the skill/tech/tool that is most valuable in your chosen industry/sector or even target it to a specific company you want to work for. e.g: if you know that AirBnB uses React.js <a href="https://stackshare.io/airbnb/airbnb" rel="nofollow">https://stackshare.io/airbnb/airbnb</a> you find and <i>devour</i> all the best tutorials for learning React.<p>4. Consolidate your learning into a tutorial of your own to show that you have <i>understood</i> the tech/tool.<p>5. Link to it directly from your CV/LinkedIn.<p>Seriously, this will take you 20h at <i>most</i>. You could get it done in a week and it will transform your "hireability" from "no thanks" to "when can you start?".<p>I know this because I have used this strategy to get jobs & contract work in the past to excellent effect. Investing in your skills and sharing your knowledge is the <i>single</i> best time-investment you can make. It's a 1000x ROI! Put in 20h of focussed effort and you will get an extra $200K in the next 2-5 years. Guaranteed.<p>My advice to any <i>company</i> wanting to <i>solve</i> the "problem" of hiring "junior" people and making them effective as fast as possible is:<p>1. Commit to becoming a "learning organisation" where <i>everyone</i> in the company shares as much of what they learn as possible.<p>2. Establish <i>metrics</i> for learning in your company! "What gets measured gets done". If there is no actively tracked & visible metric for each person's learning, people will stagnate and default to using their existing "hammer". <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument</a> what you want is people who are <i>proactively</i> learning new skills/tech/tools and then bring those skills into the company to improve effectiveness or build features that your <i>current</i> tech does not allow!<p>3. Systematically share anything that is not "sensitive" or "secret sauce" in <i>public</i>. Having private wikis with lots of learning is fine for internal use, but what if people could learn your "stack" <i>before</i> they join your company/team?<p>4. Hire the people who <i>proactively contribute</i> to the learning materials without being prompted. This is the mindset you are looking for: people who want to learn and share what they know regardless of getting paid.<p>Anyone looking for a proven example of any of this, see: <a href="https://github.com/dwyl?q=learn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dwyl?q=learn</a> dwyl is a bootstrapped, profitable Open Source software company that shares <i>all</i> of it's learning in public. [disclaimer: I co-founded it!] |
Create-phaser-app for web-based game development | Hi, I'm the author of this, but I'm not the person that posted this. I actually wouldn't have necessarily come here to post at this phase of the project. I don't feel like I've reached a version 1 of what the goal of this project is.<p>So a few things.<p>Firstly: the goal of this project.<p>This is not meant to be a super-minimal js boilerplate. In that sense, it is not create-react-app. It does have a fairly comprehensive and complete build process, and in that sense it is. It even will have a pretty nice preprocessing process as well, which can do a lot. I’ll talk more about that later.<p>I find that with a lot of boilerplate projects for Javascript game dev, there's usually such a spartan setup, that the delta between the 'bootstrapped' project and actually making something is still very great. One of the things that makes a lot of other frameworks useful is that there's some convention in place to help, at the very least, organize your project. I gave a talk about this at the beginning of this month at a conference in Oklahoma called Phaser: How to Draw the rest of the Owl<p><a href="https://slides.com/jesseharlin/set-phasers-to-javascript" rel="nofollow">https://slides.com/jesseharlin/set-phasers-to-javascript</a><p>There are the slides from this talk if you're curious.<p>There are a few things about his project that are opinionated, and they are on purpose. Unity, Game maker and a lot of other tools that are often favored for projects like game-jams because you can get up and running <i>quickly</i>. It means you adopt some conventions in order to work more quickly. I intend for this to be a lot like that.<p>Here’s some stuff you need to know about this project.<p>1. It just isn’t done yet. I plan to convert it to a lerna-style scaffold, and a lot of the modules in it will be plugins. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will and is a top priority. This project is to be a scaffold, not a boilerplate in the long run.<p>2. One opinion is that you are going to use Tiled in some way to make levels if your game needs levels. I consider this project one that ‘relies’ on Tiled. It’s the only sensible open source tool that could even let you compete with a more sophisticated game making system. If you don’t need Tiled, that’s ok, but most games have some concept of levels and enough need them I wanted that to be there. That means:<p>3. I’ve made some decisions about a good starting point for controlling animations. Too many frameworks start with an overly simple approach, and any complexity quickly becomes unwieldy. I explain this in detail in my slides. I made an animation manager that allows you to chain animations, and I use a Finite state machine to organize transitions (machine.js). I go into a lot of detail here in my talk. And a tiny bit of detail in this other talk from a few months ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNmu_9J2p8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNmu_9J2p8</a><p>4. This project has a pre-processing step, and that’s something that makes it unique in this space. This currently does a few things for you. It can extrude your tilemaps so they don’t literally cause graphic glitching when you run the game. You can also target Layers from tiled and use a flood-fill to generate polygons that can be used for Physics and Raycasting. The light you see is using this. I <i>just</i> wrote this a few weeks ago. You can also minify images, etc.<p>5. The file organization also is meant to simplify this workflow, but I need to make changes even now. I’ve realized I need to have a separate concept of biomes and levels. A lot will likely change here. As I said, this project is super new.<p>6. I intend to encourage systems-music and Html5 audio in future iterations. I think the barrier for entry for these tools is too high, and to be honest, if your game loads mp3/ogg files that’s likely the biggest assets in your game. This means you’d more likely play a MIDI sequence and use Tone.js than load a recording. It is a similar technique to how older game systems managed audio, because it has a smaller footprint and performs better. You're not going to be forced to do this, but I'd like it to be easy to do this.<p>7. I am prototyping a way to make in-game ui easier, with Html. I know a lot of Html5 game devs that use frameworks like Vue and React to handle things like minimaps, lifebars and other overlay elements. It is just a fact that making something as simple as a form input in canvas is a time consuming nightmare compared to Html + css + js. I discuss this at length in this issue here: <a href="https://github.com/simiancraft/create-phaser-app/issues/18" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/simiancraft/create-phaser-app/issues/18</a> . My plan is to use React for UI and work out some simple bindings so that you don’t spend 4 hours trying to make a start menu or a player-name input.<p>8. I plan to use the raycasting module and a behavior tree plus the FSM I already included to manage enemy AI. I want something more sophisticated than a simple patrol. Something that acts differently when it sees a player. I have a clear vision of a good pattern to follow here. Remember, this project is about how to eventually draw the rest of the owl. I want to show you a good pattern for this in the scaffold. I’d like you to easily be able to add enemies at certain locations in a map in Tiled, and with some small effort have them perform useful behavior, such as attacking or chasing a player on sight, and patrolling before they see you.<p>9. I’ll know it is done when you can scaffold a game and make something that’s better than what current Html5 boilerplates afford you and you can actually work close to as quickly or more quickly than someone using something like Game Maker. That doesn’t mean feature parity, but if you want to make a game in Js <i>right now</i> at a game jam you’ll spend way way too much time fiddling with a build system, and if you go ‘ the low road’ and keep it spartan, you’ll find your final products will be railroaded into overly minimal and feature anemic results.<p>10. I’m not touching anything related to server-side state, nor will I be prescriptive about that. You gotta draw the line somewhere. I am also not going to touch multiplayer with a 10-ft pole. If any of you have ever made a game with multiplayer that requires any sort of meaningful real-time interaction you probably already expected that. This project is going to be about the client-side game.<p>There are a few criticisms of this project that I think are fair. I’ll address a few I saw.<p>One is that the controls are "clunky", and to be honest you're right. I think the test map I have made is not a very appropriate size for the player character. It is a bit claustrophobic, but I've not spent any cycles on this. My development time is tight, so I am trying to focus on things I think are more important before I hit a version 1. If you look in the source, the main purpose of the map so far has been to allow someone to organize a pre-processed and post-processed map. Also, I wanted to include some items to modify the mech’s speed and add the jetpack and things like that later. Yes the mech is supposed to feel ‘heavy’, but there’s other problems that make this not feel enjoyable. The main purpose of this mech was to have a player character with many animations states and in-between states. Sliding, Jumping, Boosting, shooting, shooting-while-walking and so on. Look at the way its organized with the finite state machine, and you’ll get why I did this. I wanted something with more complexity than “mario” to teach a user how to organize their work. I think that aspect was successful, but I have more ideas on how to improve it.<p>I do appreciate the positive feedback on the “graphics system”. I built the raycasting module that makes the light just a few weeks ago, and all the pixelart in the game (player and level) myself. I am far, far, far from done.<p>Another criticism is that the framework seems very set to the sort of game that it is right now. Yes, it does seem that way at the moment. I needed to pick a common game type that required a lot of common functionality to get started. I promise the final state of this is to not tightly couple you to a platformer, but I can see now that with no context it seems that way. I promise it will not stay that way. If you do still want something dead-simple go check out the other boilerplates or use mine and just delete the sprites and the game scenes. Seriously, just delete what you don’t need, it will still build and work just fine. I will likely have a scaffolding option to account for a super-minimal build when I convert to lerna-style scaffold.<p>Thank you all for looking at this. Please please remember that this project is very early in its lifecycle, but I still hope you find it useful even now. |
A Mystery Font That Took Over New York | Interestingly, this hiring ad from the JS console :-)<p>main.js:14
0000000 000 0000000
111111111 11111111100 000 111111111
00000 111111111111111111 00000 000000
000 1111111111111111111111111100000 000
000 1111 1111111111111111100 000
000 11 0 1111111100 000
000 1 00 1 000
000 00 00 1 000
000 000 00000 1 000
00000 0000 00000000 1 00000
11111 000 00 000000 000 11111
00000 0000 000000 00000 00000
000 10000 000000 000 0000
000 00000 000000 1 000
000 000000 10000 1 0 000
000 1000000 00 1 00 000
000 1111111 1 0000 000
000 1111111100 000000 000
0000 111111111111111110000000 0000
111111111 111111111111100000 111111111
0000000 00000000 0000000<p>NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()
We're hiring: developers.nytimes.com/careers<p>update: Those 0s and 1s formed an ascii-art style nytimes logo. The format is messed up. |
Compiler basics: Lisp to Assembly | Hi Hacker News PL enthusiasts. This is off topic, but I hope you will have mercy on me.<p>I'm reaching out for some help from you. I've been working on interpreters this whole year, taking on no more work for pay than needed for rent and food, so that I can realize my programming language dream. I'm writing a couple of interpreters every week, trying out new ideas. But there is one hurdle I've been unable to overcome for a long time.<p>I'm trying to write a typechecker for a simple lambda calculus with polymorphic functions. My acceptance criteria is being able to typecheck the K combinator. I've been stuck at this point for months. Have read all I can find on the internet, and have read TAPL many times.<p>Am honestly feeling really stupid for not having been able to complete this.<p>What I'm struggling with beta reducing expressions that are type lambdas (i.e. the expression related to `Forall`).<p>Λ means type lambda, i.e. the set of expressions indexed by type<p>λ means expression lambda, i.e. the set of expressions indexed by expression<p>E.g. Λa.λx:a.x is the polymorphic "identity" function, which in javascript looks like `x => x`<p>k = ΛA.ΛB.λx:A.λy:B.x<p>k_intint = ((k IntTy) IntTy)<p>What I have yet been unable to do is type_of k_intint, and this because beta reduction should return an expression, but type_of should return a type.<p>I'll paste the source code of my latest attempt below, the function in question is `typ_of_expression`. I've written this in OCaml, but would be very thankful for a response in any language, or pseudocode, or just explained in English.<p>Many thanks for taking the time to read this. For any reply or pointer in the right direction I would be greatly thankful. You know what, I'd be happy to pay €100 for any help that lets me solve this (SEPA, Bitcoin).<p><pre><code> (* λ calculus, with Forall and simple types *)
type 'a binding =
| SymBind of 'a
| QuantifierBind
type 'a context = (string * 'a binding) list
type typ =
| UnitTy
| IntTy
| Arrow of typ * typ
| Forall of string * typ
(* Thought it simpler to separate Closure and Lambda, for w hen I later add records/unions etc *)
| ClosureTy of (typ context) * typ
| SymbolTy of string
type expr =
(* again thought it simpler to separate Closure and Lambda, for when I later add records/unions etc *)
| Closure of (expr context) * expr
| Unit
| Symbol of string
| Int of int
| Lam of string * typ * expr (* turns into Arrow. Takes ex pr as argument, returns expr *)
| App of expr * expr
| TLam of string * expr (* expr version of Forall. Ta kes typ as argument, returns expr *)
| TApp of expr * typ
let rec lookup context key =
match context with
| [] -> Error "No result"
| (k, QuantifierBind) :: rest -> lookup rest key
| (k, SymBind v) :: rest -> if key = k
then Ok v
else lookup rest key
let str = String.concat ""
let rec string_of_typ t = match t with
| UnitTy -> "UnitTy"
| IntTy -> "IntTy"
| Arrow _ -> "Arrow"
| Forall (s, t) -> str ["Forall "; s; " "; string_of_typ t]
| ClosureTy (_ctx, t) -> str ["Closure "; string_of_typ t]
| SymbolTy s -> str ["SymbolTy "; s]
let string_of_expr e = match e with
| Unit -> "Unit"
| Closure _ -> "Closure"
| Symbol s -> str ["Symbol "; s]
| Int i -> str ["Int "; string_of_int i]
| Lam _ -> "Lam"
| App _ -> "App"
| TLam _ -> "TLam"
| TApp _ -> "TApp"
(* Convert between context types, such as (expr context) or ( typ context) *)
let rec convert_context converter_fn original_context exprcon text acc = (* カリたべたい *)
let convert_context = convert_context converter_fn original _context in
match exprcontext with
| [] -> acc
| (x, QuantifierBind) :: rest ->
convert_context rest ((x, QuantifierBind) :: acc)
| (x, SymBind e) :: rest ->
(match converter_fn original_context e with
| Ok t -> convert_context rest ((x, SymBind t) :: acc)
| Error e -> failwith (str ["typ_context error: "; e]))
let rec typ_of_expr context e =
match e with
| Unit -> Ok UnitTy
| Int i -> Ok IntTy
| Closure (ctx, e) ->
let new_context = convert_context typ_of_expr context ct x context in
typ_of_expr new_context e
| Symbol s -> lookup context s
| Lam (x, in_typ, body) ->
(let new_context = (x, SymBind in_typ) :: context in
match typ_of_expr new_context body with
| Ok return_typ -> Ok (Arrow (in_typ, return_typ))
| Error e -> Error (str [ "Error finding return type of lambda. Error: "
; e]))
| App (e0,
e1) ->
(match (typ_of_expr context e0,
typ_of_expr context e1) with
| (Ok (Arrow (t0_0, t0_1)),
Ok t1) -> if t1 = t0_0
then Ok t0_1
else Error (str ["Type mismatch"])
| (Ok (ClosureTy (ctx, Arrow (t0_0, t0_1))),
Ok t1) -> if t1 = t0_0
then Ok t0_1
else Error
(str
["Type mismatch. t0_0: "
;string_of_typ t0_0
;", t0_1: "
;string_of_typ t0_1
;", t1: "
;string_of_typ t1
])
| (Ok t, _) -> Error (str ["Not given a lambda as first thing to App. "
;string_of_typ t])
| _ -> Error (str ["Error getting typ of expr App"]))
| TLam (a, body) ->
(let new_context = (a, QuantifierBind) :: context in
match typ_of_expr new_context body with
| Ok body_type -> Ok (ClosureTy (new_context,
Forall (a,
body_type)))
| Error e -> Error (str [ "Failed to get typ of TLam, a nd thus can not construct Forall. Error: "
; e]))
| TApp (TLam (a, body),
t1) -> let new_context = (a, QuantifierBind) :: con text in
typ_of_expr new_context body
| TApp (e0, t1) ->
(match typ_of_expr context e0 with
| Ok (ClosureTy (ctx,
Forall (a, body))) ->
let new_context = (a, SymBind t1) :: ctx @ context i n
Ok (ClosureTy (new_context,
body))
| Ok (ClosureTy(ctx,
t)) ->
Error (str ["TApp given ClosureTy with non-forall on left-hand-side. IS: "
;string_of_typ t])
| Ok (Forall (a, body)) -> Error "TApp given naked Fora ll as first argument"
| Ok _ -> Error "TApp given non-Forall first argument"
| Error e -> Error (str ["Error in TApp - error: "
;e]))
let rec eval context e =
let context: (expr context) = context in
match e with
| Unit -> Ok Unit
| Closure (ctx, e) -> eval (List.append ctx context) e
| Int i -> Ok (Int i)
| Lam (x, t, body) -> Ok (Closure (context,
Lam (x, t, body)))
| Symbol s -> lookup context s
| App (Closure(ctx,
Lam (x, t, body)),
e1) ->
let new_context = (x, SymBind e1) :: ctx @ context in
eval new_context body
| App (e0, e1) ->
(match eval context e0 with
| Ok (Closure (ctx,
Lam (x, t, body))) ->
eval (ctx @ context) (App (Lam (x,
t,
body),
e1))
| Ok _ -> Error "Can't apply non-Lam"
| Error e -> Error (str ["Apply error: "
;e]))
| TLam (a, body) -> Ok (TLam (a, body))
| TApp (TLam (a, body),
given_typ) ->
let new_context = (a, QuantifierBind) :: context in
eval new_context body
| TApp (e0, t) ->
(match eval context e0 with
| Ok (TLam (a, body)) ->
let _ = failwith "Not gonna happen" in
eval context (TApp (TLam (a, body), t))
| Ok (Closure (ctx,
TLam (a,
body))) ->
eval (ctx @ context) body
| Ok _ -> Error "Can't type-apply non-Λ"
| Error e ->
Error (str [ "Error applying type lambda. Error: "
; e]))
(* helper functions *)
let tlam a body = TLam (a, body)
let lam x t body = Lam (x, t, body)
let app e0 e1 = App (e0, e1)
let tapp e0 tyT1 = TApp (e0, tyT1)
(* eval [] (tlam "a" (lam "x"
* (SymbolTy "a")
* (Symbol "x"))) *)
let k_combinator = (tlam "a" (tlam "_b"
(lam
"x"
(SymbolTy "a")
(lam
"_y"
(SymbolTy "_b")
(Symbol "x")))))
let k_intint = (TApp (TApp (k_combinator,
IntTy),
IntTy))
(* DEAR HN READER: This is what is failing me. *)
let applied_k = typ_of_expr [] (app k_intint (Int 1))</code></pre> |
Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand? | As others have said, I specialize in legacy code. It's the one area you can be an expert in and know 100% for sure that it's never going to change ;-)<p>Some quick advice: Rewrites are almost always a bad idea. The requirements are almost always at least as difficult to discover as they were in the first place. You will also miss things or incorrectly decide that something isn't important now. These can often kill your project before you get a chance to replace the old system.<p>But the most important reason for not rewriting is because there are almost always business reasons for extending the existing application during the rewrite period. This gives you a moving target for the rewrite. Additionally, you will find that the "legacy team" who is adding code to the existing system will be seen in a better light than the "rewrite team" because they are actively solving business problems. The "rewrite team" will be seen to have no value until they ship something. As more and more features are added to the legacy application, more and more resources will be added to it until someday someone will say, "Why are we rewriting this again?" and cancel the rewrite. It doesn't happen every time, but in my career I think I've seen it in about 90% of the rewrites.<p>So you need to get comfortable with the legacy code. The first thing to do is to make the build and deploy process as painless as possible. You probably can't get time allocated to do it, so with every piece of work you do, steal some time for that. If you are on a project where they have "build teams" and it's actually impossible to build the application yourself, fix that as a matter of priority.<p>Once you can reasonably work on the code, you need to start introducing tests. The best advice I can give is to read Michael Feathers's book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code". This is a must read. I think there may be a newer version of it, but even though the old version is very dated technology wise, the techniques are still rock solid.<p>Fight the urge to refactor/rewrite large portions of the application. Instead, pay attention to the code that you touch the most. Ensure that this code has good tests and once it does, fence it off from the rest of the code base and start improving it. Code that you never touch can be the crappiest in the world. Code that you touch once only has a one time cost, so don't fret over it. Code that you touch every single day needs to be amazing. Concentrate your efforts there.<p>The last piece of advice I have is to look at the kinds of requests you get. If you get a lot of similar requests for functionality (for example lots of reports), then make that part of the system easy to work with. What you want to do is match the ability to work with the code with the expectations of the customer. If they intuitively think, "This should be easy", then work hard to make it easy. Say things to your stakeholders like, "You/Users asking for feature X expect this task to be easy for me to do. It's not. I need time to make it easier." Usually they will see the sense in that. If they expect <i>everything</i> to be easy, use that back on them. "I can't rewrite the whole application without stalling our business plans. I <i>can</i> make some parts of this easier than others though. Which parts are the most important? Note if you say X is important to be easy, then I have to spend time up front to make it easy. We have to be careful about our budget". That's the kind of language that business people can understand.<p>Finally, have fun with the legacy code. You aren't likely to make it (much) worse. Use the opportunity to experiment with new ideas. However, I caution you to avoid the temptation to transition to newer technologies (you'll never get it finished -- just like a rewrite). Instead, think about the <i>techniques</i> in the newer technologies and start introducing them in your old code base. IMHO, this is <i>always</i> more fun that simply using something off the shelf anyway. Ironically, I find that working on legacy code is the most liberating thing I can do on a professional team. You can always say, "Well, this is crap. Anybody mind if I replace it?" and almost always people will welcome it. |
Google C++ Style Guide Is No Good | This article is so full of misconceptions.<p>> Unlike C++ Core Guidelines that try to explain how to use the language effectively, GSG is about forbidding the use of certain features.<p>They aren't meant to accomplish the same thing. The GSG's goal is to standardize both style and feature set across the mono repo so that thousands of engineers can effectively contribute.<p>> We should not bifurcate developers into two camps as the reality exists in a continuum between these two extremes.<p>It's a style guide, not an unwavering book of law. Library writers use some features that aren't necessary in non-library code. In fact, some language features are written specifically to the benefit of the implementers.<p>> GSG prefers #ifndef/#define idiom over the simpler #pragma once. Yes, #pragma once is non-standard but widely supported.<p>When the difference is a 2 lines of code that you probably have tooling to generate anyways, why not default to the thing that's standard?<p>> Yes, both of these forward declarations are possible to avoid by type-punning through a void* but it is not a good pattern.<p>The point of "Avoid using fwd-declarations where possible" is exactly that: reason about the code and whether the declaration is necessary. It's not "dogmatically avoid forward declarations". I'm sure no-one at Google is punning through void* for those examples.<p>> Marking the function “inline” lets the compiler make the decision. Not marking it inline is a sure way to prevent inlining, unless Link Time Optimizations are turned on.<p>That's simply not true. The compiler can inline a function if it can infer that it doesn't alter the program's behavior. Generally, tools make good decisions. Override them when you've measured that something else is better.<p>> Library code should always be placed in a namespace. Top level/application code has questionable value being placed in a namespace.<p>It's easier to be diligent about placing everything in a namespace because application code doesn't always remain so. Especially not in a gigantic mono repo like Google's.<p>> GSG prohibits the use of static definitions and annonymous namespaces in header files. How else do we declare constants?<p>I mean, you declare your constants in the header and define them in the implementation file. First example I can find in Chromium: <a href="https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/ios/chrome/browser/pref_names.h?rcl=82d8ee1e070100260963c8d76f23dcd2884099c9&l=11" rel="nofollow">https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/ios/chrome/browser/pref...</a><p>> The rule basically says that global/static variables with non-trivial constructors and destructors are not allowed. While it’s true that initialization/destruction order of globals between translation units is not defined and can pose problems, this rule is overly prohibitve.<p>This rule isn't overly prohibitive in the context of large applications that require clean startups/shutdowns and contain objects that are sensitive to construction/destruction order.<p>> “Do not define implicit conversions”. I would urge the reader to consider what life would be like if std::string(const char) constructor was marked explicit (especially in the absense of user defined literals, which GSG also outlaws). Nuff said.<p>The issue with implicit conversions is that they're not explicit to callers. Honestly, having to wrap a few const char* into std::string() calls wouldn't be as bad as you seem to think it would be. Explicit code is easier to read and reason about.<p>> “a copyable class should explicitly declare the copy operations, a move-only class should explicitly declare the move operations” – this goes against the language philosophy.<p>Again, this is about being explicit, and using safe defaults. It's not prohibited to make things copyable and movable but defaulting to the most restrictive set up and adding things as needed ensures that developers thought about the implications of those properties.<p>> In this pattern the private base cannot be replaced by a data member because the base is constructed before the members.<p>I've never seen code with private inheritance that made sense and couldn't be refactored to something clearer.<p>> Operator Overloading<p>See my point about implicit conversion above because it's the same thing here. Operator Overloading tends to obfuscate code.<p>> I think this rule mixes together two ideas for no good reason. C++ has a clear way to denote mutability – the const qualifier. Using pointer vs reference to signal mutability goes against the language.<p>The const qualifier isn't visible from the call site. This rule makes it so that you can reason about what will happen to the values you're passing to a function based on whether you pass them by pointer, or by reference/value. It also prevents a library from changing an argument from const T& to T&, introduce mutations, and break callers as a result.<p>> Exceptions<p>Google's code is just setup to std::terminate instead of throwing. It's a minor performance gain AFAIK but it also avoids littering the code with try {} catch {} blocks. It forces developers to handle errors instead of propagating them whenever possible too.<p>> “Use lambda expressions where appropriate.” – probably a cheap shot, but what is the alternative? – use them where it’s not appropriate?<p>This point seems counter-productive considering the author claims the guide is written in too much of a prohibitive fashion.<p>> Avoid complicated template programming.<p>TMP is hard, increases compilation times, and is difficult to reason about. The Guide recognizes its usefulness but suggests avoiding it where possible. This is similar to the library writer vs application writers argument: not everyone needs it, avoid it if possible.<p>All in all I think the author just doesn't have the same requirements, constraints, and sheer amount of developers/lines of code Google has. Nothing is forcing them to use the Guide. In fact, it's public but it was written for Google, by Google. It works for Google, and it's a great tool in that kind of organization.<p>Disclaimer: I work on Chrome, which has its own guide derived from the GSG. |
U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Further | Article:<p>Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.<p>Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.<p>Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.<p>“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”<p>The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations.<p>Life expectancy is 84.1 years in Japan and 83.7 years in Switzerland, first and second in the most-recent ranking by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. ranks 29th.<p>“It’s significant,” Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said in an interview. “It doesn’t seem like a lot, but in terms of human cost you’ve got a lot of life that’s not being lived.”<p>White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.<p>“These sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” said CDC Director Robert Redfield.<p>As drug and suicide mortality has risen, deaths from heart disease, the nation’s leading killer, went down only slightly, failing to offset the increases in mortality from other causes and prolonging another worrisome trend. A decadeslong decline in deaths from heart disease—brought about by antismoking and other public-health campaigns, along with medications to control blood pressure and cholesterol—has stalled in recent years, with heart-disease deaths even increasing slightly in 2015.<p>Earlier this century, the steady and robust decline in heart-disease deaths more than offset the rising number from drugs and suicide, Dr. Anderson said. Now, “those declines aren’t there anymore,” he said, and the drug and suicide deaths account for many years of life lost because they occur mostly in young to middle-aged adults.<p>While progress against deaths from heart disease has stalled, cancer deaths—the nation’s No. 2 killer—are continuing a steady decline that began in the 1990s, Dr. Anderson said. “That’s kind of our saving grace,” he said. “Without those declines, we’d see a much bigger drop in life expectancy.”<p>Drug-overdose deaths skyrocketed between 2015 and 2017, particularly for adults between ages 25 and 54. The main culprit was fentanyl and other synthetic opioids that became pervasive in illicit drug supplies in the U.S. around that time.<p>Deaths from synthetic opioids rose 45% in 2017, while the death rate from heroin, which had risen sharply after 2010, was flat.<p>Methamphetamine and cocaine use is on the rise in the U.S., but deaths from those drugs weren’t broken out from the total. Those statistics will be released in mid-December, in a separate report, said Holly Hedegaard, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC and lead author of the reports released Thursday on drug overdoses and suicide.<p>There is some hope the decline in life expectancy won’t be prolonged. The rise in drug-overdose deaths was slower in 2017 than the previous year. Total overdose deaths for the preceding 12 months dropped slightly between late last year and April, though they remain high.<p>“We may have reached a peak in regards to the drug-overdose epidemic,” Dr. Anderson said. “I’m hopeful, given what we’ve seen in recent months.“ But, he cautioned, “This might just be a lull.”<p>More federal and local resources have been devoted to the opioid crisis. States began accessing nearly $1 billion in federal grants in 2017 to combat the opioid crisis. In addition, opioid prescriptions are monitored more tightly, and medication to reverse opioid overdoses has become more available, among other factors possibly behind the tentative improvement.<p>Suicides rose 3.7% in 2017, accelerating an increase in rates since 1999, the CDC said. The gap in deaths by suicide widened starkly between cities and the most rural areas between 1999 and 2017, the data show. The rate is now far higher in rural areas. “There’s a much wider spread,” Dr. Hedegaard said.<p>“This is extremely discouraging,” Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said of the suicide-rate increase. Studies show that traumas such as economic difficulties or natural disasters, along with access to lethal means including guns and opioid drugs, and lack of access to care can affect suicide rates, she said. More accurate recording of deaths may also have added to the numbers, she said.<p>Scientific understanding of suicide and its risk factors is improving, Dr. Moutier said, and new prevention programs are being implemented. But their effects have yet to be felt, because they haven’t been scaled up yet, she said.<p>“The science is growing tremendously,” she said. “We now have answers about how to prevent suicide.” |
My experience with toxic teams | This article was passed around in a FinTech slack channel I frequent. The major response to it was "Well, that sounds just like FinTech."<p>tl;dr: Toxic teams come from lack of vision from an equally toxic management.<p>To be precise, toxic teams always develop from an overworked, understaffed workplace, on a vision-less project, thrown together so fast and so haphazardly that it cannot tolerate any degree of failure, with no fallbacks implemented due to cost and time. This profile fits every failed "disruptive" startup or company I've worked at over the past decade, especially in FinTech.<p>No one uses vacation time or sick leave since no one can fill in for you. Having any sort of redundancy is seen as "bad", in all circumstances. If one employee is going out for a week, and his or her part of the project breaks, that's going to stay broken for a week if that person leaves. Employees are told they can start "living it up" just as soon as sales "hooks the big one", then they'll hire more devs, and it'll all be fixed, surely!<p>If you insist on taking vacation, they'll expect you to be "on call". In my personal experience, I saw a manager give a sales rep an employee on vacation's cell number with the instructions "if they call in about [component], throw her on the call." There is no escape.<p>It's always crunch time because planning anything in advance beyond the next fiscal quarter isn't possible, due to, well, crunch time. This one feeds on itself. Startups and FinTech darlings think they can be a 1-year-old vineyard selling 10-year-old wines to 100-year-old clients who see right through this BS.<p>The priority of the day shifts to whoever is screaming loudest because, as we've discussed before, the project was thrown together so fast and so haphazardly that it cannot tolerate any degree of failure, and something crucial just broke, or in the case of one startup I worked at, "the laws of physics got in the way."<p>Socializing with other teams is frowned upon because talking with other teams gets people fired. It's a paranoid (but completely justified) mentality that discussion with other teams may reveal someone from one team is better at solving a problem than a person on another team - which can alert managers, who then tell their superiors, who then tell the better employee to move to the other team. And the poor guy he bested? "It's his last day, and now two teams are angry at you because you opened your mouth."<p>The communication you _do_ have has been reduced to some trendy iteration of IRC with half-baked teleconferencing built-in. Teams cannot see other teams' chats, for reasons unknown. Miscommunication is always dismissed as "Oh, we already discussed that in our team channel." The people who need to be on the chat app, which is pretty much all of management, never use the chat app. E-mail doesn't work, because no one checks their e-mail anymore. E-mail inboxes are where excuses from the CFO for that terrible last quarter go to die. There is only despair and automated messages in the inbox.<p>Never expect documentation. Ever. If the software is too crucial to let rot on the vine, and too complex to maintain if the maintainers are laid off, you won't find a shred. Writing good documentation means that someone with a certain level of technical competency can follow it, someone who the suits could pay a lot less than they do you.<p>If a company suddenly requests thorough technical documentation on a product, the poor soul's days are numbered. Many are directed "on a whim" to write exhaustive documentation, only to be laid off the week after said documentation is finished and announced to management. The system is then thrown to a team of contractors elsewhere. Yeah, one could argue that the system must have not been too important, but no one deserves to be treated this way, knowing you're basically writing your job away, one keystroke at a time, for several months.<p>There is little or no recognition of good work because "the work is never done". Everyone can rest when the project is done, which never happens because either the money runs out, or the project is abruptly cancelled (the money ran out).<p>Check-ins are constantly skipped. If there is a check-in, it's a cover for the actual intent of the meeting - layoffs, or announcing that people have been laid off. Ergo, no check-ins is a good thing.<p>Project-stopping roadblocks are ignored because that would implicate to management there was no proper planning ever involved, which everyone knows damn well there was no proper planning ever involved. If the remedy is a third-party service, suddenly there is enough money for said service, especially if the person (if any) responsible for clearing the roadblock is paid more than that third-party service costs.<p>Insults abound in the workplace, but they are crafted in a way to appear superior to management, who see the pecking order as "structure". Complaints are shrugged off by HR as "banter". If it's any consolation, these same people doing the pecking are being pecked at by someone higher than they are.<p>It isn't safe to fail because the company never had any money to afford failure in the first place. That doesn't stop them from acquiring other companies in a desperate attempt for growth, though! Yes, there should be safeguards to prevent failure from being catastrophic but that safeguard is to have a product that actually solves a problem, rather than having a product to solve a "problem" created simply for the product's solution to solve. It's the tech equivalent of a Seen-on-TV gadget.<p>The saddest part about all this is that everyone on the team feels the same way. No one benefits from this, and it's only prolonging the inevitable, when everyone has to pack their stuff in a box and leave the premises by lunch. It's a miracle if you still get severance. Am I jaded? you bet! |
‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’ | This was an interesting read. I guess I'll start with the response.<p>As has been pointed out by others, bringing up the book was a weird humblebrag. It kind of makes me think that Polly chose to answer this particular request for help because it was an opportunity to continue promoting her book, not that it somehow organically happened to fit in with her advice.<p>Also, it seems like a lot of the response kind of boils down to "nuh-uh!" and "cut it out!" with no shortage of affirmation-esque platitudes. From my personal experience, I have found that line of reasoning to be frustratingly valid only in retrospect for people that have already overcome the bulk of their depression/anxiety/existential dread. It's easy to be prescriptive or reductive when you have some distance from the issue that you're talking about, and that's not necessarily helpful for everybody.<p>Anyway, as far as Haunted's post goes, I can entirely identify with those feelings.<p>On my nineteenth birthday I had my house raided (and entirely destroyed) by the gang taskforce of the local pd. This was because in the middle of the night before, my house had been tagged with some gang related graffiti on the side of the house that faced the freeway. I couldn't afford to fix the place after the raid, and had no way of guaranteeing that the people that tagged the house wouldn't continue to do so.<p>So I had to move with only the clothes I was wearing.<p>At 20 I had to move overnight because a stalker broke into my mother's house (where I was staying) and tried to choke me to death. When the police arrived, I was almost arrested because the stalker had friends in the department (this individual moonlit as a kind of "high class" cocaine dealer to lawyers and a few judges in the area). Knowing he was certainly going to come back with no consequences, I moved again. This time I was able to carry my laptop and a change of clothes.<p>At 21, me and my then-girlfriend up and left everything that wouldn't fit in her car so that we could move in with her parents as a way to get her out of prostitution. When we got there, her parents changed their minds and we ended up selling everything including the car in order to get a ride across the state to an office building I knew we could squat in.<p>At 22, I was summarily kicked out of the living room that I had been crashing in because I told the guy whose house it was that I wasn't comfortable with covering for him every time he stole money from his wife to buy heroin. He kept my laptop and the bag of half my clothes out of spite.<p>I have since lived in much more stable circumstances, and the last two time I'ved moved, I've kept all of my stuff and relationships! For the first time in my life! That being said, it's made it difficult for me to shake the mindset of "Don't buy it or care about it if you can't take it with you given five minutes' notice." In fact, I don't know if I'll ever be entirely without that feeling rattling around in my head.<p>If put on the spot, I would have difficulty making a rational argument that my life hasn't been wasted. There objectively exists a number of periods of my life which I have nearly zero to show for. That being said, it's not a line of thought that I regularly entertain. That type of existential despair is simply too easy to wallow in. It's like quicksand. The idea of a ~Meaningful Life~ (and its opposite) is at once way too emotionally weighty and way too easy to mercurially define to be a useful focus for anybody, especially people that are already struggling with other issues.<p>As for broke, it is a tangibly anxiety-provoking and embarrassing thing. Every little setback (like schools you're applying for asking for surprise paperwork that you can't access, being "mysteriously" rejected by a school wholesale without an interview just for ASKING if they offer financial aid, not being able to afford basic resources to launch a small business, etc.) makes everything seem more and more like there is some sort of cosmic curse at play, or that the world is <i>actually</i> reflecting my personal worth. All I can really do is keep trying, and personally only the tiny victories help with that sort of anxiety. That's just me of course, others might respond to being broke differently.<p>As for "friendless", the only thing I can think to say to someone who makes that claim is "Are you sure about that?" I recently moved to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and have yet to make any close friends in the area, but I still have close friends from all around the country that I talk to on a near-daily basis. Group chats are great for this. Whenever I am feeling lonely, I figure that it's on me to reach out.<p>The friends you"ve moved away from probably miss you as much as you miss them, and while it's not the same as hanging out in person, an extended phone call or a nice text chain full of jokes and news snippets can be a healthy reminder that you haven't just "disappeared".<p>Sorry this got a bit long, I might've lost and then re-found the thread of my reasoning at some point ;)<p>Basically, I think it's good that the original author decided to reach out and ask for help, even if the help is from an advice columnist. I would encourage anybody else struggling with these things (like I currently am) to make an effort to do the same in whatever way works for them. Asking for help when needed, and offering it when capable are two of the most satisfying and empowering things a person can do.<p>Also as stated by many posters, therapy from a good therapist can also be a godsend.<p>Anyway I'm done rambling for now. If anybody wants to have a friendly chat about depression or isolation etc., feel free to shoot me an email! I am not a professional anything, but I'm pretty friendly and a good listener!<p>:) |
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview | 30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University.<p><a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source=your_stories_page---------------------------" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source...</a><p>But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:<p>If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.<p>Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.<p>It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.<p>You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.<p>>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity<p><a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...</a><p>Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.<p>So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".<p>Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.<p><a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptio...</a><p>Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD<p>Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."<p><a href="http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b...</a><p>There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.<p>There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.<p>[...]<p>The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades<p>Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).<p>As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:<p>"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know." |
“no one gets fired for buying AWS” – intentionally provocative thoughts | I really wish this was written up as an article rather than a tweet storm.<p>To that end:<p>---<p>In @stratechery @benthompson offers this (subscribe as you should for entire analysis). I totally agree on the general analysis but want to dive into "no one gets fired for buying AWS". Intentionally provocative thoughts:<p><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DtRbxi9UcAAdEur.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DtRbxi9UcAAdEur.jpg</a><p>IBM "invented" the idea of not getting fired for buying IBM. The key to all of this became known as "account control". Providing enough product, support, service, that there is no reason (arguably, impossible as practical matter) to look elsewhere.<p>For decades this was viewed as an insurmountable moat. IBM did not just offer products and services, it essentially "dictated" them. Of course not by force, but by having defined product roadmaps and literally explaining to customers what they needed.<p>The world was awash in confusion and complexity, but not awash in information. IBM exploited that asymmetry. At the same time IBM delivered transformative products and services, and profits, and so everyone was happy.<p>This all unraveled essentially starting with the PC but really it was client/server computing and then the Internet that changed this equation. There were new technologies and new sources of information. The asymmetry was broken. IBM wasn’t the unique supplier it was.<p>But this did not happen overnight. Little Microsoft in the early 1990s made a living selling MS-DOS and Windows to PC makers (half the company) and copies of apps (mostly on the Mac) one at a time at retail. It was a joke of an "enterprise" company. IBM tried to exploit that.<p>Personal story. In Jan 1993 I went to my first "exec" offsite (I was just a kid working for bill). Our small breakout group was tasked with developing a presentation answering the question "How does Microsoft fill the void left by the demise of IBM?"<p>Really that was our group. None of us were equipped to answer this question (I was a developer on C++!) though a) many read Father, Son & Co, b) knew IBM was ~bankrupt c) heard the phrase 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM'.<p>We had about 10 hours to come up with a slide deck. The thrust of our presentation was about how to develop account control. The main tool of account control is providing air cover, a backstop when things go wrong, and comfort.<p>A huge part of comfort is knowing that customers are not buying products but "investing". This means there needs to be more certainty in product roadmaps--primarily when are things coming, how pieces fit together, big changes that will take /, will something break.<p>We spent a lot of time discussing "industry analysts" and how Microsoft "needed to figure them out". No one was really working with these parties but boy customers sure loved them. Customer comfort comes from third party validation not just first party.<p>And so on. We concluded that there is a love-hate relationship with the idea of account control--both from the customer perspective and the product development perspective. But when customers are spending millions of dollars (directly) this stuff matters.<p>Fast forward to today. I am not as clear as above that no one ever got fired for going with AWS. Yes AWS is a huge success, massive and growing, but the product strategy is decidedly different than traditional enterprise.<p>AWS has many products that overlap, may or may not have long term support within Amazon, there are very different update frequencies. This is not about innovation—there's TONS of that. This is about "enterprise"— old school. Does Amazon look like Microsoft did in 1992?<p>Yes to some degree. But it also looks like a retailer. Some things retailerS do are an anathema to "Enterprise IT". In retail you carry 20 products in a category and let brand managers duke it out. Having "n" storage products in the aisle is innovative but maybe confusing.<p>At AWS:reInvent there was some shade thrown in the direction of Analysts. Been there, done that. The problem is it is not that 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' but 'no on ever got fired for listening to guidance to buy IBM'. There's a difference. Maybe I’m overreacting.<p>AWS has a colossal lead but now that cloud is "done" exploding, there's a new era in IT—"investing". The desire to be "multi-cloud" is a reaction to uncertainty from the leader, not a desire to hedge. AWS has to react to that but not necessarily with innovation.<p>For AWS to truly become the "don't get fired" alternative, customers are going to demand roadmaps, support lifecycles, predictability, reliability, and above all prescriptive coherent guidance that pulls all this together. Annoying, boring, and maybe just reality.<p>Of course Microsoft knows all of this as starting in the mid 1990s all these things started—the EBC, analyst relations, prescriptive guidance, MCS, architecture reviews, advisory councils, and more. Lots of mistakes, lots of flaws, etc. This is not about perfect.<p>Today, in the zeal to compete in the cloud one could easily say Microsoft is adopting many of the same approaches AWS exhibits—what is an AWS objection handler/compete versus strategy, is something a future or a 'project’…Is this new normal? That didn’t work for PC servers.<p>Prescriptive guidance means having a point of view on what technology is best and how to use it. That’s different than a bit of everything everywhere (as a retailer might do). Point of view == strategy == guidance. Risky. Hard. What analysts look at. Who is really doing that?<p>Maybe this is a new era in how IT thinks about software because software is now so pervasive and information so readily available. I am not so sure. Why? Because all this stuff is frigging difficult and there are a lot of choices at every step.<p>Ultimately whole businesses will bet their future on software—partner choices are existentially important, not less than the past. As Microsoft learned, being "best" is a combination of product, price, place, promotion not just innovation. There's a lot to winning.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1068579932610027520" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1068579932610027520</a> |
Why is 2 * (i * i) faster than 2 * i * i in Java? | The graal behavior is a lot more sane:<p><pre><code> graal:
[info] SoFlow.square_i_two 10000 avgt 10 5338.492 ± 36.624 ns/op // 2 *\sum i * i
[info] SoFlow.two_i_ 10000 avgt 10 6421.343 ± 34.836 ns/op // \sum 2 * i * i
[info] SoFlow.two_square_i 10000 avgt 10 6367.139 ± 34.575 ns/op // \sum 2 * (i * i)
regular 1.8:
[info] SoFlow.square_i_two 10000 avgt 10 6393.422 ± 27.679 ns/op
[info] SoFlow.two_i_ 10000 avgt 10 8870.908 ± 35.715 ns/op
[info] SoFlow.two_square_i 10000 avgt 10 6221.205 ± 42.408 ns/op
</code></pre>
The graal-generated assembly for the first two cases is nearly identical, featuring unrolled repetitions of sequences like<p><pre><code> [info] 0x000000011433ec03: mov %r8d,�x
[info] 0x000000011433ec06: shl �x ;*imul {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_two_i_@15 (line 41)
[info] 0x000000011433ec08: imul %r8d,�x ;*imul {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_two_i_@17 (line 41)
[info] 0x000000011433ec0c: add �x,%r9d ;*iadd {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_two_i_@18 (line 41)
[info] 0x000000011433ec0f: lea 0x5(%r11),%r8d ;*iinc {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_two_i_@20 (line 40)
</code></pre>
while the third case does a single shl at the end.<p><pre><code> [info] 0x000000010e2918bb: imul %r8d,%r8d ;*imul {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_square_i_two@15 (line 32)
[info] 0x000000010e2918bf: add %r8d,�x ;*iadd {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_square_i_two@16 (line 32)
[info] 0x000000010e2918c2: lea 0x3(%r11),%r8d ;*iinc {reexecute=0 rethrow=0 return_oop=0}
[info] ; - add.SoFlow::test_square_i_two@18 (line 31)
</code></pre>
Both graal and C2 inline, but as usual the graal output is a lot more comprehensible. |
On Being Accused (Neil DeGrasse Tyson) | The complete text from Facebook<p>-------------------------------<p>On Being Accused<p>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON·SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2018<p>For a variety of reasons, most justified, some unjustified, men accused of sexual impropriety in today’s “me-too” climate are presumed to be guilty by the court of public opinion. Emotions bypass due-process, people choose sides, and the social media wars begin.<p>In any claim, evidence matters. Evidence always matters. But what happens when it’s just one person’s word against another’s, and the stories don’t agree? That’s when people tend to pass judgment on who is more credible than whom. And that’s when an impartial investigation can best serve the truth – and would have my full cooperation to do so.<p>I’ve recently been publically accused of sexual misconduct. These accusations have received a fair amount of press in the past forty-eight hours, unaccompanied by my reactions. In many cases, it’s not the media’s fault. I declined comment on the grounds that serious accusations should not be adjudicated in the press. But clearly I cannot continue to stay silent. So below I offer my account of each accusation.<p>The 2009 Incident<p>I am asked by thousands of people per year to take pictures with them. A flattering, time consuming, but delightful chore. As many in my fan-base can attest, I get almost giddy if I notice you’re wearing cosmic bling – clothing or jewelry or tattoos that portray the universe, either scientifically or artistically. And I make it a priority to point out these adornments for the photograph.<p>A colleague at a well attended, after-conference, social gathering came up to me to ask for a photograph. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a tattooed solar system extending up her arm. And while I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation. As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me. I was reported to have “groped” her by searching “up her dress”, when this was simply a search under the covered part of her shoulder of the sleeveless dress.<p>I only just learned (nine years after) that she thought this behavior creepy. That was never my intent and I’m deeply sorry to have made her feel that way. Had I been told of her discomfort in the moment, I would have offered this same apology eagerly, and on the spot. In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.<p>Summer 2018 Incident<p>While filming this past summer, I had a (female) Production Assistant assigned to me, to ensure, among her countless tasks, that every ounce of my energy was efficiently allocated to the production needs of the show. As part of this, she was also my driver, to and from the studio, ensuring that I arrive on time. In the car we would review details of the shoot and she would help me anticipate parts of the shoot to come. Across the many weeks of shooting she and I spent upwards of a hundred hours in one-on-one conversation. We became so friendly that we talked about all manner of subjects, even social-personal ones, like the care of aging parents, sibling relationships, life in high school and college, hometown hobbies, race, gender, and so forth. We also discussed less-personal topics in abundance, like rock lyrics, favorite songs in various musical genres, concert experiences, etc. And we also talked about food – I’m kind of a foodie, and her fiancé was a chef. In short, we had a fun, talkative friendship.<p>She is a talented, warm and friendly person -- excellent traits for morale on a high pressure production. Practically everyone she knows on set gets a daily welcome-hug from her. I expressly rejected each hug offered frequently during the Production. But in its place I offered a handshake, and on a few occasions, clumsily declared, “If I hug you I might just want more.” My intent was to express restrained but genuine affection.<p>In the final week of shooting, with just a few days left, as a capstone of our friendship, I invited her to wine & cheese at my place upon dropping me off from work. No pressure. I serve wine & cheese often to visitors. And I even alerted her that others from the production were gathering elsewhere that evening, so she could just drop me off and head straight there or anywhere elsewhere. She freely chose to come by for wine & cheese and I was delighted. In the car, we had started a long conversation that could continue unabated. Production days are long. We arrived late, but she was on her way home two hours later.<p>Afterwards, she came into my office to told me she was creeped out by the wine & cheese evening. She viewed the invite as an attempt to seduce her, even though she sat across the wine & cheese table from me, and all conversation had been in the same vein as all other conversations we ever had.<p>Further, I never touched her until I shook her hand upon departure. On that occasion, I had offered a special handshake, one I learned from a Native elder on reservation land at the edge of the Grand Canyon. You extend your thumb forward during the handshake to feel the other person’s vital spirit energy -- the pulse. I’ve never forgotten that handshake, and I save it in appreciation of people with whom I’ve developed new friendships.<p>At that last meeting in my office, I apologized profusely. She accepted the apology. And I assured her that had I known she was uncomfortable, I would have apologized on the spot, ended the evening, and possibly reminded her of the other social gathering that she could attend. She nonetheless declared it her last day, with only a few days left of production.<p>I note that her final gesture to me was the offer of a hug, which I accepted as a parting friend.<p>Early 1980s<p>I entered astrophysics graduate school directly out of college in 1980. It’s a grueling adventure-marathon, and many people do not finish the PhD. In fact, it was not uncommon for half the admitted students to leave after two or three years, finding some other kind of work in their lives. While in graduate school I had several girlfriends, one of whom would become my wife of thirty years, a mathematical physicist -- we met in Relativity class. Over this time I had a brief relationship with a fellow astro-graduate student, from a more recent entering class. I remember being intimate only a few times, all at her apartment, but the chemistry wasn’t there. So the relationship faded quickly. There was nothing otherwise odd or unusual about this friendship.<p>I didn't see much of her after that time. Our student offices were on different floors of the building and we were not in the same classes. A few years later, I ran into her, pregnant, with who I think was the father by her side. That’s when I had learned that she dropped out of graduate school. Again, this is not itself an unusual fact, but I nonetheless wished her well in motherhood and in whatever career path would follow.<p>More than thirty years later, as my visibility-level took another jump, I read a freshly posted blog accusing me of drugging and raping a woman I did not recognize by either photo or name. Turned out to be the same person who I dated briefly in graduate school. She had changed her name and lived an entire life, married with children, before this accusation.<p>For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember. Nor does she remember waking up the next morning and going to the office. I kept a record of everything she posted, in case her stories morphed over time. So this is sad, which, for me, defies explanation.<p>I note that this allegation was used as a kind of solicitation-bait by at least one journalist to bring out of the woodwork anybody who had any encounter with me that left them uncomfortable.<p>Overview<p>I’m the accused, so why believe anything I say? Why believe me at all?<p>That brings us back to the value of an independent investigation, which FOX/NatGeo (the networks on which Cosmos and StarTalk air) announced that they will conduct. I welcome this.<p>Accusations can damage a reputation and a marriage. Sometimes irreversibly. I see myself as loving husband and as a public servant – a scientist and educator who serves at the will of the public. I am grateful for the support I’ve received from those who continue to respect and value me and my work.<p>Respectfully submitted, Neil deGrasse Tyson, New York City |
Developer on Call | While I agree developers should be responsible for their work, I'm very wary of "Why Developers Should Be On Call" going the way of the whole "open-office layout". Fast spreading, but abused by many companies to optimize for the bottom line without much care for anything else.<p>I recently had an incredibly dystopian experience around being on-call as a developer, and while I know for a fact that's not the norm, it's enough cause for concern to share my experience with others in hopes companies that choose this are held to higher standards and processes.<p>I joined a company in Vancouver early this year, that I will call company X. Company X is a well known name in the U.S for real estate/property search/etc. I was hired onboard to help transition a good chunk of their dated front-end code and help champion the direction of the front-end for various product teams in the company. Turns out the front-end was a giant amalgamation of a couple things: Dust.js, jQuery, bits of really poorly written React.js, all hooked up with and plugged into Node.js rendered server-side pages. An immense amount of UI bugs and regressions would appear whenever anyone haphazardly made a change to a seemingly unrelated component/page. Multiple efforts over the years were made by various people to "take the lead" on coming up with a shared UI/component library that was to be used across the various teams and products, but the components themselves were very buggy and lacked clear, consistent design patterns or input from UX/UI designers. This caused most of the teams to resort to building their own variations of similar components, with little effort to contribute back. This would continue over a couple iterations until someone else came up with the genius idea to build a share UI/component library...you get the idea. To actually develop and make changes on the front-end was even more archaic. The various products owned by the teams occupied a portion of the site, and were all hooked up by a build harness that someone had created. Only one person really knew how the harness worked, you needed to be able to connect to a specific machine to even just load the site navigation or anything, for that matter. There was a whole week or two where this wasn't possible, and productivity slowed to a crawl. Interestingly enough, the version of the harness that various teams were running were also different and out of sync. So you'd run the harness and wait some 3 minutes to test any little change, but no other pages nor products worked, so if your feature required integration with various other products, you were in for one hell of a ride. On top of this, a lot of the front-end code was written by developers that weren't well versed in building front-ends for web applications. Needless to say, the codebase was largely an entangled mess of different ideas, state management strategies, polluting of the global namespace, front-end libraries, duplicate code, hacks, and nuances. Some 2~3 years prior to my joining, the company had a mass exodus of developers -- apparently the place is rife with political turmoil amongst various directors and departments, too.<p>Prior to joining, I was explicitly told there was no on-call. Some 3 or so weeks after, there was talk about "testing Pagerduty". Very quickly, every developer on the product teams were required to be hooked up to Pagerduty and be on a recurring schedule. This is what that looked like for my team: 2 developers would be on-call on any given week, for 2 straight weeks. The intern, contractor, and Principal were excluded. This meant that as 1 of the 4 other people on the team, you'd be on-call 24/7 for 2 weeks every 4 weeks. How were the escalation and notification policies setup? When any error occurred, you'd get an app notification from Pagerduty, immediately followed by a text message, and a phone call. If you did not acknowledge within 3 minutes, it would text, phone, and notify again every minute until 5 minutes. At the 5 minute mark it would call the other 2 developers. No ack in 15 minutes -> Principal + Manager, next 15 minutes -> Director. My manager had 2 teams under him, and at one point he got an escalation from his other team. Saying he was unhappy would be an understatement -- a large number of hours and meetings over the next couple weeks were put in place to come up with a plan to make sure it never happened again and to keep people accountable.<p>Frequency of on-call rotation and overly aggressive escalation policies aside, there were other major issues. Traditionally, the products/services were all part of one large monolithic application. At some point in the past 2 years, there was a big push towards microservices. However, there was no API versioning, no proper logging or much ability at all to track where an error originated from. Despite using microservices, deployments were a coordinated effort every Thursday, along with code freeze and multiple rungs of approval from PMs to Directors/VP. Unfortunately, the team I was on was in charge of the CRM portion of the product, which was the most commonly used feature and had many integrations with other teams. This meant that for many teams, their errors would only bubble up through our front-end, where Pagerduty would be triggered for our team. In order to make the alerts stop, there were a number of hurdles. Firstly, there was no way to snooze some of these alerts as they weren't identified as identical errors even though they were. Secondly, locating the root of the issue was often extremely difficult, between the broken build processes and fragmentation. Thirdly, as APIs weren't versioned and deployments were done once a week as a concerted effort, fixes would not land until at least the next week, at best.<p>There were multiple times when I was on-call that I'd be woken up multiple times at incredibly inconvenient times: 2am, 4am, 5am, any day, didn't matter. Pagerduty bombardment came frequently. One day in particular I was at my desk trying to get work done and my phone went off some 13 times in 1 hour, all first alerts, and for the same issue. The cause? One of the teams was in charge of maintaining a set of APIs around Twilio, and pushed an update that caused constant errors everytime someone made a call. Obviously, this surfaced through our team instead of theirs. There was no rollback or anything to address this immediately. After tracking down the root cause and making the team aware, they had to prioritize the issue so it could get a resolution. The fix took just over 3 weeks, during which time all our team could do was put up with the pages and dismiss them.<p>I'd expressed concerns around how Pagerduty would be put into place prior to all this happening, and during. Throughout, the response from management was very clear: tough luck, deal with it or get out (in more words). Multiple members on both my manager's teams (amongst other teams) expressed discontent and frustration, many talks were had, and all fell on deaf ears. To top it all off, there was zero compensation, both monetary and time off. Myself and another colleague left, yet another transferred to a different part of the company without Pagerduty, and now another mass exodus is in full swing. Even the new contractor decided to get out well before his 8 months was up.<p>Overall it was a horrid experience, an incredible waste of everyone's time, productivity, health, and money. I'd hate to see this type of paradigm proliferate in the industry without due diligence and care around the whole practice. All I have left to show for it is my body in a constant state of anxiety, as if I'm still on 24/7 Pagerduty. |
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2018) | Abl Schools | Multiple positions (engineering, data science) | San Francisco |Full-time | ONSITE | www.ablschools.com<p>Technology has made the world more connected, fundamentally changing how we live, work and interact; yet traditional schools have not evolved to prepare students for the 21st century. Replacing textbooks with tablets won’t be enough. We believe schools need a new foundation. That’s why we’re building a web-based school scheduling platform, that allows administrators to put master schedules and daily calendars into a single cloud-based system. We are creating the next generation of software for all K12 schools to fundamentally change how they design, measure and improve their schools. We are also a company that deeply values diversity in every way.<p>View openings, including sales, engineering, customer success, and design on our site: <a href="https://ablschools.com/careers/" rel="nofollow">https://ablschools.com/careers/</a><p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Personal note: I've been on the Abl engineering team for over a year and I love it. The mission and the team make coming into work _awesome_. We have a diverse team, we're well funded, we have experienced leadership... I could go on. The interview process is, in my opinion, very fair. You won't be asked to white board and we understand that the process is just as much the candidate getting to know the company as it is the other way around.<p>If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my contact info is in my profile.<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Data Scientist:<p>The Role<p>We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist, and in this role, you will help schools understand the impact operational changes have on their students and staff. You’ll collaborate with a team of product designers, engineers, and school leaders to build software features that help schools overcome complex logistical challenges.<p>As a Data Scientist at Abl, your work will immediately improve equity in and operations of schools across the country. You will collaborate with product designers to determine what to build and prototype, with engineers to deploy software into production use, and with our schools team to provide decision support for K12 principals who are implementing novel solutions to complex scheduling problems.<p>Recent data science projects include:<p>Defining and calculating measures of inequity for students within a school schedule Building recommendations for course placement in a schedule Proposing and prototyping algorithms for supporting team teaching best practices Developing metrics and visualizations for student tracking<p>The Team<p>Our product research and development team is small, passionate, and inclusive. You will be the second Data Scientist at Abl and will work across the product and business.<p>As a data team, our goal is to produce software and insights that are proactive, guiding our peers and school leaders towards the right thing to do next, rather than taking a reactive view or simply describing what has been done. For the current stage of our business, our domain, and our customers, we have found that a bias towards reproducible, and more easily interpretable models and metrics is more useful than attempting to ruthlessly optimize an algorithm.<p>Responsibilities<p>+ Build underlying systems that power our data-driven products (e.g., recommendation engines, constraint solvers, and predictive models)<p>+ Consult directly with school leaders to work on complex problems within Abl’s product using your research and rapid prototyping skills to push new features into production<p>+ Perform data profiling, complex sampling, and statistical modeling<p>+ Design and develop tailored data models for K12 schools<p>+ Identify incomplete data, improve the quality of data, and integrate data from several data sources<p>+ Work on the challenge of combining data from across schools and districts, who all store things differently, so that we can measure our impact in aggregate<p>+ Determine how to evaluate equity, or fairness, for students and for teachers<p>+ Propose metrics for evaluating the overall quality of a schedule and methods for comparing multiple schedules’ ability to meet school leader priorities<p>+ Find trends and insights in complex, human-generated school data<p>Qualifications<p>+ Strong programming skills (e.g., Python, R, and/or JavaScript)<p>+ Proficiency in writing SQL queries<p>+ Ability and desire to present complex findings in a simple, approachable way for non-technical audiences (e.g., in writing, through reporting tools, and at in-person presentations)<p>+ Experience with cleaning, structuring, and transforming data via ETL processes<p>+ Ability to design and deploy machine learning algorithms and models<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Front-End Engineer:<p>We are seeking a Front-End Software Engineer to join our team and help build products that support our mission. We are growing quickly and there is a lot to do! Your contributions will have a meaningful impact on our company.<p>Your Impact<p>+ Work collaboratively with the Product and Design team to understand the experiences and pain points of schools, teachers, and students<p>+ Define and build compelling new products and exciting new features that give educators insights that will enable them to optimize how they use their resources<p>+ Use your extensive knowledge of front-end technologies to build high-quality designs that are scalable<p>+ Manage code review, increase performance, and communicate best front-end engineering practices<p>+ Create a first of its kind interface that will progress K-12 schools and their communities<p>Qualifications<p>+ Experience with Javascript frameworks such as React, Backbone, Angular etc.<p>+ You should have a great feel for user experience and an eye for beautiful designs<p>+ Bring a deep understanding of best practices in design, optimization, interaction, and usability<p>+ Familiarity with the whole web stack, including protocols and web server optimization techniques<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Support Engineer:<p>Abl’s Schools team is seeking a data-savvy Support Engineer to ensure customers are set up for success in our product. This person will provide direct technical assistance to customers, assisting with post-sales onboarding, configuration setup, and data manipulation tasks. In addition to assisting customers, the Support Engineer will interface directly with the Implementation Manager and Engineering to contribute to projects related to ETL tools and data solutions. The candidate should be familiar with basic programming and data management, and be passionate about helping schools use the master schedule as a lever for change.<p>Responsibilities<p>+ Collaborate with customers to initiate and schedule data transfers from school sites to Abl’s internal database<p>+ Write scripts to transform, validate and transport data as part of the ETL process<p>+ Provide first-line technical support to customers and implement ad-hoc data solutions<p>+ Support account managers with documentation and research around customer specifications<p>+ Create and update SQL-based reports to provide key customer success metrics to larger team and to inform product and implementation decisions<p>Qualifications<p>+ Proficient in at least one scripting language (e.g. Ruby, Python, JavaScript)<p>+ Experience with data analysis and management (Excel, SQL, reporting tools, etc.)<p>+ Customer-facing experience in technical role<p>+ Eagerness to work in a mission-driven, startup environment<p>+ 2+ years of experience in support of technical products<p>+ Former experience with a K12 edtech company or in a school-level role a plus |
Brute-forcing a seemingly simple number puzzle | That's a very nice challenge!<p>Here is a Prolog formulation of the task:<p><pre><code> :- use_module(library(clpfd)).
n_tour(N, Vs) :-
L #= N*N,
length(Vs0, L),
successors(Vs0, N, 1),
append(Vs0, [_], Vs), % last element is for open tours
circuit(Vs).
successors([], _, _).
successors([V|Vs], N, K0) :-
findall(Num, n_k_next(N, K0, Num), [Next|Nexts]),
foldl(num_to_dom, Nexts, Next, Dom),
Dummy #= N*N + 1, % last element is for open tours
V in Dom \/ Dummy,
K1 #= K0 + 1,
successors(Vs, N, K1).
num_to_dom(N, D0, D0\/N).
n_x_y_k(N, X, Y, K) :- [X,Y] ins 1..N, K #= N*(Y-1) + X.
n_k_next(N, K, Next) :-
n_x_y_k(N, X0, Y0, K),
( [DX,DY] ins -2 \/ 2 % 2 diagonally
; [DX,DY] ins -3 \/ 0 \/ 3, % 3 vertically or horizontally
abs(DX) + abs(DY) #= 3
),
[X,Y] ins 1..N,
X #= X0 + DX,
Y #= Y0 + DY,
n_x_y_k(N, X, Y, Next),
label([DX,DY]).
</code></pre>
The key element of this solution is the CPL(FD) constraint circuit/1, which describes a Hamiltonian circuit. It uses a list of finite domain variables to represent solutions: Each element of the list is an integer, denoting the position of the <i>successor</i> in the list. For example, a list with 3 elements admits precisely 2 Hamiltonian circuits, which we can find via search:<p><pre><code> ?- Vs = [_,_,_], circuit(Vs), label(Vs).
Vs = [2, 3, 1] ;
Vs = [3, 1, 2].
</code></pre>
The rest of the code sets up the domains of the involved variables to constrain them to admissible moves. A dummy element is used to allow open tours. The predicate n_x_y_k/4 relates X/Y coordinates to list indices. You can easily adapt this to other variants of the puzzle (e.g., knight's tour) by changing n_k_next/3.<p>A major attraction of a declarative solution is that it can be used in <i>all directions</i>: We can use the exact same code to test, generate, and to <i>complete</i> solutions. For example, we can use the Prolog program to show that the 5×5 solution that is shown in the article is <i>uniquely defined</i> if we fix just 4 elements in the first row:<p><pre><code> ?- n_tour(5, Vs),
last(Vs, 1),
Vs = [_,_,18,19,26|_],
label(Vs).
Vs = [4, 5, 18, 19, 26, 21, 22, 20, 24|...] ;
false.
</code></pre>
A few additional definitions let us print solutions in a more readable form:<p><pre><code> :- set_prolog_flag(double_quotes, chars).
print_tour(Vs0) :-
reverse(Vs0, [First|Vs1]),
reverse(Vs1, Vs),
length(Vs, L),
L #= N*N, N #> 0,
length(Ts, N),
tour_enumeration(Vs, N, First, Es),
phrase(format_string(Ts, 0, 4), Fs),
maplist(format(Fs), Es).
format_(Fs, Args, Xs0, Xs) :- format(chars(Xs0,Xs), Fs, Args).
format_string([], _, _) --> "\n".
format_string([_|Rest], N0, I) -->
{ N #= N0 + I }, % I is textual width of square
"~t~w~", call(format_("~w|", [N])),
format_string(Rest, N, I).
tour_enumeration(Vs, N, First, Es) :-
length(Es, N),
maplist(same_length(Es), Es),
append(Es, Ls),
foldl(vs_enumeration(Vs, Ls), Vs, First-1, _).
vs_enumeration(Vs, Ls, _, V0-E0, V-E) :-
E #= E0 + 1,
nth1(V0, Ls, E0),
nth1(V0, Vs, V).
</code></pre>
For example, here is the 5×5 solution from the article again:<p><pre><code> ?- n_tour(5, Vs),
last(Vs, 1),
Vs = [_,_,18,19,26|_],
label(Vs),
print_tour(Vs).
1 24 14 2 25
16 21 5 8 20
13 10 18 23 11
4 7 15 3 6
17 22 12 9 19
</code></pre>
And here is a query that solves the 10×10 instance:<p><pre><code> ?- n_tour(10, Vs),
time(label(Vs)),
print_tour(Vs).
</code></pre>
Yielding:<p><pre><code> % 21,852,020 inferences, 3.323 CPU in 3.349 seconds (99% CPU, 6575193 Lips)
63 58 53 64 59 54 65 60 55 66
21 16 11 22 17 12 23 18 13 24
52 49 62 57 50 61 56 67 28 85
10 7 20 15 8 19 14 25 82 72
47 44 51 48 45 68 29 86 69 30
5 91 9 6 92 26 83 73 27 84
42 96 46 43 97 87 70 31 81 71
36 39 93 35 38 74 34 78 75 33
4 90 98 3 89 99 2 88 100 1
41 95 37 40 94 79 76 32 80 77
</code></pre>
Since the search for solutions is decoupled from the problem description, we can easily try different search strategies. For example, using the strategy "ff" (first fail) measurably reduces the running time in this case:<p><pre><code> ?- n_tour(10, Vs),
time(labeling([ff], Vs)),
print_tour(Vs).
% 8,317,298 inferences, 1.344 CPU in 1.355 seconds (99% CPU, 6190382 Lips)
89 84 49 90 85 48 23 86 47 22
81 63 13 82 64 61 68 65 60 69
50 91 88 51 92 87 46 43 24 36
14 83 80 62 12 66 59 70 67 21
27 52 93 26 53 44 25 37 45 42
79 57 15 8 58 71 11 40 72 35
94 31 54 95 32 38 19 33 75 20
28 7 98 29 6 9 73 3 10 41
78 56 16 77 55 17 76 39 18 34
97 30 5 96 99 4 1 100 74 2
</code></pre>
Using CLP(FD) constraints typically yields much faster solutions than using brute-force search, since constraints propagate information before and also during the search to prune the search tree. Especially for more complex tasks, the computational cost of constraint propagation is typically negligible in comparison to traversing the entire search tree.<p>However, if you want, you can also easily obtain a brute-force variation from this program, by posting the constraints <i>after</i> the search. This turns the whole program into a "generate and test" approach, which is typically much slower than constraint-based search. |
Goodbye, EdgeHTML | Goodbye, Firefox (TLRD I switched to Vivaldi.com for a far better browser)<p>I switched to using <a href="https://Vivaldi.com" rel="nofollow">https://Vivaldi.com</a> last year after going through a whole bunch of web browsers to find a adequate replacement for my once favorite pre quantum Firefox browser with 70+ core xul based addons... The best I could find was Vivaldi, it's chromium engine based however the developers behind it have really taken to providing power user features and a good level of customization for the front end ... adding at least some of the features Firefox addons used to be able to provide. Not to mention it still allows me to use the garbage chrome store extensions, which while they will never compare to the old Firefox addons, it's at least better than scrap like dummIEs browser, flOpera, and defaulty chrome goolag Garbage and of course whatever fail Mozilla work on.<p>Seriously Mozilla have been making themselves irrelevant, for at least a decade since Firefox 4.0 they have been adding allowing retards to add crap features, mess around the frontend gui while not actually improving anything just causing more work for addon developers and the those who make good theme. The only good thing they did was push the standards for website rendering. Now they have self lobotomized the best product they had by cutting off the addons that kept it being the browser power users and influential users would recommend out to the less techie friends and family who now all just use chrome crap. Firefox(quanturd) has now become what might aswel be a chrome clone that while practically falling to it's knees in supporting and copying all the same crap Goolag does... so basically a whole lot of developer time is wasting just making their version of the same shit, instead of ever getting around to developing useful features for end users. .. at this point MS is smart for just using the chromium backend, ofc MS are even more rubbish these days and will never improve the front end user experience and features even with more time to spend on those areas and they'll probably not update the chromium source thus dragging things behind again.<p>And starting with the garbage web extensions api, that was the death nail for Firefox the moment they thought throwing technology like XUL out, that had allowed third party addon developer to create vastly more powerful addons for the Firefox web browser (NOT every other mediocre noob garbage browser, which is the goal of web extensions, when the best addon you can mak for your preferred browser could be ported to other crap browsers and is also limited by such a poor and limited api as implemented and agreed on by a consortium of morons with agendas of the company they work for ie Goolag, crApple or MicroSuck..) than are possible for Chrome, not to mention the customization and power user features that came with that addon support. These new employeed dolts that started infesting the Moztard organization threw it all away to level the play ground with all the other rubbish browsers like Chrome and Edge, etc..<p>So now they find themselves competing with zero advantage, and they have such morons working at this place that they don't even bother to implement the best power user addons in the actual browser that they broke.. Which is funny because if they did that, I wouldn't be using Vivaldi.. To this day many addon developers behind very popular addons like TabMixPlus are still trying to get these retards at Mozilla to actually improve the web extension crap format to not only fix bugs but improve on the api's that would help them re-implement the addon that made Firefox any good in the first place... check this thread <a href="https://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19942" rel="nofollow">https://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19942</a> .. it's a been a whole year, meanwhile Vivaldi practically just implemented most the features that TMP added for Firefox directly into Vivaldi options.. wtf have Mozilla done, nothing like that, they might aswel be the same idiots that work at goolag on chrome with its garbage user interface and feature standards.<p>Stupidity doesn't even begin to describe Mozilla, I have nothing but contempt for the organization for what they have done and the kind of morons they have working at the place. And it is sad because as a power user and someone who used to recommend Firefox as I really do miss having a web browser that had 70+ core addons that all went to making my browser highly customizable so I could have it looking and working the way I wanted, while providing a great experience and interaction with the web that was vastly superior to anything else on the market. Not anymore though, since Quantum wreck came out last year. And now he legacy browser of Firefox that supported all those vastly better xul based addons has ceased to get the updates required to render sites properly, performance issues have increased more bugs and for years Mozilla have been messing with frontend css changes etc and breaking customization for there own crappy visual design and garbage inferior features.<p>So yeah <a href="http://i.imgur.com/481pHyo.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/481pHyo.jpg</a> ...farewell Firefox (that was an old screen of Firefox, FF versions onwards Moztard broke more of the interface I gave up maintaining any sense of a good theme and more addons started breaking).. Firefox you were once the best, now you are shit, to all those at Mozilla go fuck yourselves. You cater to mediocrity and noobs, you deserve to disappear, followed by the rest that follow and set your direction into oblivion. |
The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays by Wesley Yang reviewed | I like Wesley Yang's writing quite a lot. As a 2nd generation Asian American (Korean like Yang himself,) I understand and have experienced quite a lot of his pain. However, I think he and others somewhat misattributes the origin of his/our pain. I'm more inclined to think that a lot of this pain comes from how we are raised and an impedance mismatch between the "American dream" as our parents understood it and the dream as it is (to be fair, he acknowledges this is a possibility.)<p>For example, I think the stereotype of Asian men being effeminate/sexless robots is largely a byproduct of our childhood upbringing. In my childhood (and in the childhoods of most of the 2nd generation Asians I've met) dating was strictly verboten and generally seen as a waste of time that could have been spent studying. Even in young adulthood, dating is frowned upon by most 1st generation Asian immigrants unless you're explicitly looking to get hitched. Obviously, when you raise an entire generation of people this way, a large % of them are going to grow up to be sexually awkward and therefore unsuccessful in the sexual market.<p>I'm aware of the data drawn from online services that show that Asian males are the target of some unfair prejudice. I'd respond to this by saying that obviously online dating brings out the "worst" in people. Given the sheer number of available "mates", I'm not surprised people lean on racial stereotypes to help filter their inputs on such a platform. And if I'm being honest, yeah, a large number of us Asian males are pretty sexually awkward. If we're not, it's almost certainly in spite of our upbringing.<p>I'm aware that this is anecdata, but after some practice (really just putting myself out there enough,) I haven't had any issues dating in an in-person format. I'm actually inclined to believe most people are willing to give anyone a fair shake (presuming some base level of sexual attraction) after getting to know them a bit, though this assumes that you're comfortable enough with the various dating rituals to not scare anyone off (which I suppose may be a tall order if you were raised in a way that prohibited the necessary practice.)<p>With regard to being passed over for workplace promotions, Asians are raised to be deferential to authority. The cultural norm is basically for our parents to be regarded as dictators within the home (for better or worse.) Moving up the corporate ladder isn't just the result of "hard work" per say. It takes a certain amount of arrogance and disregard for your "superiors" and peers to engage in the kind of self-promotion required to move up the ladder. Yet again, if we're successful in this domain, it's in spite of our upbringing and not because of it.<p>If you've ever read Venkatesh Rao's essays about the office according to the office, you'll be acquainted with the notion of power talk. Asian Americans are not typically raised to understand this particular game and there's little room to practice this growing up when your parent's rule within the home is as absolute as it is. As Yang puts it, this requires a certain level of "calibrated insouciance" Asian Americans just don't grow up learning. Once again, if we learn to play this game successfully, it's in spite of our upbringing.<p>From an Asian perspective, White children appear shockingly disrespectful to their parents. Now being a bit older, I've come to believe that this is up to a certain point a selective child rearing strategy. Asian children are treated as if they have no table stakes 100% of the time with regard to negotiating with their parents (there's basically no negotiation ever.) While this does lead to a certain "harmony" within the home, I don't think it teaches people the skills they need to be fiercely self-advocating when they grow into adults. The American economic system doesn't reward meekness in anyway (I can't be strong enough on this point.) So to me, it seems counter productive to be raising meek children if the desire is for them to become competitive at the highest levels. Our identities are honed on conflict, and it's also through conflict that we develop a set of values and the ability to make value judgments about when it's when in our interests to fight or retreat. Our 1st generation parents aversion to conflict within the home I think has raised us to be overly meek in the outside world.<p>With regard to the lack of Asian CEOs despite disproportionately high Asian representation at elite universities, Asian Americans are raised to not be risk takers. There's honestly a certain amount of cultural distaste for risk-taking and there's huge social stigma attached to failure in this domain. Once again, if you observe successful Asian Americans in this domain, it's because they've overcome their upbringing and learned to become calculated risk takers.<p>Yang also mentions this notion of "pumping the iron of math." Even in the educational domain, I've noticed a lot of Asians prefer to substitute repetition and rote learning for time spent actually thinking about and understanding what they're doing at a deeper level. This kind of practice is useful to a point, but unfortunately puts a ceiling on how far you can progress. This is something that was particularly painful to me in particular. I spent a lot of time laboring under the delusion that there was a "right way" to do most everything, if only I could find it and practice it enough. Beyond a certain level of prowess (surprisingly early sometimes), you find yourself "trailblazing" for lack of a better word, and this sort of mentality can only get in your way.<p>I know this is an uncomfortable discussion because it raises the specter of "cultural superiority." To be clear, I'm not arguing here that Asian American culture is inferior in any way, only that in some respects it might be maladaptive to the system we find ourselves in. In a lot of ways, I think our parents have a major blindspot in that they want us to go farther than they did, using the same maps and tools that they did.<p>I think what our parents were blind to was the fact that there are a lot of "hidden" games that you need to learn how to play to be successful in this society, and that learning these games isn't something that's surmountable by hard work alone. As much as we like to pretend otherwise, societies are a lot more than just their laws and institutions. White folks in this country have had their hands on the levers of power for a while (for various reasons,) and as a consequence, their children are able to learn the games they need to know to be successful in this society from their parents and grandparents. Most of us are still only in our second or third generations. We're obviously comparatively on the back foot in terms of what our parents are able to give us in terms of the cultural knowledge necessary for success in this particular iteration of our society.<p>Again, to be clear, I'm not arguing that this situation is "moral," just that in my opinion, it's pointless to be bitter about it. If we want to go farther than our parents, I think it's clear we won't be able to do it using all of the tools they tried to give us.<p>Obviously, there's a larger discussion here about whether or not this situation is moral in the first place. I'm inclined to think not, but I'm also of the mind that it's not much use to be bitter about the fact. I think we'll change the situation faster if we learn how to play the games we don't understand and are able to get our hands on the levers that move the media, politics and business. In many ways, I think as a cultural group we should be looking to the Jews as an example. Despite being so aggressively pogromed over the centuries and despite there being so relatively few of them, they've managed to become dramatically overrepresented at the top of basically every major domain of human endeavor.<p>To finish, I don't think there's anything wrong with our faces as Yang conjectures. I think we can learn the games we don't know how to play yet and hopefully by doing so make a world that's a little kinder to our children and grandchildren (not that the world is particularly unkind to us in my opinion.) It'll just require some tweaking of our cultural values and maybe rejecting some of the tools and maps of the world we were passed from our parents. |
Solution of Google Lake Volume Puzzle | Below we have output and code for the
Google lake volume puzzle.<p><pre><code> >glv_puzzle 4 9 7 5 9 7 4 8 3 4 2 6 5 8 12 0 0 0 3 6 5 8 9 0 2 5 3
GLV_puzzle: Started ...
GLV_puzzle: Number of walls = 27
GLV_puzzle: Max wall height = 12
GLV_puzzle: Max wall height at 15
GLV_puzzle. Calculating left results.
GLV_puzzle. Calculating right results.
GLV_puzzle: Lake volume = 89
PRINT_LAKE: We display the lake with walls 'X' and water '.'
X
X
X
X..X.........X.......X
X..X..X.....XX......XX
XX.XX.X.....XX......XX
XX.XX.X...X.XX....X.XX
XXXXX.X...XXXX....XXXX..X
XXXXXXXX.X.XXXX....XXXX..X
XXXXXXXXXX.XXXX...XXXXX..XX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXXX.XXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXXX.XXX
GLV_puzzle: Returning.
/* GLV_PUZZLE.REX -- Google lake volume puzzle. */
/* */
/* Here we have code for a solution to */
/* the Google lake volume puzzle. */
/* */
/* The code is in Open Object Rexx and */
/* easy to read. */
/* */
/* The lake is one foot wide and, for */
/* some positive integer n, n feet long. */
/* Each foot of length has a vertical */
/* wall with square cross section of one */
/* square foot. */
/* */
/* The heights of the walls, in feet, >= */
/* 0, are inputs to the program. */
/* */
/* Water is poured into the lake to fill */
/* it. The water is stored between */
/* walls. */
/* */
/* The puzzle is to find the volume, in */
/* cubic feet, of the water in the lake. */
/* */
/* For i = 1, 2, ..., n, the wall at i */
/* has height a.i. */
/* */
/* For our solution, first we find k so */
/* that a.k >= a.i for all i. Second we */
/* go to the left end and work toward */
/* the wall at k finding lake volumes. */
/* Then go the the right end and work */
/* toward wall at k finding the rest of */
/* the lake volumes. */
/* */
/* It's an O(n) solution. */
/* */
/* The wall heights are arguments on the */
/* command line. */
/* */
/* Created at 10:20:52 on Monday, December 10th, 2018. */
/* Get the name of this program: */
exec_name = 'GLV_puzzle'
return_code = 0
sq = "'"
Say exec_name': Started ...'
Parse Arg all
n = 0
Do Forever
Parse Var all token all
If token = '' Then Leave
n = n + 1
If Datatype( token,'N' ) \= 1 Then
Do
Say exec_name': Input' n 'has bad data.'
Signal out
End
a.n = token
End
If n = 0 Then Signal out
max_height = -1
Do i = 1 To n
If a.i > max_height Then
Do
max_height = a.i
k = i
End
End
Say exec_name': Number of walls =' n
Say exec_name': Max wall height =' max_height
Say exec_name': Max wall height at' k
Do i = 1 To n
Do j = 1 To max_height
lake.i.j = ' '
End
End
Say exec_name'. Calculating left results.'
volume = 0
result_code = left_calculate()
Say exec_name'. Calculating right results.'
result_code = right_calculate()
Say exec_name': Lake volume =' volume
result_code = print_lake()
out:
Say exec_name': Returning.'
Return return_code
/* ================================================================== */
left_calculate:
Procedure Expose n a. k volume lake.
return_code = 0
height = a.1
Do i = 1 To k
Do j = 1 To a.i
lake.i.j = 'X'
End
Do j = a.i + 1 To height
lake.i.j = '.'
End
If a.i <= height Then volume = volume + (height - a.i)
Else height = a.i
End
left_calculate_out:
Return return_code
/* ================================================================== */
right_calculate:
Procedure Expose n a. k volume lake.
return_code = 0
height = a.n
Do i = n To k By -1
Do j = 1 To a.i
lake.i.j = 'X'
End
Do j = a.i + 1 To height
lake.i.j = '.'
End
If a.i <= height Then volume = volume + (height - a.i)
Else height = a.i
End
right_calculate_out:
Return return_code
/* ================================================================== */
print_lake:
Procedure Expose n lake. max_height
return_code = 0
Say ' '
Say 'PRINT_LAKE: We display the lake with walls ''X'' and water ''.'' '
Say ' '
line = ''
Do j = max_height To 1 By -1
line = ''
Do i = 1 To n
line = line || lake.i.j
End
Say line
End
Say ' '
print_lake_out:
Return return_code</code></pre> |
Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy | I grew up in a town of 2,000 in rural Illinois. My parents ran a business, until it shut down of course. A lot of people have this idyllic vision of small town life. Everybody knows everybody, you can let your kids walk home from school, happy cows chewing cud in verdant fields.<p>I will add a caveat to this: I lived in a small town during the decline. The place my parents grew up in was a much more lively, happy place. There were jobs and prosperity, it made sense for them to not leave. My town no longer has a grocery store, has a single restaurant, and I am hard pressed to think of a small business doing well. There are other small towns in the US that I am sure are lovely. I'm just speaking from my own experience.<p>Unstructured list of thoughts about small town life:<p>- People are poorly educated and constantly make bad decisions about everything.<p><pre><code> - Years of poor decisions and management have buried my town in bad expensive infrastructure.
- Our mayor was an extremely incompetent, unqualified barber.
- The schools are falling apart and the good teachers quickly move on to more lucrative jobs in other areas. The good ones leave. The bad ones stay.
- Picture the Simpsons monorail episode, but replace the ambitious public transit project with a strip mall they can put a buffalo wild wings and a huge parking lot into
- Picture the Simpsons monorail episode, but instead of the town agreeing to build affordable housing, they reject the free government development because, and I was at this meeting, `They don't want the black people from Chicago moving into town.`
</code></pre>
- The people... kinda suck.<p><pre><code> - Conservatism in small town America exists, it is not some abstract concept. They are racist. They are poorly educated. They think global warming is a hoax.
- There is a special breed of large, swaggering, ignorant, low, angry white men that tend to live in small towns. They exist in cities too, but there are also other people around.
- As the article suggests: The educated leave. The info-wars fans stay.
</code></pre>
- Poor diversity. Still know 30 year olds who think it is edgy/cool to slur constantly. Experiencing other cultures breeds empathy. Full stop.<p>- RAMPANT drug abuse. Alcohol. Meth. Opiates. You name it.<p>- Mind numbing boredom.<p><pre><code> - Just because there is less civilization does not mean it is a beautiful forest.
- Is often a polluted creek people would be happy to replace with a Walmart, or a corn field that stinks of fertilizer for months on end. ( poop )
</code></pre>
- There is no culture to interact with.<p><pre><code> - Want an education?
- Good luck finding a decent college nearby.
- Want to see a band? Too bad. You will have to drive 4 hours to see anyone.
- Want to start a band?
- Good luck finding a community.
- Good luck finding an audience.
- Good luck finding a mentor.
- Good luck finding a place to perform.
- Who you surround yourself with matters.
- Who are you going to hang out with?
- Who is going to be hanging out and collaborating with your kids? Would you rather it be the smart, cosmopolitan Muhammad, or Cletus the pig-farmer's feral son?
</code></pre>
- Kind of obvious, but: What are you going to do for a living?<p><pre><code> - There is nobody to network with.
- What are you going to do when you lose your remote gig?
- Personally I would rather have the opportunity to get a local job if remote work goes out of style.
</code></pre>
- Small town gossip is a THING.<p><pre><code> - People will see your success, covet it, and hate you for it. They will want to knock you down.
</code></pre>
Small towns destroyed themselves by deciding to build giant roads, shopping malls, and walmarts instead of maintaining their main street, building parks, and upgrading their schools. You know, enhancing the life of people living in your city, instead of enhancing the lives of the people who drive through it at 60 miles an hour.<p>Now the malls are empty ( They were always a bad, dumb experiment ). Now all of their pointless expensive roads are crumbling and eating up a massive amount of tax revenue. Walmart pays the community a pittance and funnels all of their wealth to the CEOs.<p>It stinks people are suffering and losing a way of life, but I feel that much of this pain is self-inflicted. So to small towns: Bye, Felicia.<p>Some interesting reading:<p>- <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme" rel="nofollow">https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme</a> |
The usefulness of useless knowledge (1939) [pdf] | Ironically, the same author of that report, Abraham Flexner, destroyed accessible effective medicine for many people in the USA by essentially saying things like folk remedies, herbalism, cultural differences, gender differences, and so on were useless knowledge.<p>See: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report</a>
"The Flexner Report is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath. ... In a very short time, medical colleges were all streamlined and homogenized (all the students were learning the same thing) ... Flexner sought to reduce the number of medical schools in the U.S. to 31, and to cut the annual number of medical graduates from 4,400 to 2,000. ... A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College. ... Flexner viewed blacks as inferior and advocated closing all but two of the historically black medical schools. His opinions were followed and only Howard and Meharry were left open, while five other schools were closed. His perspective was that black doctors should only treat black patients and should serve roles subservient to white physicians. The closure of these schools and the fact that black students were not admitted to many medical schools in the US for 50 years after Flexner has contributed to the low numbers of American born physicians of color and the ramifications are still felt more than a century later. ...When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy. Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all either complied with the Report or shut their doors. ..."<p>Key treatment modalities abandoned as a result included spending time in the sunshine (which we now know gives you essential vitamin D), an emphasis on good nutrition (which is not a "procedure" doctors can be trained in and bill for), and other aspects of having a happier life like humor and so on (e.g. what Dr. Andrew Weil or Patch Adams write about). Alternative medicine has spent a century fighting back on such topics.<p>Another consequence of that report is that the American Medical Association and the "MD" established a stranglehold on medical treatments. MDs became in short supply and could charge large amounts of money. So medical treatment of any kind became much less accessible for most people. And when you did have money to pay a doctor, they would invariably be a white male and not a woman or minority who you might be able to relate to more easily if you were the same.<p>Also ironically, the Bamberger family, who wanted to give back to the city of Newark in some way for the success for their department store there by creating a medical school and teaching hospital in Newark, NJ, were instead talked into funding the physical creation of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Some of that is mentioned here: <a href="https://www.ias.edu/flexner-legacy" rel="nofollow">https://www.ias.edu/flexner-legacy</a><p>One big irony about Abraham Flexner is that he was very interested in hands-on education. While Flexner's excellent recommendations for making K-12 education "hands on" were ignored, his recommendation for making medical education "hands on" in terms of learning specific procedures were adopted by the mainstream instead of learning to see the bigger picture of a unwell person's life -- like Patch Adams advocated for instead with the Gesundheit! Institute. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Adams" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Adams</a><p>I have some other comments on that theme here:
<a href="https://pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html" rel="nofollow">https://pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-ma...</a>
"The Flexner Report a century ago (1910) began a purging process of alternative medicine practitioners in the USA. It lead indirectly to people like Herbert Shelton for being persecuted and prosecuted decades later for telling people age-old wisdom that sunlight, whole foods, and occasional fasting (and avoidance of stuff like cigarettes) could cure or prevent most chronic disease, and could do it better than mainstream medicine at the time (something that modern medical science is grudgingly coming to admit). Herbert Shelton may not have had the whole truth, but he had part of a bigger older truth, and he was harmed by a mainstream medical-financial system by advocating for that truth from the past and from his own experience."<p>I also include there a section of the older version of that Wikipedia article since removed: ""The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four), called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. ... One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. At the same time, the Report tended to delegitimize existing women doctors and doctors of color. While many such doctors continued to practice, usually within underserviced clienteles, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay."<p>And as I also mention there, From Marcia Angell: "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."<p>So, while the IAS is indeed a wonderful place as far as it goes, it is too bad Abraham Flexner did not advocate more broadly on the topic of the value of a diversity of knowledge and a diversity of exploration by a diversity of explorers -- especially in the medical field. |
Ask HN: How did you decide where to live? | Please excuse the throwaway account.<p>I realized a few years ago that the place where you live determines a lot of what happens in your life:<p>The type of people you meet, the type of sports you can do, environments you see, activities & events you can take part in, people you meet, cost of living, tax, local wages, type of housing, what kind of foods you can eat, what the weather is like, transportation systems, healthcare, internet connectivity, what language you will speak, religious activities, exposure to diseases, peacefulness / safety & stability ... and so on.<p>Human life also has a certain momentum to it that means you are quite likely to stay in one place or nearby it for much of your life if you settle intentionally or get stuck unintentionally. So it's a situation where if you get it right at the start, you can be happy for quite a long time, and if you get it wrong, you can be suffering for a long time. Finding somewhere just 1% 'nicer' can integrate well over the years.<p>I began by deliberately saving up a 'find a new home' fund for a couple of years while working normally so that I could take some time to travel freely and in a patient/relaxed way. I spent these years looking at multiple sources of information:<p>- International statistics & websites & thematic maps describing the basic shape of many countries - quality of life, climate, culture / attitude of people there, cost of living, tax, etc. Forums for immigrants, forums for tourists, forums for locals. Newspaper articles. Anything I could find.<p>- I made a shortlist of about 10-15 countries (occasionally adding/removing new ideas over the years) and used a combination of VR streetviews and real life 3-7 day trips to build an idea of the feeling of being in each country. I made a point to avoid all tourism, keep costs low, and stick to exploring widely on foot and visiting residential areas to get a taste of actual life as an immigrant. I would ask locals where they would live in the town (and country) if they had the freedom to choose, and why. I would ask immigrants how they felt about being there and if they knew of any better places (towns or countries). I kept a list of the top 5 towns or cities in each country that might suit me best and would adjust my trip following advice from local people as I travelled.<p>- If I found I was having a nice time and felt happy somewhere, I would wait a few weeks then go back for a second trip staying in my favourite town for 2-4 weeks, to see if I continued to like the place. This gave me a chance to exclude 'sunny weather' effects, i.e. almost anywhere can seem nice on a sunny day. Also it helped to overcome the novelty effect. New places are always fun, for a while. It's useful to ask yourself if you still feel excited about the idea of going back for another full month having just spent a week somewhere.<p>I won't say where I picked in the end, because the process is much more important than a particular result - and because my needs & values & preferences & language background will be different to anyone else's.<p>However, some places that might be interesting to begin your search with: Netherlands, Estonia, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, Romania, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Sweden, Georgia.<p>I have no regrets about taking a systematic and extremely patient approach over several years, utilising every possible source of information online, and always keeping an open mind (avoiding prejudices about certain parts of the world). I can see that if I had tried to solve this problem in just hours, days, weeks or months, I would have found a much less appropriate answer.<p>If you will be running your own business, PAY ATTENTION to business practices (laws, accounting, taxes). There are many countries where it is fantastic to be a salaried employee and you can have a generally excellent quality of life, but you might be tripped up repeatedly trying to run a business (<i>cough</i> Germany...).<p>Equally there are countries where the quality of life has certain things missing, but running a business is easy and straightforward; or the cost of living is so low that it makes a transition to running your own business viable where it otherwise wouldn't be (in particular, the cost of a local accountant to make things easy for yourself). Some countries have unique entrepreneurial tax systems like France's micro-entrepreneur system, or Estonia's 'your company only pays tax whenever you start to pay yourself anything'. Those are worth exploring. It's also worth looking for places with plenty of other coders & meetups to hang out with. (Meetup.com will give you clues).<p>And there are places that are just so friendly and fun that it may be worth paying whatever it costs to live there. Last of all, don't miss out on the chance to try something radically different to what you are used to. If you are from the US, consider Asia and Africa as well as Europe & Canada. You only live once.<p>Finally, a virtual reality headset (oculus rift or htc vive) is probably the fastest/cheapest/most effective way to explore thousands of villages, towns and cities for just a few hundred dollars total, and get an excellent idea of what it's like to be there in person.<p>You might find these sites useful: <a href="https://nomadlist.com" rel="nofollow">https://nomadlist.com</a> and also <a href="https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/" rel="nofollow">https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/</a><p>Good luck everyone and I hope you all find somewhere nice to live. |
Finite state machines as data structures (2015) | Note that it is perfectly possible to have more complicated values associated with FST keys, just not in the <a href="https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html</a> implementation. FST's can also be cyclic – this lets you represent things you couldn't with just a hash table.<p>Anyone who wants to play around with this should try the HFST[1] library, which lets you create compact and possibly cyclic string-to-string maps, which are closed under union, intersection, reversal, inversion, difference, composition. HFST makes it quite easy to do different operations on FST's:<p>$ echo 'c a t 0:%+N 0:%+Sg' | hfst-regexp2fst > cat.fst
$ echo cat |hfst-lookup -q cat.fst
cat cat+N+Sg 0,000000<p>(the default is for each arc to have input-equals-output, but you can use : to map inputs to outputs, and use % to escape special characters; 0 is epsilon/"nothing")<p>$ echo cats |hfst-lookup -q cat.fst
cats cats+? inf<p>$ echo 'c a t 0:%+N s:%+Pl' | hfst-regexp2fst > cats.fst
$ echo cats |hfst-lookup -q cats.fst
cats cat+N+Pl 0,000000<p>$ hfst-union -1 cat.fst -2 cats.fst >feline.fst
$ hfst-fst2strings feline.fst
cat:cat+N+Sg
cats:cat+N+Pl<p>$ hfst-invert feline.fst > ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
$ echo 'cat+N+Pl' | hfst-lookup -q ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
cat+N+Pl cats 0,000000
$ hfst-fst2strings ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
cat+N+Sg:cat
cat+N+Pl:cats<p>$ hfst-fst2txt feline.fst
0 1 c c 0.000000
0 6 @0@ @0@ 0.000000
1 2 a a 0.000000
2 3 t t 0.000000
3 4 @0@ +N 0.000000
4 5 @0@ +Sg 0.000000
5 0.000000
6 7 c c 0.000000
7 8 a a 0.000000
8 9 t t 0.000000
9 10 @0@ +N 0.000000
10 11 s +Pl 0.000000
11 0.000000<p>$ hfst-minimize feline.fst >min.fst
$ hfst-fst2txt min.fst
0 1 c c 0.000000
1 2 a a 0.000000
2 3 t t 0.000000
3 4 @0@ +N 0.000000
4 5 @0@ +Sg 0.000000
4 5 s +Pl 0.000000
5 0.000000<p>Now let's make an FST that turns slashes into +-es and increases the weight for every slash we see (~$[ a ] means anything-but-a):<p>$ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 |hfst-fst2txt
0 1 / + 0.000000
1 1 + + 0.000000
1 1 @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@ @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@ 0.000000
1 1.000000<p>$ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 | hfst-repeat > dir.fst
$ echo /a | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
/a +a 1,000000<p>$ echo /ab/c | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
/ab/c +ab+c 2,000000<p>$ echo /ab/c/d//e | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
/ab/c/d//e +ab+c+d++e 5,000000<p>On Debians you can install the package `giella-sme` which gives you a 37M cyclic FST of 587060 states and 1101943 arcs which turns North Sámi word forms into analyses. North Sámi has productive compounding, so e.g. "school bus coffee" is a word that I suppose someone might say:<p>$ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser-disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |head -1
skuvlabussegáfe skuvlabusse+G3+Sem/Veh+N+Err/Orth+SgNomCmp+Cmp#gáfe+Sem/Plant+N+Sg+Nom 10,000000<p>and there's a bit of ambiguity in the analysis:<p>$ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser-disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |wc -l
64<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/hfst/hfst/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hfst/hfst/</a> , using among others <a href="http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome" rel="nofollow">http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome</a> under the hood. `sudo apt install hfst` on Debians |
Jack Ma: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure | Um... I know it's part of what the cool kids do. Shitting on the US. But... this is the pot calling the kettle black.<p>China has been ramping up their own military spending like crazy the past few years. Plenty of articles from CNN and other media "The US should be scared of the Chinese military because of XYZ". Their infrastructure programs are just as bad as here. Difference is, we have actual code enforcement and building regulations that, yes, raise the price and increase in time to build/repair. But that also ensures that you get fewer buildings and public projects that crumble after a few years.<p>I also find it interesting that a lot of people jump on public transit as a poster child of "infrastructure". The economics for mass transit over large stretches SUCKS. It's one of the worst investments into public good.<p>Let's take a place I use to live in just 6 months ago, Colorado Springs. It's about 60-70 miles south of Denver. The Springs is a decent sized city (270k population). Roughly 21% of springs residents work in the Denver area. This was evaluated because I-25 is the main road between the two cities and a majority of it is just 2 lanes. Back ups. Oh my God. The back up traffic was so fucking bad. If I had to do a contract in Denver and had to be there at 9am, I had to be out on the road at before 6:45am to make it around 8:45am. That's if there wasn't an accident along the way. Anyways, a cost analysis was done to either provide mass transit between the two cities or give I-25 another lane on a ~50 mile stretch.<p>So, let's see, that's about 56,700 people that have a nearly daily need of going back and forth. To make it attractive for people to use, it has to be cheaper than standard car fuel costs. Yes, there's maintenance costs that SHOULD be considered. But normal people would never figure that in. That's like expecting people to "Read the terms and services". Driving my Jetta, it's about 4 gallons round trip. Between 8-12 bucks a day in fuel, depending on gas prices. Now, a car provides a level of freedom too. I can leave whenever I want. Go when I want. If you ever relied on mass transit for work (I did when I lived in Seattle and in Portland), you spend a lot of hours waiting. You show up early for the bus to take you to the WES train, which you wait for, that takes you to the Blue Line tram, that you have to wait for, that you then go to roughly where you need to be on foot. Essentially, you save little practical time. Yes, you can read. My answer. Library card and free audio books. Maybe if the cost is $5 for the day between CS and Denver. But more than that. I'll drive. I like sleeping when I can.<p>Oh and commuters don't run all day. Just the peak hours to and from work. As in. You don't get to "stay in the city for a little while". You have to go. Immediately after work. There's no waiting around. Have to work late? Got to call a friend with a car. You owe him gas money now as well.<p>Okay, now to the economics. IF, major if, 56,700 people take the commuter everyday at $5 X about 20 workdays a month X 12 months = $6.8 million a year. Let's say $7 million. Every year. Revenue generated. Now, minus fuel. Minus train maintenance. Minus employees. Even a $10 daily ticket only gives $14 million. For a how big of an initial investment? A billion dollar one? Even at half a billion, that's 35 years to break even if all the employees volunteer and the fuel was free. Shit, I forgot about insurance for whoever runs that train. In 35 years, you'd probably need a major revamp again. It's like being on a tram or train from the 80s/90s at this point. Another major cost sink.<p>But some of those 56k+ commuters, still need their cars. I built custom servers, delivered and installed them in Denver. You ever carry a 3u filled with hard drives? A lot of commuters are manual laborers too. You know, poor, hard working folks. Guys who do plumbing or electrical work. Dry wall. Carpenters. Those are just the commuters that pop in mind. They have too many tools and materials to ever imagine using public transit if their job requires them to actually carry their own gear. Plus, they have to travel around on a moment's notice.<p>Or spend the $350 million to expand the interstate which nearly everyone uses ALREADY. Logically speaking, what would politicians approve? You think they're going to risk having their heads roll for a half billion dollar investment that SOME people MAY use? Or expand what people ALREADY use?<p>You can apply the same logic to easily 90% of the rest of the country and come to similar results. There are definitely outliers to where it works. But let's not shoehorn ideas where they don't belong.<p>In reality though, being in the lead of commuter train technology is a lot like being in the lead of horse drawn carriage tech.<p>Are there infrastructure problems here? Fuck yea there are. The aging water system is major one. Electrical grids are being upgraded but there are trouble spots. Same with gas lines. Telecomm needs an over haul. Too many cities are also bottle necked on highways. If a natural disaster happens in certain cities, there's only one way out. Plus, just in time inventory causes major issues when these places do get cut off due to flooding. I'm not even getting started on social issues. Legit issues of dealing with foster care, criminal rehabilitation, mental health facilities, etc. Oh fucking hell, what about education? That too is a shit show. But to cry that other countries have "better trains"... seriously? How about we first deal with an aging water system before we shed tears for high-tech trains.<p>Also, wrong towards "It doesn't matter who says it". It really does. Because the connotations start to pop up. People start to bring up what that person "does right". It burns my ass that yes, the right conversation finally starts, then red herrings out to some bullshit territory like "more mass transit". No. We don't need that. We shouldn't solve Chinese problems in America. Trains are not our damn focus. Let's not forgot, they are sinking in debt just as bad as us. They've postured for a long time of being a "cash society". That little fairy tale is unraveling on them. They're not magically better. Factories closing. Human rights violations up the wazoo. Let's not miss how xenophobic they are. You think non-Han Chinese have a wonderful time? Hell, there's a government program to end their own Muslim communities in the western parts. They have, essentially, government minders that report on their non-party-approved activities. A forced assimilation program in essence. Oh, and that island that was "always there and always Chinese territory".<p>It's also funny, "invest in the Mid west". Really? I thought you all hate the mid west for mostly voting for republicans. Now, it's "Ma is right. We need to invest in the mid west" Come on! Seriously? And people also thought we should all politically follow Zuckerburg since he's rich and techie. How'd all that work out?<p>I'm all for investing into different parts of America. But shouldn't we invest in the Mid West because it's part of America and is struggling and we should help each other out? Not because some rich guy said so?<p>This got off to rant territory pretty bad. But this is silliness and someone needs to call it out. The comments in HN to this article is a prime example that the one problem this country has is too many people look elsewhere for answers instead of internally. It's complained that companies hire from the outside to lead/manage instead of internally. That thought process is represented here too. |
Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You | from <a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661" rel="nofollow">http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661</a><p>> The internet was our garden. And a beautiful garden it was. Sure, some fed agency created it, but let's face it, they used a fraction of the lot and we didn't really care for their supersecret bases they had littered about. There was so much empty space in between! And that lot we cultivated. We built a few nice trees and in their shadows we relaxed, we planted beautiful roses and yes, a few fruits and vegetables because, hey, it's always better if you grow it yourself. And ... heh, well, yeah, we had a few corners here or there where we grew that "special weed", ya know, but nobody really gave a shit, it was just us.<p>> We were pretty good gardeners. Well, you pretty much had to be in those days, if you didn't know your way 'round with rake and shovel, you didn't really get much out of it. Still, we were quite happy with it. So happy actually that we thought we should share that. I mean, there's so many people out there who don't even know just how great the garden is! And we invited them in. They looked around and, well, most of them didn't quite "get" it. Sure, it was nice, here or there, well, if you're into botany, that is, but it's kinda hard to get around and find your way through the jungle, and using a machete wherever you go, phew, hard work! But a few of them stayed. They didn't quite know what they do, but we handed them a few saplings and some seed and some actually managed to learn a thing or two about gardening. Sure, of course a few smartasses tried to steal our stuff, but we usually didn't have much of a problem to whack them with our shovel and get our stuff back. And, heh, yeah, we, too, went into each other's yards and played some pranks on each other, painted their roses black and the like, but it was all in good fun! And hey, they sure liked our ... ya know, "special stuff". They still had no idea how to grow it, but they were quite willing to help us share everything with everyone, as long as they got their share, too. And, well, why not, pass the blunt!<p>> That was about when the corporations noticed that, hey, where did all the people go? They took a look at the garden and they went batshit crazy. I mean, sure, we knew that it's great, but we never saw anyone go so insane about it. They saw it as the next big thing to make money with, and we laughed. Money? With this? Dude, you can't make money out of a system based on freedom and sharing! Everything in here is free. Yeah, in <i>both</i> ways.<p>> True. You can't make money in such a system. Unless of course you change the rules. And changing the rules, they could.<p>> I can't help but think that this must be how the natives of the US felt after they were "discovered". Because we had to face that there are suddenly areas in what we considered OUR garden where we couldn't go anymore. Worse, something that was the staple of our culture, going to a guy who did something great and asking him for a sapling of his wonderful tree. Became anathema. Instead of you SHOULD imitate and build on top of mine, the new creed was you MUST NOT. This rule, of course, did only surface after they themselves took from our gardens what they could possible rake together quickly. You might understand our utter disbelief and of course outrage when we noticed that turnabout is not fair game.<p>> Well, we have had our share of trolls and nuisances before. Long before we already had to deal with people who trampled through our gardens or were a general pest. Our solution was simple, we took our superior gardening skills and whacked them from here to next week with our shovels 'til they either learned to play nice or left for good. This didn't work out so well this time. No, not because they had the better gardeners. But they didn't need to. They had a much more powerful weapon in their arsenal: The law. First, they ensured that the laws would benefit them, and then they used it against us. And despite how despicable it may be, we have to admit that it is quite efficient to have others take care of your battles, especially when you know that you cannot win a conventional war.<p>> And now we're sitting here in what's left of our once beautiful garden. The once mighty jungle has been tamed and civilized, what used to be interesting and a land for explorers is now divided into lots that you may buy instead of simply use. You can get there easier now... well, if you prefer using long winding roads to a direct route, but the long winding roads are necessary so you pass by all the billboards that block your view to what's really interesting. Of course you may not step anywhere, only where you're allowed to, and don't even think about taking anything, rest assured it's for sale, not free.<p>> So we're sitting here now, at the edge of something we once knew as beautiful and free. We're looking at it and we wonder what we did wrong. Where did we fail? And I can only come up with one solution for when we try something like this again: Don't invite the masses in. Keep it to yourself. It's the only way how you can really keep it. And the only way you can do without a camo net over your herb garden. |
Ask HN: Best books for startup hiring? | I don't have any good book recommendations sorry, but as a serial entrepreneur and current CTO for a backed startup I can give a few pieces of advice.<p>1. Hire for what you need now, try not to overhire for too many future ideas. You just burn cash and it hurts the business.<p>2. In the early stages hire more for culture than just pure raw talent. If you have a person who is a 10/10 technically but a 7/10 culture, but you have a 10/10 culture and 7/10 technical, take the culture fit first. You need people who can be flexible and work with the team more than one person who happens to be an amazing engineer or whatever.<p>3. Look for people who share an understanding about startups. Meaning they won't feel demeaned if you ask them to clean up the bathroom before an important client/investor visit. I always had this as a standing rule in my teams, I'll be the first to take the worst job, but everyone has to help do it in the early days. If they get this, they are a team player, if they are too good for it, pass on them. I can't stress this enough in the early days. Later on, not so critical but I always will favor #2 and #3 people.<p>4. Try to hire specialized generalists in the beginning whenever possible. Sounds like an oxymoron but it isn't. You want someone who is say deep in one area but is capable of helping across the spectrum and is happy to do it. Kinda goes with #3.<p>5. When hiring business people, always always always hire culture. They are the face and voice to the client, if they don't share the values of the team you are done from the start.<p>6. Don't get hung up on where someone went to school or what degree they do or don't have. Look at the people applying, treat them with respect and your companies name will spread quickly. If everyone who interviews with you walks away and says damn, I didn't get that job but man I sure would like to work with them, you've done excellent.<p>7. Focus on treating people right and doing what is right more than what is easy or expedient. We use the value of "people first" where I am at now, and it is a value I take to every environment I lead in. Does that mean we have never screwed up and upset someone, NO. Does it mean we have always done our best to put the person over the easier options, yea, we have tried.<p>8. Don't disrespect engineers and give them a "test" to do at home and send to you. This is a major red flag to me for any employer, but it is not uncommon in SV. If you want to test them, respect their time and yours and talk to them. You want to test their ability to read code and deal with it, show them code and have them talk to you about it and what it does/doesn't do and what is wrong/right with it. Along with this one, don't do meaningless whiteboard problems asking them to reverse a string, who cares. Ask real questions.<p>9. Asking real questions in interviews is important. There is a trend right now in SV where they like to separate "culture fit" interviews from "Engineering" interviews. This is crap. Doing them separately is a waste of time and isn't realistic. Combine them into a conversation, sit with your candidates (phone, in person whatever) and talk with them like they are a team member, ask them hard questions, find out what they know and don't know, but do it as a team member and you'll learn all you need to know about their culture fit and technical skills and save multiple rounds of interviews. This also means you'll get to candidates while other startups are wasting time scheduling more and more rounds. Early on, if there are two of you founding the company, there should be at max two rounds besides an initial phone screen. If there are 3 or more, you need to make it two-three rounds max, and make all hiring decisions in say 7-10 days at max. Don't do the wait and see if something better comes along, you'll lose time waiting, if you find a good fit they are a good fit.<p>Ok I could write a book, sorry, bit of a passion thing for me on hiring. Always happy to share experiences and answer questions I can, 20+ years of building teams has let me make a lot of mistakes to learn from. |
Do I Offend? | I was a full time mom for a lot of years. I absolutely would not have tolerated one of my kids triumphantly humming louder to intentionally aggravate the other one. The fact that he thinks there is something wrong with the other child protesting this makes me think the answer to his question -- <i>Do I Offend?</i> -- is probably "yes." He probably is pretty offensive at times. He doesn't really get basic human respect.<p>Having said that, I have come to the conclusion that we all offend, we all exclude, we all decide what kind of people we want to associate with and what kind we want nothing to do with. Then we argue about who is right and where those boundaries "should" be drawn.<p>Some people draw those boundaries along racial lines or religious lines or other fairly arbitrary categories for deciding who is the "right" kind of person and who is the "wrong" kind of person. Boundaries drawn that way tend to have a lot of downside to them.<p>But it's simpler and easier than trying to figure out who is actually respectful, honorable, kind and decent. That's a much harder question to answer in a meaningful way and we often need to decide if we trust someone to some degree under circumstances where, no, we can't reasonably determine the answers to such questions. So it's really common for people to come up with some shorthand method for sorting the presumed good apples from the presumed bad apples so we can try to get through the damn day without wondering if the guy bagging our groceries is really a serial killer.<p>I don't think it's actually good policy to use such rubrics. I think the world needs to sort out some better methodology for coping with social realities in a world of 7 billion people when our brains evolved to cope with little tribes and villages of about 150 people.<p>But I have come to believe that we all, to some degree or another, tend to promote rules with our own self interest in mind. So I no longer feel like, <i>clearly, X is morally superior to Y!</i><p>Just because I'm a big believer in X and I spent years thinking about it doesn't mean it really is morally superior in some big picture sense. Those folks who believe in Y may have spent just as much time thinking about it and may feel just as strongly as I do and we may both be wrong. We may both simply be promoting something that happens to work for us as individuals while dressing it up in moral language because that works better for getting buy-in than admitting "It works for me, so I want it that way to enhance my life."<p>I'm a woman. Hacker News was perhaps as much as 98 percent male when I joined under a different handle more than nine years ago. I feel like it has become more welcoming of women over the years. I feel like I have played some role in that change.<p>I think the guys here tolerate me as well as they do because I don't take some sort of strident moral ("Feminazi") position that I have some kind of <i>right</i> to be here. I am mindful of the fact that there is something of value here and that thing was mostly built by men. I'm aware that change is a potential threat to the value that exists and accommodating my presence -- what with me being some loud-mouthed brassy broad who never managed to learn my "place" in the world and who, for whatever reason, grew up with the idea that my voice was as acceptable as any guy's voice, never mind that this is apparently not what most people on the planet seem to learn -- de facto involves change. I've worked at trying hard to figure out how to make that work in a way that doesn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.<p>When I first joined HN, I was more inclined than I am these days to feel self-righteous about trying to stand up for myself. I still am willing to take a stand, but I am much less inclined to feel self-righteous about it.<p>I'm just a human trying to make my life work. I'm angry, as most anyone would be, about the ways in which I feel that arbitrary categories, such as my gender, have undermined and seem to continue to undermine those efforts.<p>I am a big believer in win-win solutions.<p>If other people help me make my life work, then that's one less person who needs food stamps and other forms of welfare. We pay for those people who don't succeed. Whether they are in prison or standing in line at a soup kitchen, someone else is paying for them because they can't manage to support themselves.<p>But I'm also aware that not all solutions are win-win solutions. Plenty of them are just redefining the split without growing the proverbial pie. So it is generally reasonable to be somewhat leery of people advocating for changes that would lead to them having more pie, because it is possible that they are just trying to change the rules to get a bigger slice for themselves at the expense of other people.<p>The things that have happened to me really stick in my craw precisely because I'm not looking for a handout. I've consistently tried to figure out how to develop an earned income of my own. Perhaps people have trouble seeing the distinction there. Perhaps all they hear is that I want a better life and they assume I'm asking for a larger slice of the pie rather than asking for the means to bake more pie for myself.<p>I'm not very good at writing in some kind of "professional" detached third-person fashion. I've gotten a lot of feedback over the years that I'm doing it wrong to speak from firsthand experience and to speak from a first person point of view based on my life experience. For a long time, I worked at improving on that. At this point, I'm sort of inclined to feel like such accusations are really just intended to silence me, not to tell me "There are better methods for communicating than what you are doing and please get a clue, you silly person, you."<p>So the above is <i>testimony</i> as to the problem space as I best understand it, not me whining about my life and asking for advice. If you give me advice about how I'm just doing it wrong or you want to tell me that talking about my life is inherently bad and wrong and unwelcome when it seems fine for other people to talk about their lives, I'm planning to just ignore such replies.<p>Happy to engage people about anything of actual substance concerning, say, how the world draws various boundaries, etc. |
Ask HN: How do you handle your depression? | I'm going to give a very comprehensive answer here. Please bear with me, I've got lot's of expertise in this area, hard won, and this all may help:<p>It's important to note that not all depressions are created equally. There's transient depression: most people may experience some form of this at some point in their lives, and it can often be dealt with through short-term medication, counseling, both of those, or sometimes just one of them.<p>Then there's chronic depression. If that's an issue, prior to accepting a clinical diagnosis such as from a doctor (preferably psychiatrist) you should push for a full blood screen, especially for things like thyroid and vitamin D. There are things that can be picked up in such a screen whose symptoms mimic depression, and you want to rule out obvious physiological causes that have trivial fixes.<p>Next I'm going to get into the medication aspects of things a bit, but I'll give some coping hints afterwards.<p>Assuming we're dealing with either chronic or intermittent & highly disruptive episodes of depression, treatment can still vary greatly based on circumstance. My own opinion is that a combination of medication and therapy present the best long term prognosis for improvement. In some cases, these can even be temporary, where medication helps improve things enough to be bearable while you work out underlying issues and coping mechanism with a therapist (DBT & CBT style therapy can be very effective here) but therapy styles can be highly personal and different things work for different people.<p>In such a situation, on the medication front, an SSRI medication is usually the first-line medication treatment. But the specific presentation of symptoms can absolutely drive a different selection of medication(s). As one simple example, depression with extreme anxiety is a strong risk for BP2 (bipolar type 2) where the anxiety is actually mixed episodes (This is NOT always the case). But in that sort of situation, a psychiatrist might reasonably be reluctant to prescribe an SSRI which can exacerbate the hypo/mania symptoms of BP2. As such, an atypical anti-depressant such as wellbutrin may be used, and for acute anxiety/panic either a benzo class drug or in some cases a beta blocker may be used for the anxiety/panic.<p>Now, here's the thing about medications: (please HN excuse my language here, it's warranted I think though) it is a shitty process of trial and error. There are dozens of medications, and each person can respond differently. What's more, it can take months to determine if a given medication has had an effect before you can move on to another. This means it can, literally, be years before you find a medication or combination thereof that works for you. It requires patience and the knowledge that things WILL GET BETTER. They do. I've been at and slightly over the brink a few times in my life, and pulled back form the edge enough to keep trying for better results, and every time it has worked, and helped make the next time that much easier to trust the process. You will find something that works, eventually. Search out good doctors that will work with you as a partner in the process.<p>Now there's an exception to depression meds taking weeks or months to work. Very few medications can have a near immediate effects. One option, controversial, is Ketamine. You need a doctor open to this experimental treatment to work with you, and money to pay out of pocket: insurance won't cover it. Also it's considered a treatment of last resort, when many other med options have failed. Another, easier to get option is modafinil (name brand Provigil). This is basically an atypical stimulant, very different from something like amphetamine type drugs like adderal. It is primarily used for narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, as it's considered a "wakefulness promoting agent". However research shows it can have a profound and rapid improvement on depression. I speak from personal experience on this one: Modafinil keeps me functional during depression and takes a significant edge off it at the same time. I cannot understate the effect this drug has had in helping me manage my depression. Caveat though: No drug works for everyone, but doctors are often much more amenable to prescribing this one earlier in the medication trial-and-error process, so it's worth a conversation.<p>Finally, meds are only part of the equation. As I said earlier, therapy is a HUGE part as well. It will help develop better coping mechanisms at the same time that it also helps get at underlying issues that either cause or exacerbate depression, and can help alleviate them. So that's one thing. Next, and maybe most important for the OP here, or others reading, is the possible response to what I've said: <i>"Okay fine, but what do I do when I none the less find myself depressed and curled up in a ball and feel unable to handle anything or even get out of bed?"</i><p>Here's the answer, and it sucks: You have to power through. I know, I know, it's easy to say, and I know it can be the hardest fucking thing you ever do. But here's the thing: when you're in that state, your brain is a damned liar. It tells you it's better, easier, to stay curled up, to retreat from the world, that to do otherwise is to feel even worse. IT. IS. A. LIE. You must push to retain a semblance of normality. Set small goals if you have to: get out of bed and shower. That's it. Then set another small goal: eat something. Then another. At each small, excruciatingly difficult step, the next one will become ever so slightly easier. Keep doing this until you increment your way to some modicum of a normal routine, even if it's just going through the motions of the day, merely showing up to work, etc. However if my own personal experience and that of everyone I've ever spoken to about this is anything to go by, as crappy as you feel stumbling through your routine, it will be better than staying curled up in a (metaphorical) ball away from everything.<p>And while your depression may stick around for some time still, my experience is that it nonetheless gets better at least a little faster. Sticking to a routing distracts the mind just a bit, and every such distraction is a moment you feel less depressed. The more of those you string together, the better you feel faster. I also can't understate that it's during these depression times you should absolutely tap you support network of friends and family. If you feel comfortable enough, clue them in and ask them to help keep you on track for normalcy in your life's routines. If you don't have a support network like that to tap, try support groups: the DBSA (Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance: <a href="https://secure2.convio.net/dabsa/site/SPageServer/?pagename=peer_support_group_locator" rel="nofollow">https://secure2.convio.net/dabsa/site/SPageServer/?pagename=...</a>) is a fantastic, fantastic resource here, and even have online chat based groups too.<p>Also consider "grounding techniques" that help keep you, well, grounded. These can be great distractions when too caught up in your own head. Here's an example of a bunch of good ones: (I'm linking to google's text-only cache because the site is for some reason inaccessible now, even though I've used it for years... anyway, scroll down a bit to the list)
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3bjZ-8GU5AUJ:https://www.livingwell.org.au/well-being/mental-health/grounding-exercises/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3bjZ-8G...</a><p>None of this is a silver bullet, but it can "take the edge off", and I know, believe me I wish I didn't, but <i>I KNOW</i>, none of what I've suggested here is easy. But decades of experience coming out the other side of these things has shown me they do help. Best of luck to you. Feel free to reply with more questions, I have all too much experience here, and am happy to share the hard won lessons I've earned. |
Zuckerberg reflects on 2018 in end of the year post | Full text below for those allergic to FB domains.<p>I feel like he would win more allies by taking a more apologetic or at least humble stance after a brutal year, rather than ending by saying he’s “proud of the rest of the progress” made this year. Yes, the challenges faced by Facebook are massive, but if I were in charge over there I’m not sure if I would be feeling pride right now at the way they were handled. Then again, if Zuck had a more humble personality then FB wouldn’t be what it is today, for better or worse.<p>“For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community -- whether that's preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people's well-being. In each of these areas, I'm proud of the progress we've made.<p>We're a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We've fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we've systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm. We now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and invest billions of dollars in security yearly.<p>To be clear, addressing these issues is more than a one-year challenge. But in each of the areas I mentioned, we've now established multi-year plans to overhaul our systems and we're well into executing those roadmaps. In the past we didn't focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we're now much more proactive.<p>That doesn't mean we'll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won't find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems. For some of these issues, like election interference or harmful speech, the problems can never fully be solved. They're challenges against sophisticated adversaries and human nature where we must constantly work to stay ahead. But overall, we've built some of the most advanced systems in the world for identifying and resolving these issues, and we will keep improving over the coming years.<p>We've made a lot of improvements and changes this year, and here are some of the most important ones:<p>For preventing election interference, we've improved our systems for identifying the fake accounts and coordinated information campaigns that account for much of the interference -- now removing millions of fake accounts every day. We've partnered with fact-checkers in countries around the world to identify misinformation and reduce its distribution. We've created a new standard for advertising transparency where anyone can now see all the ads an advertiser is running to different audiences. We established an independent election research commission to study threats and our systems to address them. And we've partnered with governments and law enforcement around the world to prepare for elections.<p>For stopping the spread of harmful content, we've built AI systems to automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism, hate speech, and more before anyone even sees it. These systems take down 99% of the terrorist-related content we remove before anyone even reports it, for example. We've improved News Feed to promote news from trusted sources. We're developing systems to automatically reduce the distribution of borderline content, including sensationalism and misinformation. We've tripled the size of our content review team to handle more complex cases that AI can't judge. We've built an appeals system for when we get decisions wrong. We're working to establish an independent body that people can appeal decisions to and that will help decide our policies. We've begun issuing transparency reports on our effectiveness in removing harmful content. And we've also started working with governments, like in France, to establish effective content regulations for internet platforms.<p>For making sure people have control of their information, we changed our developer platform to reduce the amount of information apps can access -- following the major changes we already made back in 2014 to dramatically reduce access that would prevent issues like what we saw with Cambridge Analytica from happening today. We rolled out new controls for GDPR around the whole world and asked everyone to check their privacy settings. We reduced some of the third-party information we use in our ads systems. We started building a Clear History tool that will give people more transparency into their browsing history and let people clear it from our systems. And we've continued developing encrypted and ephemeral messaging and sharing services that we believe will be the foundation for how people communicate going forward.<p>For making sure our services improve people's well-being, we conducted research that found that when people use the internet to interact with others, that's associated with all the positive aspects of well-being you'd expect, including greater happiness, health, feeling more connected, and so on. But when you just use the internet to consume content passively, that's not associated with those same positive effects. Based on this research, we've changed our services to encourage meaningful social interactions rather than passive consumption. One change we made reduced the amount of viral videos people watched by 50 million hours a day. In total, these changes intentionally reduced engagement and revenue in the near term, although we believe they'll help us build a stronger community and business over the long term.<p>If you're interested in reading more about these changes, I've written extensively about our work on elections here (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing-for-elections/10156300047606634/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing-for...</a>) and content governance and enforcement here (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...</a>). You can also read about our research on well-being here (<a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spending-time-on-social-media-bad-for-us/" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spend...</a>).<p>I've learned a lot from focusing on these issues and we still have a lot of work ahead. I'm proud of the progress we've made in 2018 and grateful to everyone who has helped us get here -- the teams inside Facebook, our partners and the independent researchers and everyone who has given us so much feedback. I'm committed to continuing to make progress on these important issues as we enter the new year.<p>I'm also proud of the rest of the progress we've made this year. More than 2 billion people now use one of our services every single day to stay connected with the people who matter most in their lives. Hundreds of millions of people are part of communities they tell us make up their most important social support. People have come together using these tools to raise more than $1 billion for causes and to find more than 1 million new jobs. More than 90 million small businesses use our tools, and more than half say they've hired more people because of them. Building community and bringing people together leads to a lot of good, and I'm committed to continuing our progress in these areas as well.<p>Here's to a great new year to come.“ |
Elon and the collective | - Comparison to the space shuttle: Not remotely apt. The space shuttle, among other reasons, was a failure when it came to its design requirements because those requirements were expanded in incompatible directions by a congress that doesn't understand engineering. "It was done badly before, therefore it is not possible to do well" isn't a good argument.<p>- "Rockets are irreconcilably more dangerous than planes": That might actually be true, at least for many more decades. Rockets are at least 10^5 times more dangerous than planes and the failure modes are much, much worse. That doesn't mean that SpaceX can't revolutionize space transport for satellites, unmanned commercial endeavors, and limited manned missions. A tenfold decrease in the cost of space access would make entire new industries economically feasible, even after accounting for risk. SpaceX is currently kicking ass, and I have no reason to doubt they will continue at it.<p>- "Earth-to-Earth passenger rockets are insane": Yes, they may well be. I did a detailed analysis here: <a href="https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passenger-rocket/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passen...</a> As before, safety needs revolutionary changes, probably several times over. Economics and engineering will be very difficult, and the hardest part-- still totally unsolved-- is making something that can withstand re-entry many dozens of times without being totally rebuilt.<p>- "The advertised orbital travel times are wrong": This is likely garbage. The details of flight navigation are something SpaceX has down pat and would not reasonably lie to themselves or the public about. Without a proper orbital analysis to back up this claim, I would not give it much credence. The point about transport to and from the launch pad adding time is likely valid, though-- his figure of a 5 mile journey from city center would actually be more like 10 miles, minimum. In a ferry this would be multiple dozens of minutes, which would add up at either end, especially once you account for travel to the ferry terminal itself. 30-40 minutes would be launch-to-landing time only, not door-to-door.<p>- Colonizing mars: Mars being inhospitable is a solvable problem. Radiation can be avoided by living underground, and temperature and pressure can be maintained inside a habitat. The unanswered question is economics and logistics-- It would require many billions of dollars of infrastructure-- flight costs <i>not</i> included-- to get a colony going. SpaceX isn't working on these logistics; their attitude is "someone else will figure that out." It's not clear what pot of gold would drive that initial investment, and by whom.<p>- "Extinction danger is a bad reason to go to Mars" - Agree that this is mostly BS; even the worst Earth is much more comfortable than Mars. But I would say there are plenty of other, better philosophical reasons to try-- What is the economic and social value of an <i>entire inhabited planet</i>? We should treat the failure to pursue it as an opportunity cost of that magnitude.<p>- "We should go to the moon first" - Going to the moon is not mutually exclusive with going to other places in the solar system.<p>- "Hyperloop is infeasible" - Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it, but happy to let them try.<p>- "Neuralink is garbage" - Neuroscientists I've spoken to would love to see more advanced neural probes. Money toward that problem could reasonably do a lot of good and make a lot of progress. Right now we can get about 100 neuron readings from a small area, and this is already used in humans with various degrees of paralysis to control artifical limbs. We are a long way from a "seamless brain-computer interface", and it is probably 10 times harder than Elon imagines-- I doubt he understands it-- and healthy skepticism is in order. But investment in the problem would give real returns, especially for the quality of life of disabled people. A limited consumer brain-computer interface within the next three decades is probably not terribly outlandish if resources are dedicated to making it happen. A hell of a lot can happen in 30 years.<p>- "Boring company is dumb" - Solution to mass transit? I agree that the idea is probably not very thoroughly thought through. Are 10x gains in the efficiency of tunnel drilling possible? I could believe it. If Elon and his company have to convince themselves that subterranean packet-routed car skates are the future, only to arrive at mass transit later on, so be it if that results in making infrastructure 10 times cheaper to construct.<p>- "Self-driving is dangerous" - Self driving does not have to be impeccable to be a benefit-- it only has to be better than the average driver, which is often quite bad in some pretty trivial/preventable ways. About 50,000 Americans die in cars per year, so there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of potential good. As a society, we should try to make this work. I do agree that Elon way oversells its capability, and that's dangerous/disingenuous. I also think that many car localization and navigation problems are very solveable, but Tesla does not seem to be solving them effectively-- see examples of autopiloted cars hitting dividers earlier this year. The hard part is getting machines to participate in the nonverbal social environment that is a road full of human drivers... but Tesla seems to be struggling on problems several tiers below this.<p>- Problems in Tesla management - From the outside, it looks as if Musk's stubbornness may have lead to his underlings being unable to convery to him what is realistic to accomplish, resulting in repeated missed deadlines, as predicted by the people who appear to have been oustered for saying so. He does not seem like someone who it is easy to give bad news to, which means he and his company are going to have a hard time seeing and reacting to peril. I do not side fully with the shorts, though; Tesla is positioned to completely change the auto industry. I just hope they can execute without shooting themselves in the foot.<p>- Elon's childish toxicity - Completely agree. Not behavior becoming of a leader at his level, let alone any emotionally well-adjusted adult. It's a huge liability, c.f. the SEC fiasco, which Musk still doesn't seem to comprehend. Musk supporters frustratingly seem to attribute his companies' success as being due to these flaws instead of in spite of them. |
People with Depression Use Language Differently | I'm basically currently losing my shit over my intractable personal problems and the ways in which sexism help keep them intractable. So I don't think I can be rational or socially acceptable at the moment.<p><i>However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?</i><p>My belief based on first-hand experience is that social factors drive some people to this.<p>I'm very socially observant. I've apparently been casually announcing that <i>the emperor has no clothes</i> since I was about three years old. I often don't realize I know someone's "secrets" that they imagine they have covered up very successfully. When I casually remark on such things, it gets me hated on. No, I will never ever ever ever be forgiven for it.<p>So, over the years, I have gradually worked at saying less about other people because it's such a mine field. Talking about me and only me as much as I can convinces other people I'm a narcissist, but it's less problematic than me casually asking "The emperor? You mean the deluded naked guy whose delusions everyone is feeding by going along with his bullshit claim that he has some amazing new wardrobe? Is that the guy we're talking about?"<p>This is backed up by data. I mean, the fact that I only talk about me and everyone hates me for it -- or, more accurately, everyone hates me and identifying this habit is one of the excuses they use to justify it. When I was on Metafilter, if you checked their infodump, I used "I" vastly more than any runner up. And I was hated on, which was just a thing Metafilter chose to do to certain people because the site has serious issues. When I joined, it was policy for the mods to pin the drama on one person, blame them, tell them you shut up and stop commenting and then let other people continue attacking them under circumstances where they would get in trouble if they came back to defend themselves. I quickly got on the short list of people where public bear downs by multiple people were not only the norm, God help you if you tried to defend them because that could mean you're next.<p>Depression is often a female issue and, on average, woman tend to be (perceived as) more social. We get tasked with doing emotional labor and get dismissed a lot and can't make as much money for the same job, etc. It's a very crazy-making situation and it's common for therapists to offer women medication instead of advice on how to stop being victimized.<p>I think most men don't really mean to victimize women, so it goes bad places when women point fingers and blame men who are part of the problem. They feel wrongfully accused. Doing so just makes the problem more intractable.<p>But trying to find the right words before you can speak to the problem winds up being a silencing mechanism. It makes it extra hard to try to solve it at all.<p>When every door slams shut in your face no matter what you do, it's hard to not start thinking in absolutist terms of "always" and "never."<p>Even so, I think the absolutist terms are more likely linked to wonky brain chemistry.<p>I have a medical condition. On bad days when I'm feverish, etc, I engage in more absolutist language and I'm not rational.<p>My sons have learned to "not engage the crazy." I say something extreme and irrational, they say "Mom, are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you warm enough?"<p>Most of the time, when I'm irrational, getting me fed, hydrated and warm results in me falling asleep in short order. Trying to argue with me about crazy stuff I'm saying just puts out the fire with gasoline. Insisting on only engaging me constructively is more effective.<p>They do sometimes rebut my irrational remarks, but they don't get dragged into arguing it with me. I say "I have no friends" they say "That's not true." They rebut it,but they dont get tired in it.<p>That seems to be a best practice that helps keep me grounded in reality without pissing me off, fueling a sense of hopelessness and despair, etc.<p>Getting healthier and making my life work better has proven to be the best solution. My mental health has gradually improved.<p>I still have days when the bullshit in the world that makes it seemingly impossible for a woman to get anywhere just makes me postal. I'm there right now. The past few days have been terrible in terms of my head space.<p>But most of the time, I'm overall more rational.<p>Most depressed people have serious intractable personal problems that no one knows how to solve. Medicating their feelings ends up de facto being dismissive.<p>Think of it like if Susan B Anthony were put on Valium and told "Women don't need the vote. You're merely crazy. Here, take this. You'll feel better." No, that's not going to figure the myriad problems that grow out of being disenfranchised and disempowered and having no real say in your own life.<p>I think social factors fuel the use of first person pronouns. I think social factors and brain chemistry fuel the use of absolutist terminology.<p>Both get better when the social factors driving it improve. The second seems to also be helped by addressing physiological factors, like exhaustion.<p>/2 cents |
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019) | Abl Schools | Frontend Engineer, Data Scientist, Support Engineer | San Francisco |Full-time | ONSITE | www.ablschools.com<p>Technology has made the world more connected, fundamentally changing how we live, work and interact; yet traditional schools have not evolved to prepare students for the 21st century. Replacing textbooks with tablets won’t be enough. We believe schools need a new foundation. That’s why we’re building a web-based school scheduling platform, that allows administrators to put master schedules and daily calendars into a single cloud-based system. We are creating the next generation of software for all K12 schools to fundamentally change how they design, measure and improve their schools. We are also a company that deeply values diversity in every way.<p>View openings, including sales, engineering, customer success, and design on our site: <a href="https://ablschools.com/careers/" rel="nofollow">https://ablschools.com/careers/</a><p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Personal note: I've been on the Abl engineering team for over a year and I love it. The mission and the team make coming into work _awesome_. We have a diverse team, we're well funded, we have experienced leadership... I could go on. The interview process is, in my opinion, very fair. You won't be asked to white board and we understand that the process is just as much the candidate getting to know the company as it is the other way around.<p>If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my contact info is in my profile.<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Data Scientist:<p>The Role<p>We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist, and in this role, you will help schools understand the impact operational changes have on their students and staff. You’ll collaborate with a team of product designers, engineers, and school leaders to build software features that help schools overcome complex logistical challenges.<p>As a Data Scientist at Abl, your work will immediately improve equity in and operations of schools across the country. You will collaborate with product designers to determine what to build and prototype, with engineers to deploy software into production use, and with our schools team to provide decision support for K12 principals who are implementing novel solutions to complex scheduling problems.<p>Recent data science projects include:<p>Defining and calculating measures of inequity for students within a school schedule Building recommendations for course placement in a schedule Proposing and prototyping algorithms for supporting team teaching best practices Developing metrics and visualizations for student tracking<p>The Team<p>Our product research and development team is small, passionate, and inclusive. You will be the second Data Scientist at Abl and will work across the product and business.<p>As a data team, our goal is to produce software and insights that are proactive, guiding our peers and school leaders towards the right thing to do next, rather than taking a reactive view or simply describing what has been done. For the current stage of our business, our domain, and our customers, we have found that a bias towards reproducible, and more easily interpretable models and metrics is more useful than attempting to ruthlessly optimize an algorithm.<p>Responsibilities<p>+ Build underlying systems that power our data-driven products (e.g., recommendation engines, constraint solvers, and predictive models)<p>+ Consult directly with school leaders to work on complex problems within Abl’s product using your research and rapid prototyping skills to push new features into production<p>+ Perform data profiling, complex sampling, and statistical modeling<p>+ Design and develop tailored data models for K12 schools<p>+ Identify incomplete data, improve the quality of data, and integrate data from several data sources<p>+ Work on the challenge of combining data from across schools and districts, who all store things differently, so that we can measure our impact in aggregate<p>+ Determine how to evaluate equity, or fairness, for students and for teachers<p>+ Propose metrics for evaluating the overall quality of a schedule and methods for comparing multiple schedules’ ability to meet school leader priorities<p>+ Find trends and insights in complex, human-generated school data<p>Qualifications<p>+ Strong programming skills (e.g., Python, R, and/or JavaScript)<p>+ Proficiency in writing SQL queries<p>+ Ability and desire to present complex findings in a simple, approachable way for non-technical audiences (e.g., in writing, through reporting tools, and at in-person presentations)<p>+ Experience with cleaning, structuring, and transforming data via ETL processes<p>+ Ability to design and deploy machine learning algorithms and models<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Sr. Front-End Engineer:<p>We are seeking a Front-End Software Engineer to join our team and help build products that support our mission. We are growing quickly and there is a lot to do! Your contributions will have a meaningful impact on our company.<p>Your Impact<p>+ Work collaboratively with the Product and Design team to understand the experiences and pain points of schools, teachers, and students<p>+ Define and build compelling new products and exciting new features that give educators insights that will enable them to optimize how they use their resources<p>+ Use your extensive knowledge of front-end technologies to build high-quality designs that are scalable<p>+ Manage code review, increase performance, and communicate best front-end engineering practices<p>+ Create a first of its kind interface that will progress K-12 schools and their communities<p>Qualifications<p>+ Experience with Javascript frameworks such as React, Backbone, Angular etc.<p>+ You should have a great feel for user experience and an eye for beautiful designs<p>+ Bring a deep understanding of best practices in design, optimization, interaction, and usability<p>+ Familiarity with the whole web stack, including protocols and web server optimization techniques<p>--------------------------------------------------<p>Support Engineer:<p>Abl’s Schools team is seeking a data-savvy Support Engineer to ensure customers are set up for success in our product. This person will provide direct technical assistance to customers, assisting with post-sales onboarding, configuration setup, and data manipulation tasks. In addition to assisting customers, the Support Engineer will interface directly with the Implementation Manager and Engineering to contribute to projects related to ETL tools and data solutions. The candidate should be familiar with basic programming and data management, and be passionate about helping schools use the master schedule as a lever for change.<p>Responsibilities<p>+ Collaborate with customers to initiate and schedule data transfers from school sites to Abl’s internal database<p>+ Write scripts to transform, validate and transport data as part of the ETL process<p>+ Provide first-line technical support to customers and implement ad-hoc data solutions<p>+ Support account managers with documentation and research around customer specifications<p>+ Create and update SQL-based reports to provide key customer success metrics to larger team and to inform product and implementation decisions<p>Qualifications<p>+ Proficient in at least one scripting language (e.g. Ruby, Python, JavaScript)<p>+ Experience with data analysis and management (Excel, SQL, reporting tools, etc.)<p>+ Customer-facing experience in technical role<p>+ Eagerness to work in a mission-driven, startup environment<p>+ 2+ years of experience in support of technical products<p>+ Former experience with a K12 edtech company or in a school-level role a plus |
Tales of an Aging Gamer: We keep getting older, the games stay the same | There are many factors at play.<p>----------
1. Gaming is an escapism.<p>That's why many people hesitate to call themselves gamers or even admit it in certain (more conservative) social settings. Thinking back, gaming was a chill activity for me only a single-digit percent of the time and now at 38 y/o I am ashamed that I didn't admit that to myself earlier. And yes, many people still view "gamers" and teenagers with no cares at all. They haven't noticed that the world changed and these teenagers now play together with their kids. And that even company CEOs have admitted to be gaming.<p>----------
2. Games aren't increasing in diversity or quality.<p>Quite the contrary, even the big AAA studios drop the ball and start milking nostalgia -- recent releases like Fallout 76 and WoW's latest expansion Battle for Azeroth are a prime example. Them not being quality games is not an universal truth of course but if you visit any gaming forum outlet you'll quickly discover they are a very divisive topic. This wasn't true even as back as 2-3 years ago for many games (the above two included).<p>----------
3. I'm glad the article debunked that your abilities start to deteriorate at your 30s.<p>At 38 I can still pop in a random Quake3 server and absolutely dominate the others there. Many times they teamed up 5v1 against me and still lost on total score. As you get "older" (if 30s are "being old") your abilities can even self-perfect -- my wife several times noted that when I played a game for a week and quit it and then got back to it 6 months later I was suddenly extremely good at it and better than her who played it casually for those 6 months. It's as if your brain has been periodically replaying your experience with the game and gradually perfected the schemata that makes you much more efficient at the game. Probably while you slept.<p>----------
4. Aggressive monetization.<p>As the stable income from selling games dwindles, many businessmen imagine that they are forced to introduce microtransactions or release half-finished games and then basically make you pay for a DLC that costs as much as the original game itself for you to get the "full" game -- this isn't an undeniable fact but many feel that way about a lot of EA / Ubisoft games.<p>Whatever the reason, microtransactions are killing the desire of many to play. We the humans get emotionally invested in everything we do. The fact that the businesses want to prey on the sunk cost fallacy, or nostalgia, or bait-and-switch tactics, is something that even people at 20 years old now reliably detect and try to stay away from.<p>The customers are getting smarter and the business makes less and less effort to market / advertise their games in an appealing way. Cleavage shots or shiny costumes and mounts don't seem to be cutting it anymore -- or at least not so well as the businesses would like.<p>----------
5. Our priorities change, yes.<p>I ain't gonna bore anyone with sob stories but I had a pretty awful life and learned helplessness is something I have to fight my every waking second (people keep telling me I do an awesome job and I honestly can't believe it and that's not a fake modesty, I really can't; many other examples abound). At certain point you just sit down and start thinking what you are doing with your life -- and time, and energy. That the popular breeds of gaming lost most of its appeal is indeed a gradual process as the article assesses it to be.<p>And I indeed don't care about competition, like at all. Nobody can tempt me with "you're just afraid I am gonna beat you". I just shrug and say "you're a champion, are we done with this discussion?".<p>Me and my wife recently chatted at length about our diminished pleasure in games and concluded that we are gonna buy a PS4 Pro and a very comfy couch and probably won't touch a multiplayer game more than a few times a year. It's just how it is. She gets a lot of calming influence from just trying to figure out the next Lara Croft puzzle or a movement sequence so the character cat get somewhere important. And watching her play sometimes, I get the same vibes.<p>That, and some casual and non-engaging games like Smash Bros. You can just hop in, play a bit, get out. Which brings me to my last point...<p>----------
6. Games try very hard to pull you in, addict you and make you feel like they are your life.<p>There are plenty of gullible human beings that fall for that and they are probably the reason why many modern games even survive.<p>As an "older" gamer I miss the experience of starting a game, typing a nickname somewhere, joining a server, playing for how much you want, and then getting out. No central servers, no character progression, no worries that somebody paid their way to them dominating you.<p>Games like Half Life, Quake 2 and 3, Re-Volt and Star Wars Episode 1 Racer (two of the best racing games I ever played!), and the fighting games like Mortal Kombat were perfect for this. They had a compelling gameplay but didn't try to tie you to anything. If you wanted to play, you came back. There were no psychological tactics to make you come back for more. They already sold you the game -- whether you are gonna play 1 hour in total or waste your life in it doesn't bother them.<p>----------<p>I believe for many mature games this is the strongest factor. Stop trying to make us believe your game is our life. Make a good game. Make paying only for cosmetics or minor quality-of-life improvements. Put in good net code.<p>Gamers will come. You won't have to do absurd marketing campaigns all over YouTube. People will come to you by word of mouth if your game is not scummy.<p>But IMO gaming will have to almost die until it gets back to what made it popular and awesome in the first place. |
Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013) | I found this really frustrating. There isn't any evidence whatsoever presented here--the whole treatise is based on a single outrageously over-simplified hypothetical thought experiment, essentially a "Just-So" story. This is the crux of pseudoscience. It's always a gigantic red flag when an argument about complex real-world phenomena and systems is based entirely upon a work of fiction with no real rigorous observation involved--only anecdotal observation based on one's own personal life experiences. This doesn't work. It ends up like dream logic--you imagine something should work this way in a dream, it seems brilliant at the time, but when you wake up and try it in the real world it suddenly doesn't quite make sense anymore or mesh together properly. Ayn Rand is another big example of this pitfall. It's about as meaningful as making an economic theory based on how it works in Harry Potter.<p>This guy's a psychology and computer linguistics major. That's great, and I'm sure he's got plenty of great ideas, but we computer science people have a bit of an issue with buying our own hype. Society greatly values our skills, many people consider us to be exceptionally bright, so we end up believing ourselves to be general-purpose geniuses much like aging physicists do:
<a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21" rel="nofollow">http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21</a><p>We are not general-purpose geniuses. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Intellectual arrogance has caused many an engineer to meddle in things we don't properly understand and it occasionally causes catastrophes, or more often it merely spreads misinformation because most laymen put great value on our thoughts and view tech people as some kind of oracle.<p>In the article he lampshades sophistry early on, but that doesn't magically save it from being sophistry. It is absolutely sophistry, a transparent attempt to assuage some kind of guilt and justify a moral quandary through inventive story telling and evidence-free faux truthseeking.<p>He also calls out late in the article the fact that this thought experiment he's made only covers a single currency and a single commodity, which is an unreasonably simplistic model. The parable doesn't consider bad faith, market manipulation, monopoly, corruption, unsustainable expectations of growth, asymmetrical information, pricing inefficiency, and all sorts of other issues that crop in real life and can't simply be ignored. With a little charisma and eloquence it's pretty easy to make a self-consistent mental model by weaving a fictional story and it <i>feels like truth,</i> but in reality there are unanticipated complications and external interactions that screw things up and totally throw off your conclusions.<p>For instance, in real life there wouldn't be just one guy speculatively buying Congolese grain through a magic portal. There would be lots of speculators in wealthy nations, fueled by riches extracted from all over--including the Congo. What about when their speculative hoarding is actually the force which <i>creates the shortage?</i> Are we being such benevolent, wealthy overlords if we cause a famine, drive up costs, then sell the same product back to them at exorbitant prices through these rent-seeking practices? And speaking about rent, that's when multiple commodities come into play. What happens when our speculative buying-up of resources causes scarcity and makes them spend all their money on food and miss rent? Rent, by the way, which is also being artificially driven up by speculation and is not in line with natural supply / demand-based pricing. Because it's not just being sold as housing, an intrinsically valuable use; it's also being hoarded in order to speculatively extract wealth. People buying houses not because they need shelter, but because they simply expect somebody else to buy it at a higher price later on. Price does not magically match intrinsic value 1:1 at all times, which is an assumption his parable is dependent on. And money being an abstraction does not mean that extracting enormous dollar amounts from a local economy and hoarding it does not hurt that local economy. The amount of money you charge people for goods and services does not directly translate to how much value you've blessed their lives with. Consider our healthcare system. We pay far, far more than any other country, and that wealth is hoarded en masse by insurance companies--essentially speculative, unnecessary middle-men who only add to the cost of utterly essential services which must be bought at any cost--yet the intrinsic value of our healthcare is far lower. We have a very low life expectancy for a first-world country, let alone a superpower:
<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-and-health-spending-us-focus" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-...</a><p>That money sitting in a bank is not proof of our intrinsic value going up. It doesn't always work out that way in reality. So we aren't off the hook yet in our own affairs.<p>Economics is hard. Ethics is hard. We can't handwave it using fairy tales with magic doors. I'm no economist, so I don't want to claim any expertise either. Take all I have just said with an enormous punch of salt, as if you're boiling pasta. I only go into these diatribes to point out when others undeservedly claim authority on a subject. People need to know to view this with appropriate skepticism. People shouldn't make authoritative think-pieces about subjects like this just because their job exposes them to a good amount of math and logical problem-solving, thus causing us to assume we can apply that to anything without significant subject-specific study and actual gathering of observational evidence. Even expert economists do very poorly at predicting and properly understanding the way this all works. This subject defies translation into a simple analogy, and balks at being explained to somebody as if they are five. People who try to do that are usually fooling you and themselves as well. |
Ask HN: Go-to web stack today? | I've been in full-stack development for about 10 years (most freelancing, 3 years full-time). I started with HTML/CSS, PHP, Ruby which I spent a couple years with before getting a full-time Ruby job. Since quitting my job 12 months ago to work on my own projects (while part-time freelancing), I decided to venture into a bunch of technology I'd not used.<p>I started to build a service in Elixir but found it lacked support for some crucial aspects (http/s tracing in this case). I've found it to be a very enjoyable language to work with (not just the Ruby bias talking), and a great cushion into functional programming.<p>Over there I've seen mention of Drab and Phoenix LiveView which piggyback on excellent websocket multiplexing to create an event channel between Elixir and JavaScript. This essentially means you can interact with the frontend of the application from the backend framework. There is a lot of discussion around performance/security implications, of course, but it is a great experience if you're backend driven.<p>Where Elixir couldn't meet my demands, Go did. It has `http/trace` in the standard library. It has static typing, it's fast, simple. Go has worked perfectly here as an "agent" of my main service. It is used purely to make requests and spit out results. I've found it much easier to deploy than Elixir (which usually involves distillery). Static typing in Elixir is often done through Dialyzer (annotated type-checking). In short, I'm saying I need both and that they complement each other.<p>I use a message broker to speak between the main service and the agents. Because I was using Elixir for the core service, I went with RabbitMQ. I've found that working very well on very modest hardware, and it is has been a big help having a well-known messaging standard to work with with available clients in different languages. To note - I only use this internally. Not sure if I'd expose this publicly in any way.<p>The database is always Postgres :P I use that with wal-e for backing up to s3. Still unsure on clustering. This is on a VPS because RDS and any other managed Postgres service was charging way too much for the hardware. With clients I would use RDS from the beginning.. and I would use Postgres as a document store before reaching for Mongo.<p>For managing servers, I either use the cloud provided cli (gcloud) or ansible on my own. I try to make sure I only ever use ansible to provision and modify them and everything is version controlled. This way I have a record of any changes I've made. I used ansible to setup wal-e backups on my Postgres instance. I'll also use it to setup clustering.<p>Other great tools on that may be Chef, Puppet, Terraform. Leaning more towards Terraform as it is agentless and declarative.<p>For application deployment I'm very much containerised. I've found Docker to have greatly simplified my deployment process once Docker itself is installed. As for clustering, Swarm is simple to setup. I was lured by Nomad, but I've decided to fully invest into Kubernetes instead.<p>I spent a good 4 months trying to setup a Kubernetes federation (cross DC) on a budget. Not easy. It was very painful. Best on my own was through Rancher after trying kubespray. Best in the cloud was through GKE. However, not happy with Google's pricing considering what else I can get. Digital Ocean released a Kubernetes offering and I can fire up a one node cluster (with free master plane) for $10/m which has 2gb ram on an ssd. For comparison, I think Google were charging me about $20+/m for 1.6gb ram with no ssd.<p>Within 10 minutes I can have a new cluster. I can apply my manifests to the cluster which have security policies, environment secrets, deployment strategies, health-checking. I can deploy my applications to it within minutes and easily integrate it with my CI/CD pipeline. I'm sure I could achieve similar with some cloud-native offerings (Google App Engine, etc), too, but I'd rather invest in something cloud-agnostic.<p>.. that's before even touching the frontend.<p>I decided to jump into TypeScript and VueJS. I'm still looking for that "unified" environment where all the layers and processes just seem to fit together. I've found the frontend ecosystem to be far too fragmented.<p>I don't see much point in creating any more complexity than VueJS already has. I use Haml for templating, SASS for extending CSS. Still unsure on a component/style framework. I think possibly Vuetify.<p>With all that said, my GO TO stack will eventually look like this:<p>* frontend: TypeScript/VueJS<p>* backend: Ruby, Elixir, Go<p>* database: Postgres<p>* message broker: RabbitMQ<p>* packaging: Docker<p>* container orchestration: Kubernetes<p>* CI/CD: Gitlab<p>* monitoring: Prometheus/Munin/Cloud tools<p>* logging: ?<p>* exception management: Sentry<p>* email: SendGrid<p>..man, could probably go on. It is never ending! I also think this is largely dependent on the size of the project. However, I still use those tools above on small projects because it forces me to become more familiar with the tools which I inevitably use on more important projects. |
The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever | I excerpted a thread about this ten days ago: www.unz.com/isteve/why-the-infantryman-is-still-a-man/. Read on if you want some soldiers' perspectives.<p>"Most infantrymen lift, but that’s not the hard part. Civilians aren’t used to carrying those loads on their backs, there are all sorts of muscles and callouses you have to build and nerves you have to kill in your shoulders and feet to be able to do it. This is why Infantry units ruck march weekly. My first ruck in basic was only with a forty pound pack, rifle and water for five miles. One of the worst days of my life. Within a year, I was running twenty miles in full battle kit with an eighty pound ruck. In country, 120-150 lb was common, but we didn’t march nearly as far."<p>"In the long run it would help if we didn’t torture the guys with excessive training for long road marches that never happen in combat. We spent a shitload of time getting good at moving by foot with everything we had for days at a time over miles and miles of terrain. That’s fucking stupid. All you get out of that is a bunch of guys who have blown out knees and backs by the time they hit thirty.<p>We almost never moved miles and miles at a time with full rucks in combat, that’s why god created blackhawks.<p>What we did do was a lot of patrols with half of our battle rattle and you trained so that when someone got hit you could handle all of your gear and theirs at the same time.<p>Oh and I can tell you guys something else that nobody wants to hear about women in combat. The fact is that by the third deployment they are no longer up against regular men, they are up against guys who have taken roids for the injuries they have and to get ready for the next deployment fast enough.<p>It’s not enough to be able to get your body in condition enough to get through Ranger School or something like that. That’s a one off situation where you put everything you have into it and that’s it. Either you have enough or not. That’s not how it works in real life. In real life it’s like getting ready for the next season of football. Do we really think that women’s recovery time is going to be good enough? Fat chance, that’s why roids are a secret now. Nobody wanted to admit that even the MEN couldn’t get the job done without them, but it was true. Sure some of the guys could hang without using them but the fact that a lot of guys felt they honestly needed them to survive should tell you a whole lot.<p>I’m not saying women don’t belong in combat either. I just don’t see the point when it comes to straight up infantry units. Now if they want to put together sniper teams with women, I’d be all for that. Some of them bitches can shoot, I’ll tell you what!<p>Now aside from all the whoa whoah crap the best bet would be to stop this nonsense and worry about our own country for a change."<p>"I was a lot older (enlisted at aged 27) so was relieved to be able to ride in the Humvees. But, much to my chagrin, we still participated in a lot of humping (road marches). We always brought along the completed .50 cal system when we humped. For my unit, our basic combat load was 55lbs consisting mostly of our Alice/Molle packs, plus whatever weapon we were assigned (most issued M-16, squad leaders or gunners issued an M-9). Which by itself was a lot, but then you add in the .50 cal and it was a bit much. The receiver of the .50 cal weighs about 50lbs. The tripod was 44lbs and the barrel was 24lbs. We would distribute the system among each other. With one Marine starting out with the receiver, one with the tripod, and two Marines each with one barrel (spare). Put them up front and the rest of the Marines fell in behind them (we typically went on humps with two complete systems) and as they tired they would yell “Barrel Right!” or “Receiver Left!” and the next Marine in line would run up to them and take over carrying duties. We would do this the whole hump. So, depending on what piece you were carrying our weight was as low as 55lbs, then would jump to 79lbs with the barrel, 99 with the tripod and 105lbs when carrying the receiver. The tripod’s were later replaced with a better/lighter version. The barrel was fine to carry lighter weight and could sling across the pack quite comfortably, but the tripod and receiver were nasty.<p>The Marines value physical fitness. We had a lot of PFT studs who could kill it on the PFT test. I was fine with fitness always more athletic than strong. Always scored a first class PFT score (not that hard to do really and I got the old man discount). But in my platoon (and many other CAAT platoons) the real mark was what you carried on the humps. We “conditioned” up to 25 miles so we would do about 1-2 humps per month, culminating in the 25 miles hump. I never fell out. Always there at the end, never ignored the calls from my brothers when they could no longer carry their piece. The was the true test of toughness in my platoon. Not PFT scores, not book knowledge, but what you did on the humps.<p>We had some strong fellas. It was about the back and more importantly your heart. I only did 7 years in the Corps but it wore me down a bit. "<p>Why we use heavy infantry like this:<p>"Wikipedia gives a fair answer: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_infantry" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_infantry</a>
Roughly speaking, heavy infantry can destroy a lot more than light infantry, but (a) can’t go everywhere and (b) doesn’t have the infantry to search an area in detail. So, the opposition lives where (a) heavy infantry can’t go, because of its equipment, or (b) hide in inhabited areas where heavy infantry can’t search effectively enough to find them.
On the other hand, light infantry eats troops, both during and after combat. If we’re in an attrition war (as tactics indicate), why use light infantry? The answer to that has been obvious since the Port Arthur attack by Japanese forces in the early AD 1900s. Light infantry eats troops, don’t use light infantry in attrition wars. If you have an attrition war and you can’t stand attrition, you’ve lost. Make the best of it, try to win the peace negotiations, lose your table stakes, and rebuild. Don’t throw your society into the furnace. Simple as that, and as hard to face.<p>Disguising light infantry casualties by over-use of body armor, which produces joint injuries that aren’t attributed to actual combat, is an attempt to deceive the public, as is the “They serve so you won’t have to” advertising slogan of a few years ago was. “We have casualties, but they don’t count because . . .”. But they do. Each is a member of your society, as are that person’s relatives. You need them."<p>From the same commenter:<p>"As I’ve said in other posts, our side isn’t good at attrition warfare. That’s a consequence of having a K society, one that invests a lot in its members and relies on competent citizens. Each infantryman that dies means an important function not performed. Other societies have many completely non-functional citizens, crunches they can lose in war and never miss them. The West used to be like that as recently as the Napoleonic wars. People who could earn a living in society strongly tended to remain out of military service, and there was no legal conscription (barring press gangs and the like, small scale affairs mostly). Mass mobilization for WW I left participating societies without the people they needed to keep existing, and with considerable ill feeling from those people left sound after the conflict.<p>So, to paraphrase myself in a couple of other posts, don’t get into an arse kicking contest with a porcupine. If attrition is the only way you can win, then lose and save what you can. That or use area weapons and disintegrate the opponent’s society (that was the threat of the Cold War that prevented most attrition contests with Russia). Either is better than disintegrating your own society...<p>Or better yet, live in peace and fight wars only in video games. If possible."<p>A little more about body armor.<p>"Former infantryman here – answer is yes, they do lift, but in my experience the big lifting craze started after 2001 and all the deployments. Very likely had something to do with lugging all that armor around, but coincided with the crossfit / free-weight renaissance. The lifting is a good thing, but I’m less certain about the armor.<p>20 lbs doesn’t sound like much, but it matters when you’re trying to run, jump or dive. The ballistic plates especially really bounce up and down, seriously impacting the body’s natural motion. Add weapon and everything else (I was almost always carrying at least one radio in my one Iraq tour) and the struggle is real. It slows you down significantly. The experience gave me sympathy for breast-reduction patients. Also – and this isn’t much discussed – it affected my marksmanship. It’s just harder to tuck the stock into your shoulder and draw a sight picture with all that bulk.<p>If the conflict had involved lots of movement and close combat, maybe the armor wouldn’t have been worth it. In an environment where most casualties are caused by unexpected explosions and sniper fire, armor is probably worth it. But it’s miserable to wear."<p>"Current high coverage body armor was required by US Congress, not the Army, during the early stages of the current round of Middle Eastern warfare. Congress didn’t want large casualty numbers, and required more coverage than the Army wanted. Current loads minimize combat casualties, but cause joint injuries that manifest in later life — injuries Congress doesn’t much care about as they don’t affect the next election." |
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime? | There's so much to unpack here.<p>First of all if your experience is anything like mine was, the idea that you're choosing how to spend "the rest of your life" (and the <i>pressure</i> that comes with that idea), is the source of the paralysis. Life is both chaotic and a smorgasbord so I very much doubt that you'll be spending your entire life at one thing. Oh sure, some people do, but A) some people end up not being able to (because life is chaotic) and B) some people don't want to (and they don't have to, because life is a smorgasbord).<p>I was in group B and I've had from 3 to 5 careers (depending how you look at it), over the course of 30 years. I'm not saying that's better; but my point is, the "rest of your life?" Depending whether you're A or B: A) you should be so lucky, or B) that's a prison sentence. It's not what to do forever; it's what to do <i>next</i>. Humans are great at deciding what to do <i>next</i>.<p>Secondly, for this particular question, making any decision is probably more important than making the "right" decision. Or you could say it another way: There are no wrong decisions. We don't choose the right path; the path is wherever we walk. We make the path by walking. And even better, anything can lead to anything else. Especially if we're talking about working with computers, which are used in every field. But more broadly, everything prepares you for everything else, usually in ways you wouldn't anticipate. If what you do <i>next</i> puts you in a place that seems wrong, then in what you do <i>next</i> after that, you can change. But you won't know right from wrong until you get into it a little bit. I don't believe such things can be planned. "Theory" takes you only so far.<p>Third: How did I decide what problems to solve? I have always chosen to solve my own problems. Which is not as selfish as it sounds; any problem I happen to share with others, I am solving their problem too. And as it so happens, I actually have a lot in common with a lot of people, including having the same problems, so it works out to our mutual benefit. It's important to realize one is not some sort of weird randomly-generated freak, nor a "special unique snowflake" as they said in Fight Club (which I quote in my HN profile and which you should probably go watch or read). These two ideas about oneself are mirror images of each other, one negative, one positive, but both narcissistic as hell and ultimately self-defeating. You are like most people. Solve your own problems and you will solve a lot of people's problems.<p>Tangent: I learned that as a musician. (Speaking of weird unrelated careers.) When writing a song, I wrote what I liked, a.k.a. what I thought sounded good, a.k.a. what I wanted to hear. I wasn't sure how it would be received, but fuck it, at least I liked it. Well it turned out to be a big boost to my self-confidence and my trust in my own instincts, when I noticed that the more I liked something I wrote, the more popular it tended to be. It started to dawn on me that (as I said above) I have a lot in common with other people, and if I follow those instincts and make those particular decisions, I am representing a large cohort of other people who will approve of it. Sure there are those who won't agree. Let them find someone else to write songs for them then. Or write their own! (lazy-asses!)<p>Anyway applying that same idea to engineering and the solving of problems: My primary interest is in solving my own problems. It's inherently practical, because if a given problem is not one that I personally have, I won't have any hedonistic, selfish interest in it, thus I will be lacking that particular component of human drive, and either my work will suffer, or I will suffer; likely both. I'll be that much less motivated, and that much more likely to become discouraged in the face of setbacks, etc. etc. This is inherently a hedonistic argument - do what feels good. Things that feel good are natural and easy, and at least for the simpler pleasures, are usually based on having conferred some evolutionary advantage in the past. Reproduction being the only one that will trick you into propagating the species at the expense of your own more-modern interests, so beware of that one! But otherwise: you are drawn to things that feel good, for a reason. You were made to be the type of organism for which shit smells bad. Shit smells bad, not because it's shit, but because humans who liked the smell and taste of shit were quickly removed from the gene pool through starvation or disease. You should instead follow your instinct to eat food.<p>For the same hedonistic reasons, if your decision is, as you frame it, between that which you want to work on, and that which you should work on, what you want to work on wins every time. Every time. You can't sustain motivation based on a "should." All the philandering and molesting priests should convince you of that. A "want to" will help you surmount challenges and avoid getting sidetracked. (Unless, like me, you <i>wanted</i> to be sidetracked!) On the other hand, and speaking of sidetracking, a "want to," will likely change. That's OK. Don't let that tempt you toward a "should" though. A "should," you actually have no idea about and neither does anybody. Nobody knows what "should" happen or "should" be, always remember that. That's my take. But see, when a "should" is actually a "want to," then a should can be legit. Some people are motivated by the desire to serve; they live for shoulds. That is great. But they are still pursuing want-to's.<p>Ignore A and B from above for the following.
A.Dispose(); B.Dispose();<p>In high school I learned a little bit of A. My dad also did A. (It was his 2nd or 3rd career so I guess it runs in the family.)<p>But to be different from Dad, I pursued a degree in B.<p>But then I suffered a life trauma and ended up not pursuing a career in B.<p>Instead I did C, and experimented with A. Wasn't ready for A though, so stuck with C.<p>At some point I started doing D as a side thing too.<p>Eventually discovered E, liked it, did it for 7-8 years.<p>But it wasn't as lucrative as B. One day someone found out I knew B and said, jeez you could probably double your salary if you did B.
I suddenly said hey yeah money is nice (I had started to give a shit about it by then), so what about B?
Well I went back and revisited B. Made progress, but after 2 years, found I didn't actually like B all that much after all. At this point it had been 20 years since my first decision to do B, so yeah no wonder.<p>Tried C again, and started relying on D for the first time as a moneymaker.
Did all right with it but as soon as an opportunity arrived to do E again, I went back to E.
And realized, jeez I'm too old to enjoy C anymore, and D sucks as a career (it was better as a hobby). So I was glad to leave both.<p>Then through the E job, rediscovered a variation of A. Liked A a lot suddenly, because I was using it to <i>solve my own problems</i>, and solving the same problems for the people I worked with. That's where I am today.<p>A is programming. D is music. B, C and E are all different roles in the same industry, that shall remain nameless so nobody links my real identity with rdiddly and his more controversial comments on HN.<p>So arguably because B, C, and E are in the same industry, that might put the lie to my idea that "everything leads to everything else." But no, I was simply lazy and looking for cheap ways of (again) solving my own problems (in that case paying rent). With funding and time I still believe I could've gone to school for something totally different and transitioned to that, I just chose to make it easy on myself and transition to something more closely related. Also it so happened I was interested in that industry (as I was when I first chose B).<p>Anyway that's my take, good luck. |
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime? | I peacefully & mindfully coevolve with all life by collaboratively learning to sustainably contribute to all life's needs in fluid ways and joyfully embodying science and art, in love. This is my mission statement.<p>I want to live. I do not exist in a vacuum and everything is interconnected, even if simply by way of quantum fields. Therefore, it makes since that I need to contribute to all life I'm connected to, which includes my environment. I choose a life of serving life because if I'm not intentionally serving life, then I'll only be contributing to it on accident and contributing to death the rest of the time. I prefer a less haphazard approach to life, so I intentionally choose service.<p>I came about my life's purpose progressively.<p>First, I became an info addict when young in response to trauma. A few years ago, I entered into recovery. I'm one of a handful of self-identified info addicts in recovery I know of, so
I had to start solving the problem of how to recover from an addiction to something that is ever-present and freely available. That's how I started working on addiction/codependency recovery, neuroplastic healing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness.<p>In the throes of relapse (which looked like literally spending every waking hour in front of a screen playing games, watching porn, or researching addiction-related things), I encountered a research device that can wirelessly and covertly detect human emotions through walls for multiple people at a time while they're sitting still or moving. (<a href="http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu</a>) This was just before the 2016 US Presidential election. Reading about the device freaked me out because it was clear to me that a large portion of the US's population isn't emotionally responsible and struggles with unidentified codependent patterns/characteristics, meaning they're all ripe for emotional manipulation. It occurred to me we don't have a design theory to inform how to create things that responsibly operates on emotions, preserves meaningful connection, is anti-addictive, and respects attention. I wanted to continue to create things (I'm a computer scientist), so I started developing what I call a scientific theory of mindful design.<p>During the first month of working on that, I came across research indicating the brain encodes information in a binary manner (<a href="https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/07/this-one-equation-may-be-the-root-of-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/07/this-one-equation-may-...</a>). I didn't take it to mean brains operate the way computers do, but did take it to suggest we may be able to reason about them in a similar manner. A week later, I watched this video on Fully Abstract Compilation, which describes the theory behind how to construct a language so programs in other languages can be automatically translated into the target language (<a href="https://youtu.be/Hylji4ezQHE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Hylji4ezQHE</a>). This got me thinking that we could construct a human programming language that's universally usable if we can understand the brain from a category theoretic perspective. That's when I found this book & started working on learning category theory (<a href="https://g.co/kgs/jKELdT" rel="nofollow">https://g.co/kgs/jKELdT</a>).<p>A couple months later, while researching emotions, I found perceptual set theory (the idea that we construct reality by filtering information through perceptual sets comprised of beliefs, emotions, intentions, and behavior/thought patterns). I realized the Buddhist concept of love could be formulated as a simple perceptual set: the belief of equanimity, emotion of joy, intention of kindness, and patterns of compassion. I started looking for more simple perceptual sets, thinking they could be useful ways to embody concepts. I've so far defined sets for science and art.<p>Differentiable Neural Computers (<a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/" rel="nofollow">https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/</a>) came out around the same time & inspired in me the idea for a human-oriented self-programmable model. At this point, I realized it'd make more sense to hypothesize things and test them out on myself, rather than develop the skills to prove things theoretically.<p>After months of hacking myself through dramatic personality changes, it occurred to me that using any accurate model of a human could be used to model human interaction to some degree. I also realized self-programming, when applied to multiple people, could lead to intentional cultures designed for specific purposes. So then I started working on culture design. I also realized all these practices I'd been developing for myself led me to join a minority class because I'd hypothesized gender could be intentionally expanded beyond the limits of binary gender and then started cultivating my genderfluidity. Ultimately, everything I was doing was founded, in part, around a system of beliefs (ie. perceptual sets), and it seemed like what I was doing could pass legal tests to determine if something's a religion. I figured it'd be even easier to pass the test if all the science was packaged in an intentionally designed religion, so I began designing Iggnnominism, a religion of absurdity inspired by rock n roll, modern culture, computer science, math, psychology, and neuroscience. Then, I began living it as a monk, though I arguably already had been & it could be said I was simply discovering the religion & simply putting labels on it.<p>This was about 1.5 years ago. Now, I live with my partner and our 2 month old. I continue to work on everything in this post, as we're talking about starting a school for learning how to learn and to teach people how to cultivate a loving home/community by setting up the school as a community of homes. |
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts? | Your question is timely -- in the last year I've started to be deliberate about this, and I've found a solution for myself that works really well.<p>There are five important parts to my strategy:<p>1. Each idea gets its own notebook/document.
2. Each idea gets linked bidirectionally from/to its parent concepts. (more on this later)
3. Each concept / parent concept gets its own notebook/document.
4. Each day gets its own notebook/document that links bidirectionally from/to the ideas thought up on that day.
5. Various UI tricks such as hotkeys and "NLU" to make working with the above as fast and efficient as possible.<p>To sketch the above, I'll give you an example of my workflow on a given day.<p>I'll often start by going on a walk for 40-80 minutes in the morning. The energy of the morning air, the extra blood flow from walking, and the beauty of nature stimulate various thoughts and ideas.<p>Once I'm sitting in front of my computer, I press a hotkey Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T, which runs some code to create a "Today" document. The title and file name of the document are, for example, "January 6 2019", and it has a hyperlink within it to its parent document "January 2019". There's a section of the notebook pre-generated called "Ideas".<p>To create my first idea, I press a hotkey Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N, which is for "create a child document" which will link back to the document it was created from. A dialog box opens asking me for a name/title, so I'll type in a one line summary of the idea "Depression as Feedback Cycle that is Inverse of Entropy". Pressing ENTER, this creates a new document of that name, and adds a hyperlink from it back to its parent "January 6 2018", as well as a link from the parent to the child. I then add a few bullet points to record the essence of the idea.<p>Now it's time to link the idea to all of its "parent concepts". In this case, the parent concepts are "Depression", "Feedback Cycle", and "Entropy". If I don't yet have documents for those concepts, then I'll press a hotkey Ctrl-Alt-N to create those new documents. Then, from my idea notebook I'll use a hotkey Ctrl-E to create a link to a parent concept notebook. Each time I do this, it prompts me for the name of the parent concept, so for the first one I'll type in "Depression". Upon pressing ENTER, it will add the hyperlink from the child to the parent, but it will also open the parent concept's document and create a link to the child in a "Related" section at the bottom of the document.<p>When this process is done, I have the following documents that all link to each other:<p>Parents to children: (and vice versa)
"2019" -> "January 2019" -> "January 5 2019" -> "Depression as Feedback Cycle that is Inverse of Entropy"
"Mental Health" -> "Depression" -> "Depression as Feedback Cycle that is Inverse of Entropy"
"Feedback" -> "Feedback Cycles" -> "Depression as Feedback Cycle that is Inverse of Entropy"
"Entropy" -> "Depression as Feedback Cycle that is Inverse of Entropy"<p>In addition, I'll add links in the "Related" section at the bottom of the idea notebook to any other ideas/concepts that aren't necessarily "parent concepts" but are related. In this case, I'll press Ctrl-E and then type in "Depression as Thinking Too Much", which create a link to that document, as well as a link within that document to my new idea document.<p>Why create all of these bidirectional link from child documents to parent documents, and laterally between documents? It's all about "making connections" and making things "findable/noticeable at the appropriate time in the future". Without all of those links, your idea will become an "orphan", possibly never seen / though of again, or hard to find if you only vaguely remember what it was called in the future. On the flip side, with all of these bidirectional links in place, in the future when you're adding new ideas to these same parent concepts, you'll see the link to this idea, and it will make possible a new unexpected connection / aha moment. Being an idea person, you probably realize how ideas are like popcorn -- one pop leads to another, ideas connecting with each other to form richer and deeper understandings of things.<p>The final piece of all of this is that rather than only giving each concept document a name (for future lookup / reference), I give them a regex like name. So for example, if I create a concept document for "rectified linear unit", I'd actually define the pattern:<p>"rectified linear unit" | relu<p>Then from a document in the future, I can link to it by either of the above names. Or, if I simply want to get to that concept fast, I press a hotkey Ctrl-Q, type in a name, such as "relu", press enter, and it appears. (otherwise, if I just called it "Rectified Linear Unit", it wouldn't have been found when I typed "relu")<p>This system has been working great for me. I've quickly developed a tree/graph of concepts and ideas that are building on and connecting to each other. Any time I have a new idea or learn a new thing, I have a place to "hang" the concept, so things don't get lost. |
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts? | In order of descendance, I prefer to:<p>write down by hand → type on physical keyboard → type on virtual keyboard<p>I used to have physical notebooks to write things down in. Loved the idea, never stuck with the process: too slow, can't do much on the go¹, can't do it with one hand.<p>¹ I often take long walks around town, which is when I get a lot of good ideas<p>Nowadays, I spend a lot of time behind the table, at home. The table is wide enough to comfortably host the laptop and a wide² yellow sticky paper stack. If I have a quick idea and am near the table, I would write it down on a sticky, take it off the stack, and stick it to the top of the table, by the stickies.<p>² I find wide stickies better for writing and/or jotting down quick design<p>For outlining and quickly jotting down a complex idea – a character, a description of a design – or a list of ideas I use [Indigrid](<a href="https://innovationdilation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://innovationdilation.com/</a>). It's a quick, minimalist outliner ready for full-keyboard control, developed by a friend of mine. There, I have several categories for long-term items I keep track of:<p>* writing (plot, characters, details etc.)
* worldbuilding
* web game design
* forum RPGs planning
* major projects
* non-fiction books
* various notes (eating & dieting, songs of the year etc.) & ideas
* thoughts (things that crop up on my mind)
* questions (things about life I want to find the answer to)<p>For to-do, I use [Dynalist](<a href="http://dynalist.io" rel="nofollow">http://dynalist.io</a>). It's slow for my taste³, but the workflow is very useful for my kind of tracking: mostly-linear, mostly-checkbox, what-to-do and what-needs-doing. I've also been looking into moving to [Notion](<a href="http://notion.so" rel="nofollow">http://notion.so</a>), which is equally slow to load⁴, but provides a wider range of functions – something I find myself needing sometimes, when the thoughts move beyond linear structures.<p>³ it takes several seconds to load, so I keep it open constantly<p>⁴ both Notion and Dynalist being Electron-based apps, which takes very long to load for such small apps<p>I take the iPhone wherever I go, so it seemed appropriate to find a notetaking app for it as well. I scribe down ideas on the go, one-handed, onto Better (which is a bitch to find now; its icon is a yellow square sticky; no clue if there's an Android app). My criteria were:<p>* quick to access,
* simple design,
* easy to write things down<p>Better satisfies all three. It's like Google Keep, only even slicker-looking and fast.<p>I used to use Google Keep for on-laptop notetaking. It proved to be too slow, though I'd used it for a while and had accumulated a sizable stack of disparate notes.<p>I'd also used OneNote for a long time, and it was okay. I did, however, find myself having to navigate what ends up a maze of notes when you're in a hurry to jot one down, so I didn't stick. Evernote was no good, either, for similar reasons. (Notable, a notetaking app trending on GitHub for the last week, is like Evernote, but slicker, so if you like Evernote, check it out.)<p>Long texts – like published worldbuilding – I write in Markdown, in [Caret Editor](<a href="https://caret.io/" rel="nofollow">https://caret.io/</a>). It's simple, straightforward, a bit slow (Electron, eh), but exactly what I want from a .MD editor otherwise. I love that it uses inline Markdown highlighting⁵ – it fits my mental model of a Markdown document well. It's effectively free-to-use, as long as you can tolerate the pop-up that asks you to buy the license. [Beta releases](<a href="https://github.com/careteditor/releases-beta/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/careteditor/releases-beta/releases</a>) – stable as a hyppo, far as I can tell – are free, though.<p>⁵ if you wrap some text in asterisks, it becomes oblique while still showing the surrounding asterisks, and so on<p>For life stuff, I have plain-text files for written stuff (journalling, dream-logging, quotes, and some scattered thoughts) and a big, overarching Excel table (tracking: habits, weight, exercise, finances).<p>Overall, I use Notepad for cases where I need to write down a thought quickly. My main criterium is ease of use, centered around swiftness of response. Notepad is the quickest so far, with Indigrid close second.<p>On a related note: there was a mention of a guy with a brilliant, if sophisticated, method of notetaking on a podcast (could be Wireframe). He's carried around glasses with an in-built projector (a la Google Glass, but hand-made), and a one-hand keyboard. When he had a thought to write down, he'd switch the whole device on (no idea how, exactly) and type it down. When he needed to find a previous note, he'd switch modes and type out the text he's searching for. It's been a while for him and his experiment, so he has <i>a lot</i> of notes stored – about people, about fields of science, about himself etc.<p>I'd <i>love</i> something like that. Even typing – I type quickly – is slow, and I don't like the sound of my voice enough to tape it. If I ever get an advanced prosthetic arm, I could program it so, after a certain gesture, it would react to "muscle" movement for keypresses, and store text either on a connected device or internally, and project the results onto a lens⁶, so I could see what I'm typing.<p>⁶ I mean, I'm already assuming being able to program a prosthetic arm for use as a keyboard, so <i>of course</i> it's gonna connect to digital lenses wirelessly.<p>Alternatively, AR keyboard on my biological arm. |
Do We Get What We Pay For? (2014) | Excellent article.<p>I've done accessibility testing for a firm before, and in general it goes like this:<p>"Here's a JAWS license. Take a week, make sure the tabbing works okay. Don't sweat it, it's low priority."<p>The thing that kills me is that for a while in my life, I was legally blind. I'm not now, but I was. I'd not had much experience with screen readers, but it was "eye-opening" in the sense of having to learn how to build a mental model of a screen without "cheating" by looking at it.<p>It really is infuriating. Here's an example.<p>Imagine a screen with three columns, each filled with a series of questions to be answered; some text, some radio button, some checkbox. Each column's state can have an effect on whether another column's state is submittable or not.<p>Now let's run some tests at various visual/auditory fidelities:<p>Full visual: works just fine. All fields and values can be read, screen reader isn't necessary/tends to be distracting. Error text tends to be crossreferencable based on visual cues.<p>Partial vision: (I simulated visual degradation via forcing myself to read through a badly focused set of optics, my TLAR (That Looks About Right) set point for testing being when the image was distorted enough that text was no longer decipherable, basic shading/shapes were about the best visual information I was getting, and field focus information was only gleanable from text fields by holding down a key to dump in enough junk text to change the perceived shading.)<p>Now's where you start to have to build your mental model from the screen reader. This is where someone who hasn't had to master screen reading starts running into pain and flailing about.<p>Your brain tries to hang onto those text fields or exploit every trick it can to try to utilize the visual cues you'd tested with before. I actually had to force myself to let my aural processing take over. The first thing you realize is that everything requires a good deal more attention. You're much more dependent on tab order, and remembering where your interface "focus" is in relation to the information on the screen. Most error messages become nigh impossible to make heads or tails of without significant domain knowledge, because screen readers can't communicate visual trickery at all. If you're generous, you can assume a visually impaired person can pick out formatting tricks, but I tend to be more conservative and assume it's broken even for them.<p>Full visual impairment:
<i>TLAR set point: What Screen? There is only Tab, and the voice in my head.</i><p>In a lot of ways, using a screen reader is easier when you can just ignore visual stimuli altogether. Unfortunately, the specter of visually biased UI design still predominates the experience. You need to get to that question in Column 2 that can invalidate an answer in Column 1? Enjoy the tab spam. Or enjoy having to get intimately familiar with the decided upon presentation structure of the page if it's accessible to the screen reader. After a while though (and I don't know of this can be counted upon for those visually impaired or blind from birth), your brain will start to kind of generate a logical structure from the sound, and I found myself increasing the reading speed to just barely incomprehensible after some use, and found that I was able to make some sense, and speed out of the setup. The quick near incomprehensible overreads of the screen defined the structure, and a slower, more understandable read for specific content. Error parsing and crossreferencing was still a nightmare though.<p>Overall, the tech world doesn't care for impaired user's except for the bare minimum required to still be eligible for Government contracts, and the bar for that is painfully low in terms of pleasant or intuitive experience for the user. As a programmer, I can see how some programmer's worst nightmare is going blind. No reading design docs, every architect diagram is suddenly locked away from you, and that screen that used to tell or show you anything you wanted is just so much plastic and silicon.<p>I can guarantee that even the best Accesibility implementation out there is not delivering the usability the User is paying for. Time/money/practicality is only a cop out in the grand scheme of things dictated by a society that prioritizes the profitability of an endeavor over delivery of a thorough high quality solution for everyone involved.<p>Accessibility is the Neglected Tropical Disease of the software world, and I see no signs of change to that state of affairs. The population of the severely visually impaired will always be at best treated as a "charitable gimme" on the road to tapping government contracts as a revenue stream.<p>Designing for an effective experience would require too much overhead in the form of actually hiring designers to overhaul outdated and "good enough" visually biased layouts and workflows, as well as a body of experts who are fluent in the world of accessibility solutions, while also avoiding the bias of the unimpaired to adapt a solution that works for them rather than truly designing an experience that increases the productivity of those they are designing for.<p>Trust me on this one. I've tried. |
Pizza Dough | Timely! I've just been working on pizza! Compared to restaurants and especially to carryout or delivery or frozen I have some good results.<p>Due to the yeast and eating the pizza just after cooking, the star of the show is the dough. Making the dough is fast, fun, easy, and shockingly, astoundingly essentially just dirt cheap! With the dough and sauce ready, making a pizza is faster than delivery, carryout, or even frozen.<p>So, I've wanted a pizza for one, one pizza for a whole lunch or dinner. I end up with a pizza about 6 1/2" in diameter with sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni. It's darned good. It's a filling meal, about 600 C (food calories).<p>Shock #1: The cost of the flour is, in the US, shopping at Sam's Club not counting the cost of the club membership, via 25 pound bags, sit down for this, 9 US cents per pizza. Shopping at usual US grocery stores, the cost is about double that, 18 cents per pizza.<p>Shock #2: The 9 cents was so surprising that last night just out of curiosity I added up the cost of the ingredients for one pizza, just under 40 cents.<p>Shock #3: With the ingredients ready, can have a hot pizza ready to eat in 20 minutes with less than 15 minutes of being busy with the work and the other 5 minutes, say, reading Hacker News!<p>Shock #4: Don't need or want to use an oven! Still get the coveted crisp bottom crust from a high temperature oven with a pizza stone, but are done with the pizza even before an oven could get hot!<p>Yesterday I typed in some extensive notes as part of what software developers know well -- now that I'm making these pizzas, only myself and God understand how I'm going it, and without my notes in six months only God will still understand. So, I have the notes.<p>Here I will give a brief version.<p>The ingredients are:<p>For the dough, flour, water, yeast, and salt.<p>For the sauce, canned crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, some of the usual seasonings, and a little olive oil.<p>The cheese is just common shredded, part-skim Mozzarella.<p>The pepperoni is, well, just four slices of pepperoni widely available sliced.<p>The three most important tools are a common microwave oven, a restaurant style stamped steel saute pan with a bottom round and 7" in diameter and with a LONG handle, and a small burner on a common electric stove with power level set on medium.<p>Briefly here's what to do:<p>First make a batch of dough
and divide it into 8 pieces, one piece
per pizza. And make a batch of tomato
sauce.<p>For the dough, use 1 Kg of flour. Likely by a little should prefer "bread and pizza" flour, e.g., at Sam's Club. To a bowl of about 5 quarts, add 1 T (tablespoon) of active dry yeast (either the standard stuff or "quick-rising" intended for bread machines). Can get the yeast in little paper envelopes -- the contents of one envelope, about 8 grams, works fine. Or can buy yeast in jars of about 4 ounces -- for that just use a tablespoon. Then add 700 ml of water at 110 F. Mix. Add 1 1/2 T table salt. Mix. Quickly before the salt kills the yeast, add the flour in roughly (can be VERY rough) 1/3rds. After each 1/3rd, mix with a kitchen cooking spoon. Will end with a lot of moist, sticky dough with little pieces not yet stuck to the main mass. No need to use fingers.<p>The proportion of flour to water, e.g.,
the 700 ml of water for the 1 Kg of dough for the flour I have, is critical. Should measure carefully. Since the water content of your flour may vary from mine, or may vary from one source of flour to another or just with the humidity where you store your flour, you may have to adjust the proportions a little. The flour I'm using may have relatively high water content; if so, you may have to use a little more water.<p>Put about 1/4 C (cup) of flour on a pastry board, spread the flour roughly to a rough circle roughly 1' in diameter. Scrape and or roll the dough out of the bowl and on top of the flour. Sprinkle about 1/4 C flour on the top and sides of the dough.<p>Now <i>knead</i> the dough for 8 minutes; the kneading completes the mixing of the flour, water, yeast and salt; 8 minutes can make a nice pizza; more than 8 can result in a pizza a little tough to chew.<p>To <i>knead</i>,(A) Using hands and fingers, press the dough to roughly (can be very rough here) twice its area on the board. (B) Pick up the far edge of the dough and pull it to you to fold the dough in half. (C) Now the dough is likely wider than long; if so, then rotate it 90 degrees. Repeat (A)-(C) for 8 minutes.<p>The first few steps of all of (A)-(C) will get the dough into one relatively smooth mass. About this time fingers and hands may be coated with dough; in this case rub hands and fingers to let the dough fall to the main mass. From now on will have little or no problem with a lot of the dough sticking to hands or fingers.<p>BIG, HUGE, point: When you start, think of the outside surface of the dough. Well that is ALL you EVER touch!!! The <i>inside</i> of the dough is sticky, but you NEVER touch it! See, as you fold the dough, you are making the outside surface that was next to the board ALL the surface. As you keep doing (A)-(C) for 8 minutes, the outside surface from the board will get stretched enough to start to become sticky. Okay, then add a few T of flour but ONLY to the board and UNDER the dough, NOT to the top of the dough!<p>After 8 minutes, the dough will feel <i>elastic</i> and start to spring back. The usual test is to press the dough with a finger and get some <i>spring back</i>. You are DONE. Put the dough back in the bowl (don't have to bother to clean the bowl), cover the bowl to keep kitchen air away from the dough (the kitchen air could dry the surface of the dough too much), and let the dough <i>rise</i>, that is, let the yeast grow and generate CO2. The dough will rise well at any temperature from a refrigerator to 100 F or so. But at 115 F, the yeast will start to die. Let the dough rise until roughly (can be very rough) double in volume.<p>Now divide the dough into the 8 pieces. Flour the pastry board again, use fingers to separate the dough from the surface of the bowl, and roll the dough onto the flour. Dust the surface of the dough with 1-4 T of flour. Form the dough to a long log, say, the length of the diagonal of the board. Cut the log in half; cut each piece in half; cut each piece in half. Now have 8 pieces, hopefully all about equal in weight. For the cut surfaces, touch them to the board to lightly flour them. Put each piece in its own covered bowl, e.g., the 24 ounce, covered, plastic bowls from ZipLoc (mine are years old -- maybe they are still for sale). Apply, snap on, the covers, let the dough rise, say, each piece to half fill its bowl, and refrigerate until ready for a pizza. Note: Pressure from the CO2 can pop off the lids; so occasionally snap the lids back on, again, to keep kitchen air from the dough.<p>For the tomato sauce, in a 3 quart pot, add 3 T of olive oil and lightly cook however much garlic you like. Add two cans of crushed tomatoes, 28 ounces net weight per can. Add 12 ounces of tomato paste. Add whatever seasonings might like, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, parsley. Mix. Heat slowly with occasional stirring to sterilize the mixture, say, to 180 F, cover, let cool, and refrigerate.<p>For a pizza, take a microwave proof plate about 7" in diameter, with fingers gently separate the dough from its bowl, place the dough in the center of the plate, and spread the dough to a disk about 7" in diameter (larger if you prefer a thinner pizza and have a larger plate) with a rim. Microwave on high for 1 minute; for even heating, rotate 180 degrees and microwave on high for 1 more minute. The dough will puff a LOT. Using a fork, gently separate the dough from the plate and place the dough in the saute pan with the flat side of the dough, the side that was next to the plate, down. Maybe press down some on some of the larger puffy parts of the dough.<p>Add and spread about 2-4 T of the tomato sauce. Add and spread about 1 ounce of the shredded Mozzarella, in volume of the loose shredded cheese maybe a little less than half a cup. Put on four slices of pepperoni. Put a lid on the pan; put the pan on the burner; wait about 13 minutes.<p>So the steel pan yields the desired crust on the bottom. The lid creates a small oven that cooks the rest of the dough and heats the sauce and pepperoni and melts the cheese.<p>Want the bottom of the pizza to be crisp but not burned. Want the rim of the pizza puffed and cooked enough not to be raw but also not too tough to chew; want the sauce hot and the cheese melted. I get these results, but with your equipment, not exactly the same as mine, you will likely need some trials (I did a lot of trials with my equipment).<p>Use a spatula to move the pizza to a cutting board and cut it into 4 slices, each with a piece of pepperoni. Slide to a luncheon plate, call your significant other to share this, and start a second one!<p>For the plate I use in the microwave, that is from a very old collection of from some frozen dinners. The plates are essentially paper with some plastic. They are about the right size and are microwave proof, and the dough, once heated in the microwave, does not stick strongly. A glass pie plate might be a good alternative.<p>The pizza, once cooked, won't stick strongly to a well <i>seasoned</i> saute pan.<p>Making the batch of dough takes only about 20 minutes and is fun.<p>Most of the time for making the sauce is just opening the 3-4 cans.<p>Each pizza is ready in a little less than 20 minutes. Eaten just after cooking it's GOOD.<p>From my notes from yesterday, here are the costs for the main ingredients and the total cost (US cents) per pizza:<p><pre><code> 9.524 Flour
1.100 Yeast
0.684 Olive Oil
5.320 Crushed Tomatoes
2.213 Tomato Paste
11.900 Mozzarella Cheese
8.462 Pepperoni
-------
39.203
</code></pre>
cents per pizza.<p>It's fast, easy, fun, cheap, and good! |
Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder? | Hello NNS.<p>Some questions first:<p>1. What do you mean by strong idea? Why is it strong? I am not knocking you on this. I myself do not share the disdain for ideas when compared to execution. We know it's down to the execution, but give me a great idea any day of the week.<p>2. What is your domain experience in regards to the idea? Are they in the same domain?<p>If I can answer the second part of your question first: "...attracting co-founders and talent to work with you."
Before I go into the main body of my reply, if by co-founders you mean a programmer, then my advice is don't go down the path of something like:<p>"I have done the hard part, you push your paying jobs aside, sort out the code and prepare yourself for the type of riches only those standing on checkered floors are accustomed to. 5% of the business sound about right?"<p>You may not even need a programmer off-the-bat anyway. The tech isn't the solution. The tech is a scalable efficient conduit for the solution. Customers couldn't care less if their woes were alleviated and goals were attained via tech or a rubber band.<p>Anyway, how to attract:<p>You know the cliche sales question "Sell me this pen?". How can you sell the pen to someone who doesn't give a stationary? You can't, and you don't, because you don't know what need they have for the pen, what it brings into their life, etc, etc, the value of the pen to them. Same thing with attracting co-founders. If you attempt to attract them straight away, with nothing tangible to show, then you have one main option:<p>1. You need to find out what they think, what they feel, where they are coming from, where they currently are, where they might be heading to; in regards to your strong idea. If there is resonance, if they are on a path that suggests the journey could be shared, for they for a period of time are heading in similar directions, then there is a chance. However this chance is small unless you can show various qualities they are looking for. Honestly I don't even know the qualities really, maybe a few at best: hunger, tenacity, vision, self-belief (a stop before it goes into self-delusion), point to prove (to themselves), etc. I just summarise it by saying, they want to see if this person is just a talker or a doer. Have you got it within you to stay the course? Are you going to jump ship at the first sight of an iceberg or are you going to stand your ground and pull out your violin as the iceberg approaches?<p>Some people look for passion. I don't. If that works for them, fair play, who am I to say otherwise? However for me, passion? Nah. I leave passion for the Don Juan's, the Cassanovas and the Lotharios, for I have seen the passion in the divorced couples, in the broken hearts, and the jilted lovers. You'll need to find what fuels you, and make sure you to show it to others, not just in words but with deeds as well. None of this rubbish fake it till you make it, then the following week you're sat there with Impostor Syndrome. You be by doing, and do by being.<p>Anyway, as you work on your idea, moving it away from just in your head into something others can evaluate, you will increase your chances of attracting co-founders et al. I personally wouldn't bother with attracting anyone. Just get your head down and work on your self, and thus your idea. As this process occurs and you obtain targeted feedback, and let relevant entities know of it, you will start to attract people. But it needs to be targeted feedback. Just as you don't ask your mum as described in The Mom Test, because you she loves everything you do; you don't ask your dad either cos it's just not good enough, it won't work, etc, etc. No point asking anybody too close to you, bar a select few who don't let feelings come in the way. No point asking anybody other than assumed target audience, and even then pinch of salt, and a mixture of early adopters, laggards, etc, etc.<p>As for the first part of your question go about "founding your startup". I think you need to be wary of Survivorship Bias, Confirmation Bias, etc. Stay away from the "I went to bed, woke up, boom, overnight success-ed it" brigade. I have my own biases. I am filtering reality to verify my perception and my place within it. I read some of the other comments, informative and insightful. Sell or build first depends on many factors: to who, what, where, when, how, etc. I looked into this for quite a while, too long to say Lean with a straight face really, and I kept coming back to my own bias, am I deluded, am I lying to myself and do I not even know it, how little do I know, etc, etc.<p>Based on that, and the riskiest assumption out of the lot being do I really know, I have to say that you start by looking at the problem. My primary domain experience is in marketing, and the first thing I always do is audit the whole shebang. You have to find out where you do really stand, what do you really know, who else is standing in this space, what are they saying, etc, etc, in order to then plot a course to where you want to be.<p>Forget solution, tech, marketing, forget customer discovery as well. The first thing you need to do is be equipped with knowledge to not only stand on slightly firmer ground, but also when customer discovery does take place, which it needs to very early on, is be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, otherwise you are not really in a position to ascertain the value and the validity of the information obtained. You see it quite a bit in customer discovery classes, people getting out of the building with no reason nor rhyme as to who they actually interview. They interview every Tom, Dick and Sally, with no regards to if their opinion is even relevant, let alone valuable. Now there is a danger here in that, you don't want to be biased in that you seek to verify your research, but then it comes down to if you want to 'prove' you are right, or if you want the truth.<p>In the customer discovery you seek to not only ascertain if the problem is validated, but which target audience seems the most viable to go with first. I prefer not to go in hard on one segment, unless I have a strong thought/feeling that this is the segment afflicted with the problem. It depends really, on how much knowledge and insight you have, there are no real set in stone rules, just don't tick boxes for the sake of it, nor ignore a box solely on the basis of your own 'knowledge'.<p>When it comes to actual problem evaluation, look at root causes, factors, pain points, scenarios, etc, as well as noting the language used for usage down the line in various things. Use qual and quant methods as well as probing from multiple angles, looking for consistency and coherence (or inconsistency and contradictory), when it comes to problem severity, frequency, emotional response, etc.<p>After customer discovery, I'd say take a quick look at the market landscape, not too heavy, for you can end up being influenced by what others are doing, and who knows, your approach, your idea, etc, may well go far beyond what others are doing. Stay in contact with those you interview, certainly the ones who display certain early adopter traits, but you also need some laggards, and some that resonate with the vision (the end goal), for problem is just a roadblock from A to B.<p>I'll skip some of the other things I would mention here, message is too long. So:<p>Ascertaining market demand: all for it, but not some lame landing page 3 lines and a sign-up box, that shows a lack of insight, lack of understanding, lack of resonance, et al.<p>Building MVP: minimum is not in a bubble, look at the market, the competition, the audience expectations, minimum is fluid and ever increasing in some areas. You are below minimum if you can't hold your own against the competition on one front at least.<p>As you can tell from the other replies to your question, there are no absolute truths, so whatever your journey is, I wish you luck.<p>Cheers, Ace. |
Ask HN: Struggling with mental disorders, looking for advice | Throwaway for obvious reasons. But here is what had happened to me:
- Anxiety disorder, OCD, depression and paranoia<p>I had intense suicidal thoughts and living life was a pain. I went to a therapist and it did not help. I instead met a patient at the therapist's clinic who told me that I would be given shock treatments and will eventually go crazy. That was over all a very bad experience and made it all worse.<p>To be honest I realized how all these problems manifested in the first place. I had been indulging myself into intense philosophical content and solipsism (theory that we cannot verify the nature of reality of anyone but ourselves).<p>I remember waking up from a dream and not being sure if the waking state was a dream or not. It was the most frightening experience. I used to write on my palm everyday that, "Survive this day". I tried my best to stay afloat.<p>Skip to current day:
I have completely recovered and in the process of fighting these mental illnesses, I have developed excellent coping mechanism. I have become more kind and matured. I have learnt to rationalize my thoughts and over all I'm more content than anyone in my immediate social circle.<p>Here are a few things that helped me:<p>- I noticed that my thought process had become super confused. My thoughts were chaotic. For example, at one point I decided that doing X will be my way out of this mental suffering and then a few moments later Y would seem like the only option. I finally came to the conclusion that I cannot trust my mind's decision making ability in this state. Both X and Y could be equally good options but the mind, in a depressed state, becomes so chaotic that it can very quickly switch its stand.
Solution: Whenever you want to decide upon something, select any option, without analyzing it, and just do that. If you have a trusted family member or a friend then make them decide for you. Avoid assessing any decision and spend more time on executing it.<p>- Physical activity is a great way of reallocating the mental energy. I realized that any sort of physical activity like cooking a meal, walking etc indulges my mind a lot. If you need a quick break from the mental chaos, try to physically engage yourself. I go for cycle rides at night and eat at a place where there are a lot of people<p>- Mind is a treacherous friend. For a brief period in my life, I thought that I was going to go crazy beyond any repair. Although nothing really happened, the very thought that something could, drove me crazy. Be aware of such thinking traps. Go here and check them out:<p><a href="https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/ThinkingTraps.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/ThinkingTr...</a><p>- Probably the most helpful point is this one:- How to deal with your reality? Answer: Surrender to your reality.
I felt a huge shock when I looked back at myself and whatever I was going through. I was still not ready to accept that my suffering is here to stay for a little long. I couldn't focus on work or even the simplest tasks. It was hopeless and very painful.
But slowly I convinced myself that its okay to suffer and my achievements are greater if I can thrive despite of my suffering. And I slowly started accepting that this unpleasantness will never leave me and all my efforts to treat it are futile. And that's how you trick your self-preservation instinct. Just surrender to your reality. Accept whatever bad thought comes to you. It's very hard and scary to do so but, once you do, you will immediately notice that your mind just frees up. The preservation instinct drowns and you finally allow your brain to forget these unpleasant experiences.<p>- Dealing with suicidal thoughts: The way I dealt with it was, I kept setting a date to commit suicide. If I really feel suicidal today, I'd decide that 2 months from now, I'll end it all. And then my mind would become free from suicidal thoughts because it had an exact estimate as to how long it has to endure the unpleasantness. So I decided that I'd give life a chance until I am 32 and then every time I had a suicidal thought, I remind myself of this deadline and then I'd feel a little better.<p>- Also, start helping people in whatever little way possible. It helped me a lot. It helped me cope with my suicidal thoughts. Being of use to someone, even if in a small way, will send massive signals to your mind that make the suicidal thoughts go away.<p>On an ending note, I just really want you to get better. I have been in a very tough situation and trust me you can get out. Learn more about your mind and rationalize it and understand that its stupid. Struggle as much as you can but stay afloat. Your experiences will help someone else! And don't try to solve your problems and let go man. I will be coming back to check on this to see if you need any help or need to reach out to me. |
So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux | I just recently (a couple months ago) updated my Linux desktop experience at home. I had been running an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install, that was getting long-in-the-tooth, as well as being unstable.<p>Part of the instability had to do with various hacks and patches I had put in place, including a big one where I updated gcc to the latest version to support C11; this broke my update process horribly - so much so that when I went to update the NVidia drivers, my system became ultra-b0rked. I had been meaning to do an upgrade - now I was forced to.<p>What saved me a great amount of trouble was the fact that I had partitioned my system; that is, when I had installed Ubuntu, I had put it on an SSD (/tmp and a few others were on a RAM disk), and /home was on a separate drive. So all I had to do was pull the SSD, drop in a new one, and re-install something else.<p>Actually, I also used a different drive for my /home directory, because my old drive was getting old - plus my /home directory itself had a lot of old baggage. To that end, I migrated it to a new drive, created a new user with the new OS install, then migrated the files I needed across (moving from Chrome to Chromium wasn't as easy as it should have been, but it was doable). For the most part, it was painless.<p>I ended up sticking with Ubuntu - but this time I went with Ubuntu Budgie. What I had done was check several other live distros first (regular Ubuntu, BunsenLabs, Solus, Mint, and a few others) to see what was out there again. See, my old system I had built from 14.04 LTS - but I had started with "minimal" and built it up to look and work almost identical to CrunchBang (#!), because I liked it so much (and #! had died, but its descendents hadn't been in a finished state - which is why I looked at BunsenLabs).<p>I ultimately wanted something like the MBP setup I used for work; I thought I had found it with Solus. It seemed almost perfect - except for its package manager. While it had a lot of offerings, I worried about the ease of whether I could install third-party stuff. One thing I had "vowed" to never again do was to "compile and install from source" (that was part of what got my into this mess); if I ever needed to do that, it would be better for me to run it in a container, on a VM, or in some other manner - just not mangled into my main system with no "accountability" as to what was done and where.<p>Solus' package management was a custom system, that leaned heavily on app images; I liked that, it was something I had recently looked into (like a week before all this happened), so I wanted that option. But their library wasn't as extensive as the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I also wasn't sure what to do about third-party .deb files and the like - how would I install those. So I looked around for a viable alternative.<p>I found it with Ubuntu Budgie. I could be on the latest version of Ubuntu (I actually chose stability over latest - so I went with 18.04 LTS), but still have the Budgie desktop (with Plank and other goodness). I've found the best of both worlds, and I have a system now that I believe is as close to my MBP (well, OSX) as I can get with Linux; honestly, I consider it a bit superior.<p>I've decided, as alluded before, not to install anything from source, as tempting as it may be, and instead only stick within the confines of what is available via apt and (trusted) third-party PPAs. Otherwise, I'll consider using one of the various app image systems, a VirtualBox VM, or something similar - or look for something else. I just don't want to end up in the same boat down the line.<p>Is it perfect? No. But it certainly beats the pants off of what I had to do with Linux 10 years before, or 10 years before that.<p>I've been using Linux in one form or another since 1995 (my first "install" was MonkeyLinux, which runs on a DOS filesystem; my first "real" Linux distro was TurboLinux 2.0); back then it was a "nightmare" - a fun nightmare, to be honest. Nothing like recompiling your kernel to get the latest PCMCIA drivers working, among other things. But I'm pretty past that kind of thing today.<p>Not completely, of course, as b0rking my system with a custom manglement to get gcc/C11 working (took me a while to get all the dependencies just right, but I had it up and running - but the update system for 14.04 LTS did not like it at all). |
Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do? | I've been struggling with GTD for years. It's obviously a thoughtful system, but it's hard to implement the advice of not getting nerdy about it. It's easy to fall in love with tools.<p>But lately I've been having more success and I like the story I've generated around it. I'd suggest you implement GTD slowly, in stages, to combat anxieties that you have. In combating an anxiety you need to recognize it, implement a solution, and recognize how that anxiety is relaxed... and replaced with a new layer of them!<p>Anxiety 1: lack of trust in yourself to do what needs to be done.<p>This was for me the baseline ambient anxiety. I had originally solved it by abandoning most todo list systems and even calendars so that I could organically ask myself regularly: "what is the most important thing right now". That was a good practice, but many things "slipped through the cracks".<p>The first practice of GTD is to have a single, "global unified inbox". As I decided to implement this I realized I had collections of half-measure "inboxes" all throughout my life: email, partial todo lists, memory cues, people I relied upon to remind me of things.<p>So I cleaned that all up as much as I could and funneled it into a single todo list and kept uncovering more of these secret reminders I was keeping for myself. The result was a relaxation of this anxiety through building trust that I was at least adequately in control of _finding_ and _capturing_ the things to do. From that you can build trust that you won't let things slip because you forgot.<p>Anxiety 2: there's too much to do and I can't handle it<p>This anxiety was often hiding underneath the first. In times of emergency I could get things done, but without that focusing my needs and furnishing energy... I'd just let things slip and lie to myself that it was "ok, because important things will come up again". This was true, but a half-measure and one that stole from me conscious control of my life.<p>So the second practice is "organize" and in particular the compelling notion of the "next action". Organize says "regularly look at your commitments and think about how best to think about them" and the practice of next actions says "for any commitment, know exactly what the next, simple, tangible, visible step you could take is".<p>For instance, I need to get my car emissions inspection updated. I'd sat on that for months because it was both buried in a listing of "car stuff" and was also sort of a big, mildly important thing that was easy to defer. I chose to reorganize it to my "weekly chores" list which I respect as something to review regularly, especially on the weekends, as a mechanism to keep my life healthily managed.<p>I also chipped off a next action: "research locations for emissions inspections and their times". With this step I located one nearer to me that I had never known before—reducing the activation energy. I got stuck again with my next action "drive there and do the inspection" because I don't drive that frequently. It felt like it was still a "next action" as I saw it as immediately doable with the closer location, but I reorganized it to be on my "list of things to do next time I get in my car" list it became very natural. I also made a note to bring a book so I could resolve the anxiety of sitting there bored waiting.<p>So organization helps you create systems to manage and encounter your commitments and the design of next actions helps you tactically erode anxieties which keep you from moving forward. It all boils down to "intentional planning" in a lightweight way.<p>Anxiety 3: this all takes too much time and I'm slipping<p>This is something close to where I am now. Relaxing the first two anxieties has already been a big step, though. Here, I am realizing that I have to reconnect with the notion of "letting go". If my system is too big for me to handle it then I'm either (a) not investing enough time in what's truly important in my life or (b) trying to have my cake and eat it too.<p>Automation and schedule can help. I collect regularly, organize daily, and review lists on weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedules. Omnifocus helps with this by making the schedules something I can forget about and rely on the system to handle.<p>But what also helps is recognizing things that are just aspirational projects and launching them off into the future as opposed to hanging on to them and feeling a little regular guilt as I choose to do something else instead. My attention and energy are limited—I need to be thoughtful about what projects I am truly engaged with.<p>"Snoozing" big ideas is another practice to eliminate this anxiety, but the latter one seems more important. With limited bandwidth, I have to be conscious about what I really want to achieve and, finally, choose actively to focus my energy there.<p>To some degree I feel this is the ultimate aim of any "system". |
Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do? | I've never had a lot of luck with categorizing and allocating either. Which is actually fine, because what category (or, God help us, categorIES) a task fits into is ultimately not a terribly valuable piece of information. It's costly to obtain, in terms of time spent categorizing, but yields no particular insights, other than maybe the frustrating realization that a surprising number of tasks fit plausibly into multiple categories. (Which is as it should be, if you're productive and your life is reasonably well integrated.)<p>The only question your system needs to answer is what to do NEXT. And the only categories as far as I'm concerned are "work" and "home." Keep it simple. Therefore I have a spreadsheet for each. Within each one, here's what I have:<p>I have a list of things that repeat every day, called "dailies." I do those first.<p>Then I have a list of small one-off tasks that can be taken care of relatively quickly. This list is called, inspiringly enough, "uncategorized." I do these right after the dailies.<p>"Uncategorized" is also the default landing place for any new task. Sometimes you just want to write something down without thinking about it much. Next time I go through the list, any tasks that need to be moved to another list, I'll do it then.<p>Finally there's the "projects" list, which consists of bigger tasks with sub-tasks under them, in order, and with deadlines noted, and the whole bit.<p>Using macros, key bindings and event triggers I can re-order all these lists with one keystroke. Each item has an integer next to it for sorting. I usually use 0 through 4:<p>0 - waiting for something or someone else<p>1 - doing right now<p>2 - next<p>3 - later<p>4 - tomorrow<p>You'll notice that by doing "dailies" and "uncategorized" first, I'm doiog the opposite of what some advice suggests: I sweat the small stuff first. That's because I'm a night person, so I save the morning hours, when my mind is dull, for small, routine and easy things. By the time I get to my projects list, I'm fully alert and ready for it.<p>But if you're not a night person you could certainly do projects first, then one-offs, then dailies, or something. Also there's nothing stopping me from putting something demanding (that happens to be repetitive) on the "dailies" list for example. Something like studying a new technology for a couple hours a day would go on there. But I would probably tend to postpone it until the evening, i.e. put it in the "dailies" portion of the "home" spreadsheet, and start it when I get home from work. (Or if I'm working at home, start it when I <i>declare</i> that I'm home from work.)<p>By the way (back to "projects"), I try like hell to have only one project active at one time. Unless fucked-with by someone else, I will endeavor to finish each one that I start, before moving on. There are many reasons why focusing resources on fewer projects sequentially (rather than more projects simultaneously) is the best way to do things.<p>Therefore my day consists of, go to work, get a bunch of small ducks in a row, focus on a project for the mid-morning and afternoon, go home, do daily chores or studying, get small home-ducks in a row (things like "order underwear" or whatnot), and if there's time (usually not until the weekend) work on a home-project. I like sleep.<p>Things that recur at intervals other than a day, those go in the calendar, and I get a reminder, every n months or n weeks or whatever. From there I use automation to transfer it into the "uncategorized" area. (Home or work, depending on whether it came from my home or work calendar.)<p>If I ever think up a big over-arching life goal, I will make it a project or split it up into projects. Projects are things that you do. Goals are things you just think about, that I don't really believe in. Or rather, if it's important enough as a goal, I don't need to write it down, I just let it influence all my decisions in that direction. It's best not to have too many goals; just a few high-quality ones. Kind of like how it's best to have just a few high-quality friends. Life is not a shopping expedition; or actually maybe it is, but I say that as someone who thinks the fewer things you "buy" (into), the better. Also it's not good to try to plan out your entire life; give yourself some freedom to steer the ship in real time. Rely a little on your wits and creativity instead of on a script. |
Ask HN: Best things in your bash_profile/aliases? | I have the below for cases when I have to make a quick screencast. It needs ffmpeg and I am not sure how well the yt flag works as I don't really use Youtube any longer. Anyway.. first I do 'ffsc sc' and if I want that video to be smaller I do 'ffsc yt <path_to_file>'.<p>## Make screencast or convert to yt<p>ffsc () {<p>vid_name="$HOME/Videos/Screencasts/screencast_$(date +'%y%m%d-%H%M%S')"<p><pre><code> case $1 in
sc) ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1920x1080 -i $DISPLAY -r 30 -f alsa -i default -preset ultrafast \
-c:v ffvhuff -c:a flac ${vid_name}.mkv
printf "${vid_name}.mkv" | xsel -i
echo
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo "Output file name: ${vid_name}.mkv"
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo
[ -e /tmp/ffsc.tmp ] && { rm /tmp/ffsc.tmp }
printf "${vid_name}.mkv" > /tmp/ffsc.tmp
;;
yt) ffmpeg -i $2 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset slow -pix_fmt rgb24 -c:a copy ${2/scr/yt_scr}
yt_name=$(cat /tmp/ffsc.tmp)
printf "${yt_name/scr/yt_scr}" | xsel -i
echo
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo "Output file name: ${yt_name/scr/yt_scr}"
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo
;;
mini) ffmpeg -i $2 -strict -2 -s 1680x1050 -r 60 -c:v libx264 -b:v 164 -crf 22 -preset slow \
-pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy -an ${2/scr/mini_scr}
mini_name=${2/scr/mini_scr}
ffmpeg -i ${mini_name} -filter:v "setpts=0.5*PTS" -an ${mini_name/.mkv/.mp4}
rm ${mini_name}
printf "${mini_name/.mkv/.mp4}" | xsel -i
echo
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo "Output file name: ${mini_name/.mkv/.mp4}"
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
echo
;;
esac</code></pre>
}<p>And another nice one I didn't see here..<p># Python as a calculator<p>pc() { python -c "print($*)"; } |
Ask HN: How did you escape your safe 9-5 job? | I'll prefix my answer with a definition:<p>adj. meaningless - not bringing a sense of meaning, satisfaction, worth, value, or purpose.<p>Now onto my response...<p>I was in AAA video game development, and regardless of what game I worked on, it was always the same thing each cycle: solve the same problems, work long hours on a game I'd never play myself, often detested, and maybe get some kind of a bonus or vacation time if it did well. Rinse and repeat, only each cycle was worse as I got older, had a family, wanted to spend time with them, and learned from past mistakes, but the designers got younger (from my perspective) and wanted to continually make all the same mistakes over again.<p>After a while, I came across - and read - "What Color Is Your Parachute" (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2018/dp/039957963X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2018/dp/039...</a>), which was fantastic!<p>At the time I was working for Disney and used the strategies I learned to come up with a plan to make connections outside my studio, learn a few new things while helping with other issues. Eventually (it took about a year) it paid off and I was moved + promoted to a completely separate division. I was still helping the game studios, but doing work that was far more rewarding to me and I was learning new skills: big data, ETL pipelines, databases, etc. And, I was able to apply all my existing knowledge and experience to that new position to make it better. I may not know Kafka yet, but I knew how to integrate pipeline code into the game engine using very low memory and CPU.<p>Time goes on, and - after helping someone else with a Scala + database problem on Reddit, I ended up landing a job using all my new skills at The Broad Institute helping with genetics research. I can't say that I've ever been happier or ever had a job that was more meaningful. I go to conferences now and meet people who are actually using my tools, REST APIs, etc. to cure complex diseases. And I'm learning so much more than I ever thought I would.<p>Back to your questions:<p>> Did you have a strategy or was it a leap of faith?<p>It was a strategy. I think when you're young and don't have a family it's easy to take big risks and leaps of faith. That was not an option for me. But, I think that believing that I _could_ successfully make the transition was a leap of faith.<p>> Did you regret it later on?<p>There was one point early on I did. I knew game development inside-out and was an authority on the subject. If I said something in a meeting it was taken seriously. It was hard to go back to being the newbie. After a while, though, that went away. I absolutely do NOT regret it now.<p>> Are you happy with the decision you made?<p>Couldn't be happier. Life is better on every single front for me. I'll also note that much of that is intertwined. I'm happy (with work), so I act happier (at home), which means the family is happier (around me), and it all feeds on each other.<p>> Where do you think you would be today if you had decided to stay in that job?<p>Do the same shit over and over again, until something happened to the studio and I was let go. Eventually, I'd be a 50-year old game developer that no one would hire because my price tag would be too high, and I wouldn't put up with someone telling me to work 80 hour weeks.<p>> If you are currently in a job like that, then do you have any plans of escaping to work on your passion?<p>No.<p>But, I'll answer this a little differently than you probably expected. At every job I've had - until now - I've always had side projects and little programming things I did for fun at home. I always had an "itch" that wasn't being scratched by my day job. That's no longer the case. I get fulfillment at my job, and if there's ever anything I'd like to explore, I'm lucky enough to be working where it is actively encouraged.<p>In summary, I'm not sure if your question was a kind of "poll" for something else you're working on or if you are looking for encouragement to escape a job that you find meaningless. Assuming it's the latter, I would suggest reading the book linked - or at least enough to get you going. It has many great tips for helping you discover what's actually important to you, and then how to come up with plans on how to get there. It may take a while, but often, simply having a plan and sticking to it (and being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel) is enough to keep your spirits up.<p>Good luck! |
Ask HN: How did you escape your safe 9-5 job? | I escaped the 9-to-5 with freelance web development. I never actually had a full time job because I decided I never wanted one when I was doing a summer job in college that required me to sit in one place programming for 6-8 hours a day. I discovered Hacker News around that time and the idea that I could make money on my own and was hooked.<p>I started out doing what basically amounts to working in an agency. A business guy I graduated with wanted to start a marketing company and he got the jobs and I built the websites. It was still a contract setup and I made $50 an hour because Hacker News told me that $50 was a good starting rate so I asked for it and he gave it to me.<p>Then I got into doing Django web development and charged around $90/hr because I got a lead and I didn't really want the work so I said, "My rate is $90/hr" and he said "okay" and from then on my rate was $90/hr. (Ha!) I just recently got $125/hr in a recent project.<p>Starting when I was still sort of in college helped a lot. Living in small town Indiana where the college was and this company started out helped a lot lot. Rent at the time was $150/month with a roommate. Having very low expenses meant I could experiment more and not have to worry as much about paying rent. Not having any dependents helped too.<p>The biggest advice I have to anyone who wants to go out on their own: learn business skills. If you already know how to develop, you may think that's all you need. It's a meme at this point that "If you build (a SaaS) they will come." No, they really wont. You need marketing, marketing, marketing, and coding to build a webapp.<p>This is why I recommend people start out freelancing first. Then go into building consulting services. And _then_ build products. Freelancing is so much easier to make money with. Any competent developer can get $100/hr+ with some networking. That will teach you how to talk to clients and how to sell yourself. All things you need if you are going to sell products, but it's way easier and you don't also have the burden of designing a good product.<p>Consulting services are very lucrative, but require even more business sense. If you can business and code at the same time, you are in a verrrrry small percentage of people, and have superpowers.<p>Build your audience somehow. You'll need one if you are going to sell a product. Make the product first as a service that "doesn't scale". That is, manually implement the business outcome your software would give your customer manually yourself.<p>Then if you feel the need build a product based on your consulting business. Create rungs on a "product ladder" - free content you put out, paid info products, higher price consulting services, and then at the very top automate all of it in software. It's a model I've seen a number of people do that will be a lot "less risky" than quitting your job and building a webapp blind without anyone watching.<p>I tried this once. I quit all my freelance work for a year and lived off of savings. I then proceeded to not make anything anyone wanted and just ended up spending all of my money. Then I got back into freelancing and have money again.<p>In general, this strategy is: "Have safe money and risky money". Your employment is safe money. It's boring, but safe. If you want to get out on your own with less risk, figure out a way to get more time but keep that safe money (maybe try to reduce hours, maybe try to reduce your commute, maybe try to work 4 days a week), then pick up freelancing part part time. Then once freelancing becomes "safe money", quit your job. Work on freelancing part time and build a business that is "risky money".<p>This is what I'm now doing and I have managed to make a reasonable living while having a lot more time to pursue ventures I'm passionate about. I still spend about 20 hours of my day doing "boring" web development work, but it pays for the rest of my life. I'll probably always keep at least a little of that work because it pays so well for the time put in.<p>Happy to talk about this more, this subject is of great interest to me and is something I've thought about a lot. My email's in my profile if you want. I think your mindset is more reasonable than many people seem to think, and I wish you the best in your quest to find work you love. It's a long term process but in 10 years of doing this I wouldn't have it any other way. |
Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language | A few comments from my first quick skim, in appearance order.<p><i>If you need a good contract, don't be a dufus. Hire a lawyer who will ask questions and stand professionally accountable to you. I am doing neither here.</i><p>GitHub Link: GitHub can be good, but you really, really have to use Markdown, one paragraph per line, or at least another supported prose format, to get much collaborative benefit. You want good prose and word diffs.<p>Instructions: Listing out the blank placeholders first, with instructions to find-and-replace, is a neat approach. It pays to think about how form contracts will get handled.<p>Preamble: There's no need to spell out party names there, though it's traditional. If their info appears on the signature page, it's clear who's entering the contract. DRY.<p>Payment: I'm not quite sure which rate structure you have in mind, but it looks like an "x% up front" kind of thing, where the up-front payment is nonrefundable, and the balance is due on completion.<p>Expenses: I routinely advise clients to strike language authorizing contractors to incur and pass through whatever expenses they like. Reimbursement's usually limited to expenses set out in the contract/SOW, expenses preapproved by the client in writing, and possibly expenses below a threshold amount each, and an aggregate. On the latter think: "I'll reimburse you for expenses below $20 without approving first, but don't not more than $100 worth."<p>Invoices: Lawyers write additional payment obligations for late payment as interest, in order to avoid, first, courts reading the terms as penalties rather than agreed estimates of the damage late payment would cause, and therefore unenforceable, and second, to avoid usury laws that limit rates of interest.<p>I would be very surprised to learn that most contracts on this form actually complete on the scheduled invoice date. When contracts specify payment on completion, it usually goes: 1) contractor sends deliverables, 2) client accepts, or a deadline to accept or reject comes and goes, 3) contractor bills. Acceptance deadlines can be short. Depends on the work and the client.<p>Revisions: A fallback hourly rate can be a very good idea, depending on the work. Those interested should have a look at the form packet AIGA published for design contractors. I could improve on specific language in that packet, but its substantive coverage is good for many solo and small-studio designers I know.<p>Ownership: I would definitely advise being more explicit. In general, copyrights move from authors to clients in two ways: assignment and "work made for hire". Since not all copyrighted work can be "work made for hire", it's a good idea to spell out the mechanisms by which everything goes over. Also, beware of California work made for hire statutes tying to employee status:<p><a href="https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/05/31/California-Work-Made-for-Hire.html" rel="nofollow">https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/05/31/California-Work-Ma...</a><p>That being said, under our new California ABC test, I'm not sure who <i>isn't</i> arguably an employee. But I digress.<p>And that's just copyrights. Clients want patents covered, too.<p>Authorship: I would rename this "Portfolio Use" or similar, and also make it more explicit. Again, I believe AIGA covers this.<p>Confidentiality and Nondisclosure: Either "Confidentiality" or "Nondisclosure" would suffice. I'm all for short, pithy NDAs. But I don't think this is a very good one. A marking requirement gives a lot of clarity, but very few companies actually do that. NDA obligations typically don't survive perpetually.<p>I'd put a term in saying that the client and contractor will sign an NDA on a separate, standard form. Plug: <a href="https://nda.cantingtribe.com" rel="nofollow">https://nda.cantingtribe.com</a>.<p>Non-Solicitation: Stated too broadly. And probably unnecessary, for freelancers working for companies.<p>Representations: The rep included is common, but also kind of pointless. What happens if the side signing <i>doesn't</i> have authority to contract?<p>The key reps in freelance design, software, and other creative contracts cover IP. Specifically, that's where contractors typically guarantee that they aren't plagiarizing others' work, or including outside material they haven't the rights to license.<p>Term and Termination: Seven days is short, but termination at will is common. It's not clear how to calculate fees pro rata, given the x% up-front payment. If the client terminates the freelancer because they're terrible, does the client have to pay them more money? Only if they're >x% into the scheduled length of the contract?<p>Limitation of Liability: As I mentioned about reps above, deliverables usually <i>do</i> come with explicit reps. However, the terms usually <i>disclaim</i> reps not in the contract itself, like reps implied by law, by default. Damages cap at fees paid is typical.<p>Indemnity: The <i>Client</i> indemnifies the <i>Contractor</i> for the <i>Contractor</i>'s work??? Typically, Contractor would indemnify Client, for damages related to breach of IP reps and employee reclassification, and perhaps others. Client might indemnify Contractor for providing materials for use in deliverables that create IP or other issues.<p>I have <i>not</i> commented on terms that I think this form is missing. Cost-benefit of including more terms to head off more kinds of potential issues differs by contractor and client, and definitely tends shorter for smaller parties and smaller dollar amounts. But this feels a bit lean to me, for just about anybody. |
Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level? | What is the purpose of a proof? You may think that it's intended to solve a problem, but that's really only half the point. A good proof is one that communicates your solution to other people.<p>Mathematical writing is hard to learn well under the best of circumstances, but if you don't have someone else giving you feedback on whether they understand what you're writing, it's absolutely impossible. You need to have a mentor or at least an editor at some point. That's not impossible to find outside of the university system, but it's very difficult.<p>(This is the single biggest reason why MOOCs for higher math haven't taken off. There are a lot of people who'd love to communicate something about the field that they've dedicated their lives to, but the feedback system just doesn't scale. If anyone can figure out how to fix that, it'll be a game changer.)<p>So the first thing you have to do is to figure out what you can reasonably expect to get out of this process. You can learn the definitions and theorems of higher math, and that might be enough, but you're never going to develop an intuition for them without understanding how to produce proofs on your own. And don't fool yourself into thinking that you can evaluate your own proofs. It just doesn't work.<p>If all of that doesn't have you turned off, then here are some ideas on what to do.<p>A university level math curriculum is split into roughly three components:
* Lower level classes that focus on basic definitions and calculations;
* Mid level classes that teach some basic theorem-proving skills in subjects that are useful for people in other quantitative fields;
* Upper level classes that offer serious practice in theorem-proving as well as the core ideas of mathematics.
You don't generally have to do classes in any particular order, but you do have to master the skills of each level before you go on to the next one.<p>To begin, you must be very comfortable with the contents of a high school math curriculum. Serge Lang's book on basic mathematics is a great refresher if you're not, or you can use any of the various popular study guides (Schaum's, Barron's, etc.).<p>At the first level, you have calculus. This is generally split into three semesters, with the first dedicated to limits and derivatives of single-variable functions, one dedicated to integrals of single-variable functions as well as sequences and series, and the last dedicated to derivatives and integrals of multivariate functions. There are plenty of very expensive books with glossy page and many color pictures and few ideas, but if you want a serious introduction, look at Peter Lax's books on calculus.<p>At the second level you'll almost always find introductions to differential equations and linear algebra. Differential equations have historically been the workhorse of applied mathematics and you really need to have some familiarity with them, but I've never seen a book on the topic that I liked. I probably won't be satisfied by anything at this level, though, so look around and see if you can at least find something inexpensive.<p>Linear algebra is a more recent topic (with many of its key ideas actually originating in the 20th century), but it's probably actually more important now. Gilbert Strang's books are popular and are worth reading for a first look, but you really can't regard them as a serious introduction to the mathematical side of the topic. Axler is probably the best book in that regard, but it's best taken on a second pass.<p>I think that probability should be regarded as a core class at this level. I don't think that's a fringe view, but it's not as universal as I'd like. I learned from Pitman's book, and I think it's as good as any to start with.<p>You can also take classes on complex variables or "discrete math" here. I don't know what a good textbook for complex variables is--maybe Saff & Snider?--but I'm sure there are recommendations out there. Needham's "Visual Complex Analysis" is a fantastic book, but maybe not really suitable for a very first introduction. As for "discrete math" (a jumble of topics from logic, combinatorics and number theory), find the cheapest book you can get that has decent reviews on Amazon.<p>At the third level, there are three main topics: analysis, algebra and topology/geometry. You can think of these as the three main viewpoints in higher math, and other topics being populated by people who primarily look at things with the tools of one of those three topics.<p>Analysis starts out as the theory behind calculus. In a first course, you'll revisit a lot of what you saw in single-variable calculus, but you'll learn why it's true rather than just how to use it. For a single semester undergraduate course, Ken Binmore's book is probably the gentlest introduction.<p>Modern geometry is related to what you studied in high school, but with a few more centuries of development. It also doesn't get a lot of coverage at the undergraduate level, which is highly unfortunate. Stillwell's "The Four Pillars of Geometry" is a wonderful book and completely accessible.<p>Algebra is a bit difficult to explain without getting into the weeds. Pinter's "A Book of Abstract Algebra" is very good at motivating the topic and explaining the basics, which is the best you can hope for in an introductory textbook.<p>Beyond that but still at the undergraduate level, you can get electives in combinatorics (use Brualdi), number theory (?), logic (?) and some applied topics as well. Looking through the course offerings of various math departments will help you to fill in what the other possibilities are. |
Ask HN: What are your favorite board games? | I have many, so in no particular order:<p>* KingDomino, simple, relaxing, can be played with 4 year old, as well as two tired parents in around 30 minutes. It is a simple game, resulting map of your kingdom can look nice and it has cute art on the tiles :) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/204583/kingdomino" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/204583/kingdomino</a><p>* RailRoad Ink, everybody has a little whiteboard map and every turn somebody rolls some dice to see what kinds of railroad tracks will you need to scribble into the grid of your map. It is a nice puzzle, you score points for connecting pre-printed railroad exits on the edges on your map, but you only know four pieces of the railroad grid at the time. It is quick (after seven rolls of four dice, you are done), and if you are lucky, your map can look really nice in the end. Only drawback is, that everybody solves the puzzle on his own, and I do like boardgames where you interact a bit more :) Second drawback is, that the puzzle itself is too complicated for my 4 year-old :D <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245654/railroad-ink-deep-blue-edition" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245654/railroad-ink-deep...</a><p>* Carcasonne, a classic. Another tile-laying game, where you slowly build up a map dotted with many walled cities (hence the name :) You can claim an unfinished city or road or a field with your meeple to claim points, but if it happens i.e. two unfinished cities belonging to two players are connected to form a single whole, the player that has more meeples in the city scores points. This creates a fun dynamic of complicated city take-overs (because you can't just invade, right, you build next-door and hope for a city- connecting tile) My wife managed to get the big box, with several expansions, and even though it is longer than other games we use to play, we play this fairly regularly. And the map at the end of the game can look really nice (I am starting to see a trend :P) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne</a><p>* PatchWork - a slightly abstract puzzle, reminds me of tetris a bit, playable in 20 minutes for two players, but it still retains the "Don't you take that tile, I need it for my board!" that can be fun :)<p>* Hero Realms - a reasonably quick deck-building card-game. I use it to scratch my magic-the-gathering itch :) And when you get a good card-combo going it can be really satisfying :) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198994/hero-realms" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198994/hero-realms</a><p>* Colt Express - a wild-west-train heist game. Weirdly we found it fun only when playing as two players or more than four :D With several players, the game devolves into comedy of errors, you everybody trying to get the best of their foiled plans. With two players, the experience is much more tactical, as you play as a team of two thieves on the train, giving you bigger chance to plan and anticipate the oponent. Feeling of actually executing your plan in this game is amazing :) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158899/colt-express" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158899/colt-express</a><p>* Hive, probably the last game we actually get to the table at home, a interesting, chess-like game for two players. Unfortunately, the first player seems to have a big advantage? We still like it :-) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive</a><p>* Ticket To Ride, that we no longer have at home, but if I ever make space for the big box, I might get it again :-) Connecting USA with rails is fun, hoping your oponents don't snatch the one route you need is exciting, and scoring points for your networked cities you were tasked to connect is rewarding. Only thing I don't like that much is the way you build the tracks by collecting cards of the same color, that can take too long. At least it is simple enough to play with casual board-gamers. <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride</a><p>* SmallWorld, the game I enjoyed the most while still at high-school (even though we played Bang much more) It is really well balanced for all the numbers of players and the gimmic of trying to choose the most overpowered race available is fun :) <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world</a><p>* PowerGrid, probably the heaviest economic game I have played. Trying to power half of germany with you electric company can be a mind bending puzzle, then you add a layer of trying to out-bid your opponents to get the <i>good</i> power-plant, and moment later you realize you bid too high, you won't have resources to <i>run</i> the power-plant and your opponent could get his plant really cheap :D <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid</a><p>* SecretHitler, the game we played the most at the office at my previous team? Reasonably quick, rules are simple and hidden-role games are nice for large groups of players <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188834/secret-hitler" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188834/secret-hitler</a> (runner-up would probably be Coup <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup</a>)<p>* GalaxyTrucker, the epitome of "Loosing is fun". You cobble together a space-ship and then you fly through various hazards and in the end your ship is barely standing, but hey, you survived :D If you liked FTL and don't mind randomness, it is a great game. Only drawback is, that if build too good of a ship, the game stops being fun. We tried to solve this with my cousin by limitting the time you have to build the ship even more and then we even hacked togegether a PVP phase where we destroy each other's ship with all those weapons you'd usually use to defend against pirates and asteroids :D And it does scratch my itch of "look at all these tiles laying besides each other, my monstrosity of a sip is beautiful" :D<p>Man, almost a 1000 words just listing some of my favourite boardgames. And I might keep going. I should probably start a blog :D |
Show HN: SocialAmnesia-An open source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets | Direct link to release with downloadables: <a href="https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/tag/v1.0.0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/...</a><p>What is this?<p>I’m excited to release 1.0.0 of my side project, Social Amnesia! This completely free and open source software allows you to wipe out old reddit and twitter posts, comments, tweets, and favorites, automatically and on a schedule. It also allows you to configure certain items to be saved based on configuration options like number of upvotes, favorites, or retweets, whether an item has been gilded, how old an item is, or by specifically whitelisting items you would like to have saved.<p>Who is this for?<p>I assume most of you are wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook (if you even have one), etc. However, I can also imagine many of your friends and family are not. At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is to not use any social media. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say no". What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. This is why I've built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively (instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you).<p>Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work with scary configuration text files) or cost money. I wanted to develop one that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. I believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.<p>Why would you need this?<p>If you've been following the news recently you've probably seen cases of celebrities losing out on big career opportunities because of tweets or other internet posts from their past coming back to haunt them. Kevin Hart and The Oscars and James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are two of the more high profile examples of this recently. Make no mistake, this could happen to anyone, not just high profile individuals. If you are going to tweet, cleaning up your old tweets is one of the best ways to keep a nightmare like this from ruining a potential job opportunity or relationship. Since twitter is mainly focused on current events, and as far as I can tell it's rare for people to look far back in someone's twitter history, this shouldn't effect your day to day interaction with twitter.<p>On the reddit side of things, many people maintain pseudonymous accounts to post in places like /r/sex, /r/politics or /r/trees. The more reddit history you have, the higher chance you have of being doxxed by someone who might comb through your posts to try and scrape together details to de-cloak you and reveal your real identity. Keeping your reddit history clean is a good deterrent from being doxxed.<p>Concerns<p>I've received concerns about this software when I've posted it before. I'll try my best to detail some of my arguments here, but please leave a comment if you have anything to share and I'll do my best to respond to you.
One of the main concerns I've heard is from people who've gone back to an old reddit post and there have been deleted comments that might have been useful for them (semi-relevant xkcd: <a href="https://xkcd.com/979/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/979/</a>). I hear you, and to try and combat this I've added some features to this software. The first is a whitelist window, which as far as I know is the only of it's kind in free management software for reddit. Opening this window shows you all of your comments or posts and let's you pick ones to save from deletion. Additionally, when you do go to delete anything, the software will show you every item that will be deleted and ask you to confirm your decision. This software doesn't do anything that isn't possible for a user to do by simply going back through their comments and deleting them.<p>I realize this isn't a complete solution, so I'd recommend using this software only if you use your reddit or twitter accounts for more current events or sensitive topics. If you provide helpful advice online and want to make sure it's preserved, be careful using this.<p>The second concern I've heard is related to backups, archives and having a false sense of privacy around using this software. Obviously I can't delete anything from reddit or twitter's internal servers, and I can't remove something if it's archived somewhere else. And I'm also limited by their APIs (which I've detailed here: <a href="https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia#limitations" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia#limitatio...</a>). However I've done some research, and backups of reddit and twitter are sparse, incomplete, and often hard to find and access. For a while the library of congress was archiving every tweet out there, but they gave up when that became too difficult a task due to the sheer size of twitter. Unless someone is actively archiving your posts, there is a good chance that deleting a tweet or reddit item will actually remove them from the internet. |
Why does APT not use HTTPS? | I am seeing quite a bit of misinformation about how package managers work so I'd love to share what I have learned. I work with index files on a daily basis, and we might possibly generate more index files than any other organization on the planet. Here is my chance to share some of this knowledge!
TLDR/Summary<p>We can trust the Release file because it was signed by Ubuntu. We can trust the Packages file because it has the correct size and checksum found in the Release file. We can trust the package we just downloaded because it is referenced in the Packages file, which is referenced in the Release file, which is signed by Ubuntu.<p>Some basic package manager principles<p>I work with APK, DEB, and RPM based package managers and each of them behave very similar. Each repository has a top level file, signed by the repository's maintainer, that includes a list of files found in the repository and their checksums. When your package manager does an update, it looks for this top level file.<p><pre><code> For DEB based systems, this is the Release file
For APK based systems, this is the APKINDEX.tar.gz file
For RPM based systems, this is the repodata.xml file
</code></pre>
These files are all signed by the repository's gpg key. So the Release file found at<a href="http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic/Release" rel="nofollow">http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic/Release</a> and is signed by Ubuntu and the gpg key is included in your distribution. Let's hope Ubuntu doesn't let their gpg key into the wild. Assuming that Ubuntu's gpg key is safe, this means that the system can verify that the Release file did in fact come from Ubuntu. If you are interested, you can click on the previous link, or navigate to Ubuntu's repository and open up one of their Release files.<p>Release file<p>In the Release file you'll see a list of files and their checksum. Example:55f3fa01bf4513da9f810307b51d612a 6214952 main/binary-amd64/Packages<p>9f666ceefac581815e5f3add8b30d3b9 1343916 main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz<p>706fccb10e613153dc61a1b997685afc 96 main/binary-amd64/Release<p>9eae32e7c5450794889f9c3272587f5e 1019132 main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz<p>5dd0ca3d1cbce6d2a74fcc3e1634ac12 96 main/binary-arm64/Release<p>The left column is the checksum, then the size of the file, and lastly the location of the file. So we can download the files referenced in the Release file and check them for the correct size and checksum. The Packages or Packages.gz file is the one we care about in this example. It contains information about the packages available to the package manager (apt in this case but again, almost all of the package managers behave very similar).<p>Packages file<p>Since we know that we can trust the Release file (because we have proven it was signed by Ubuntu's gpg key), we can then proceed to download the contents of the Release file. Let's look at the Packages file specifically as it contains a list of packages, their size, and checksum.<p>Filename: pool/main/a/accountsservice/accountsservice_0.6.45-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb<p>Size: 62000<p>MD5sum: c2cffd1eb66b6392f350b474e583adba<p>SHA1: 71d89bd380a465397b42ea3031afa53eaf91661a<p>SHA256: d0b11d1d27fe425bc91ea51fab74ad45e428753796f0392e446e8b2450293255<p>The Packages file includes a list of packages with information about where the file can be found, the size of the file, and various checksums of the file. If you download a file through commands like apt install and any of these fields are incorrect, apt will throw an error and not add it to the apt database.<p>It's time to debunk some myths!<p>Can an attacker send me a fake Release file?<p>Sure, but apt will throw it out because it's not signed by Ubuntu (or whoever your repository maintainer is like centos, rhel, alpine, etc)<p>Can an attacker send me an old index from an earlier date that was signed by Ubuntu that has old packages in it with known exploits?<p>Sure, but apt will throw it out because it will have a date (in the Release file) that is older than what is stored in the apt database. For example, the current bionic main Release file has this date in it: Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2018 23:37:48 UTC So if you supply it with a Release file older than that timestamp, it will throw it out because it is older than what it currently knows about.<p>I hope this helps clear the air!<p>Shameless plug. If you are serious about security and not just compliance, check out our Polymorphic Linux repositories. <a href="https://polyverse.io/" rel="nofollow">https://polyverse.io/</a> We provide "scrambled" or "polymorphic" repositories for Alpine, Centos, Fedora, RHEL, and Ubuntu. We use the original source packages provided in the official repositories and build the packages but with memory locations in different places and ROP chains broken.<p>Installation<p>Installation is a one line command that installs our repository in your sources.list or repo file. There is no agent or running process installed. It is literally just adding our repository to your installation. The next time you do an `apt install httpd` or `yum install docker` you'll get a polymorphic version of the package from our repository. You can see it in action in your browser with our demo: <a href="https://polyverse.io/learn/" rel="nofollow">https://polyverse.io/learn/</a><p>What does it do?<p>Many of the replies in this post referenced an attacker tricking a server into an older version of a package that has a known exploit. We stop this. Even if you are running an old version of a package, with a known exploit, memory based attacks will not work on the scrambled package because the ROP chain has been broken or as we call it "scrambled". So with our packages, you can run older versions of a package and not be effected by the known exploits. This also means that you are protected from zero day attacks just by having our version of the package.<p>FREE! For individuals and open source organizations you can use our repositories for free. I hope you try it out! |
Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble? | There is a lot of bubble logic in these replies - things like "salaries are destined to go up forever because they've gone up since the dot-com days", "smart people in other fields are baffled by things we find trivial", "programming is incredibly hard so it's obvious we should be paid more," etc. There's probably a kernel of truth to some of these statements, but there are eerie parallels to past bubbles here.<p>It is my opinion that we are not in a <i>programming</i> bubble, but in a <i>venture capital</i> bubble. The latter causes the appearance of the former. Let me explain the meat of how I think it works.<p>1) A well-to-do person decides to start a VC fund. This person recruits a few high net-worth friends and convinces them to invest a sum of money in the new fund. Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that this person gets $1m to play with in total from 10 individual investors.<p>2) This new fund does around 10 unpriced seed investments with its $1m (convertible notes). 50% of these companies do not go on to raise more money, and thus the money spent on them is written off. The other 50% go on to raise a priced A round, whereupon some bigger funds lead the rounds and mark up the price of each company's equity by between 50% and 150%.<p>3) Our seed investor is now sitting on equity roughly worth $1.25m. This person has made a 25% return on the capital under their management. They take a 5% fee off the top - for a handsome payday of $62,500. The investors are pleased.<p>4) Then, this thought crosses our brave new fund owner's mind: "Boy, I'm really good at this." So our owner goes out to a wider network and solicits $10m this time, with the intent to participate in A rounds instead of seed rounds. They cite their successful 25% returns in seed stage companies, and people scramble to hand them money to manage.<p>5) Goto step 2 (but increase the numbers and change up the preferred investment round occasionally)<p>The sums get bigger, the paper returns get bigger, and the management fees get bigger. But what brings this all to a crashing halt? Where does all that VC money come from?<p>I believe that this is all a consequence of the zero-interest rate environment in the United States throughout the last decade. People with assets have largely had no attractive places to put their money, so they were forced to chase riskier and riskier investments. Venture capital was the perfect target - the compelling narrative of technological progress makes for a feel-good investment avenue, and the general opacity of tech concepts to non-technical people makes the mystique that much more compelling. Plus - there's a mathematical strategy here! Why buy bonds and get a lower rate of return than inflation when you can chase unicorns? Why not take the probabilistic and "scientific" approach by investing in 100 companies - expecting 90 to die, 9 to do okay, and 1 to be a mega-success that makes your investment worth it?<p>The hunt for the fabled "unicorn company" is this economic cycle's equivalent to "housing prices are always going to go up." <i>But the models work!</i> you say. <i>The success and failure probabilities are accurate!</i> So were the models that led to mortgage-backed securities - if we bundle enough of these loans together, on average they will have to be profitable - right? The problem then, as now, is that such a model is only accurate when the broad macroeconomic conditions underlying it remain true. When you run out of money coming in, the music stops. Loan defaults started to spike and the MBS model fell apart. Likewise, I suspect that less money entering the VC world will presage the whole thing falling apart - and as interest rates climb, it's only a matter of time until debt is more profitable again and the easy-money faucet turns off.<p>I've ranted for a bit, so you're probably wondering - how in the hell does this relate to the OP's article? Let's now address the other side of the equation here - where does all that VC money <i>go</i>? Well, that money that was invested in all those failed startups (or the successful ones) gets spent on something. But what? It clearly doesn't all get spent on catered lunches and ping pong tables (much to the chagrin of our industry's critics). But it does get spent somewhere - and I'd hazard a guess that the most popular targets for that spending would be Facebook Ads, Amazon hosting, Apple hardware, Google Ads, Microsoft software, etc. <i>The VC money gets spent on stuff the tech giants are selling, fueling the dramatic increase in their share prices over the past ten years.</i><p>Given that OP's article makes the point that compensation is huge and <i>primarily driven by share price increases</i>, it's easy to see how VC money could be actively impacting this situation. But as a gut check - if all of this talk of "US economic conditions fueling a domestic venture capital bubble" does have a grain of truth to it - what would you expect economic conditions for software engineers to look like in other parts of the world?<p>London: <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,6_IM1035_KO7,24.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-software-engineer-...</a><p>Paris: <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/paris-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,5_IM1080_KO6,23.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/paris-software-engineer-s...</a><p>Berlin: <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/berlin-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,6_IM1020_KO7,24.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/berlin-software-engineer-...</a><p>Interesting, right? Proximity to the nexus of Sand Hill Road does appear to have an impact. I'm no data scientist, but I imagine there's enough publicly available data about venture rounds and salaries that a more rigorous assessment of this general thesis is possible. If anyone knows of existing studies, please let me know. |
Ask HN: Revolut account frozen – this has to be illegal? | Ok I am new here and is have been brought to my attention that I have gone about this the wrong way . So let me start again and do this properly (unable to edit post)
I used revoult for a period of about 5-6 months .
I used it for part of my spending, then eventually moved over all of it (note my bank account with a normal high street bank never had any issues with my spending , as there is nothing illegal about it )<p>Technically the app had no flaws that I noticed .<p>So reasons I moved to revoult :
1.Customer support was great via live chat (especially if you paid for premium, as you would get preference in the line to speak with a customer support agent )
2.I am a very risk adverse person so , I use my main bank account to protect my savings and I avoid using my debit card at all costs as if any money was very taken out by someone else using my card it would be very difficult to get it back (ie if any fraud ever occurred). The traditional alternative to this problem is to use a credit card , but I didn't want to have pay off a balance at the end of every month (as if I forget it could be very costly for me ) . This is where revoult suited perfectly . I just set up my revoult as a payee and sent money to it via my main bank account and this provided the layer of protection I wanted.
3. This ties in with the 2nd part . Revoult allows the user to deactivate ones card via the app. This was a brilliant feature that I loved as it gave me that piece of mind.
4. Replacement cards, they would arrive within 1-3 days which is brilliant .
5. Could have up to 3 cards attached to an account. Since I regularly forget which pocket I put my wallet in I just put the cards in my wallet, in one of my coats and last one in my room as spare (just in case)
6. I love data , so the ability to track all my spending habits in one place (could see shop name, time of transaction and amount) was excellent. Then the data also was available in pdf form for me to print of at the end of the month or when ever I wanted . I think you could also transfer data to excel or google sheets . I am aware this is a double edged sword as they are getting lots of priceless data on a users spending habits , but this was a cost I was willing to put up with (for anyone who watched the show the prisoner , starring Patrick McGoohan , I would say you already feel like your living in the village )<p>These are the main reasons I used revoult . So on to the issues I had.<p>As expected I had to prove my income once my spending was fully moved over. I had no issue with this . I actually preferred it as it gave me the feeling that they were more legitimate.<p>So after I passed 20k (limit was 30k at this point ) I asked to raise the limit and they happily did so (went to 70k ). Then after a few months my account was suddenly frozen. I asked what was wrong . They said my account was under review . I sent in all supporting documents (even though my bank never asked for this kind of stuff) and then was told by an under qualified customer support person that they didn't mind my source of income , they just didn't like where and how I spent my money . The support staff then insinuated that I engage in illegal activities ( and therefore implied I was a criminal ). I asked to speak to someone higher up as this person was not reading my messages properly. They were not aware of what their messages where implying . I was then passed on . Was given the same response that they do not like how i spend my money . I requested a phone call on many occasions . Was refused (which I think is a major problem if your company is now a bank )and then blocked from using live chat .<p>So to conclude . I went above and beyond what is reasonable , when it comes to proving that income was legitimate and that my spending was legal ( I have never been accused of illegal spending , I spent all the money at high street stores ). I was refused any phone calls and had my account suspended. I am no legal expert , but soloy on principle I find this to be wrong.<p>I had great hopes for this start up . I just find it very dangerous when you are at the whim of others. |
People Find It Difficult to Think About Arguments That Contradict Their Politics | I've found that something rarely considered is that even people who are less informed and less introspective have put /some/ thought into constructing their world view. Politics is usually a component of this, and at some level, at it's very basic, is built on top of the moral philosophy you hold as part of your world view. It's something so deeply personal, that it innately becomes a component of your everyday character. While it is true that a lot of people behave in tribalistic political manners, without "walking the walk" every day (Leftists call it "performance", Right-Wingers call it "virtual signalling"), on average if someone holds a political viewpoint about an issue and behaves in response to certain political news, it's a reflection of their fundamental worldviews.<p>It's not just a failure of people to logically consider arguments, it's an unwillingness to completely deconstruct and rebuild one's own worldview. When I press highly intelligent friends about this in discussions, what I'm often told is that discussing politics is exhausting for them, and that having arguments about is something they "lack the spoons" for. This is with people who are highly informed, intelligent, and typically enjoy argumentation and discussion based in facts and logic. Politics is different and special, because to change your mind you have to be willing to deconstruct your world view and everything that goes into it.<p>Of all the people I've had very deep political conversations with in my life, the one commonality was that they had all somehow achieved a level of introspection which allowed them to understand /why/ they have certain viewpoints. I'm not sure if their understanding is correct, because often it's tied to some prior personal private experience, but at least they could make a feasibly valid claim to understanding. I'm in an interesting position in my own world view, which has lead me to conversations which made it obvious to me that many folks who are on the Left that feel most viscerally about modern political issues do so because of a reaction to some specific personal trauma. Trauma that they may not yet have resolved, and that may impact their lives daily in many ways. Often those people are aware of their trauma, but they haven't yet been able to get through facing it and deconstructing it because it's emotionally painful, and any argument about related political issues which reminds them of this trauma elicits a visceral emotional reaction. This is in some sense is really what people mean when they discuss being "triggered", but even those people who won't discuss it experience this.<p>It's VERY VERY difficult for people to be brutally honest with themselves. At a certain point you can no longer lie to yourself, and you know all of what is in your head, where others can only guess. It's much easier to obscure the truth from other people, going through life structuring a world view that protects your emotional wellbeing based on a facade or partial truth. When you are deeply introspective, all of this is stripped away. Most of the people I've discussed this with have admitted that they have skeletons they don't want to face. I think to a large degree, this is just part of the human condition. All these aforementioned folks who seem to have gotten past this either had previously gone through many many years of therapy, which helped them emotionally mature, or they have some sort of empathy disorder which allows them to lack even empathy towards themselves and approach things from a less emotional perspective. Neither are common things in the general population, and thus we have people with visceral emotional reactions to nearly every bit of political news without really even understanding why they have their reactions. News organizations from a revenue perspective are incentivized to encourage and build upon these visceral emotional reactions as well, which just exacerbates the issue.<p>At the end of the day, the reality is that the vast majority of people integrate their politics into their worldview, but have never deconstructed it into first principles, and maybe wouldn't even know where to begin doing so. Trying to change their mind is like the emotional equivalent of physically assaulting them. You're forcing them to face a reality that they have either consciously or subconsciously prevented themselves from seeing. The vast majority of people are not emotionally mature enough to be able to handle this without eliciting a visceral rejection of any idea that makes them feel that way.<p>To a large degree, this is why I don't bother discussing politics with people anymore. I love thinking about and discussing the topic and all the fundamental philosophical and moral questions that go into it. But it's nearly impossible to discuss with the vast majority of people without mortally offending them. I've probably lost more friends over politics than any other thing in my life, despite the fact I hold no extreme positions on any topic, and generally frame discussions with questions rather than statements, using data to analyze popular viewpoints. |
Deliveroo users are getting defrauded | this website makes it a point to make it as annoying as possible to disable all tracking. No option to disable all.<p>full article for whose whom want to read it but not be tracked:<p>Deliveroo users are getting defrauded – and it could be fined millions for it<p>Scammers are using the delivery service to clear out bank accounts, and the company’s response may be in breach of GDPR regulations.
By
Sarah Manavis
Follow @@sarahmanavis
Getty Images<p>On Friday morning, I woke up late, rushed to the tube, tapped in with Apple Pay, only to discover a few minutes later that my payment had been declined because I had insufficient funds. Figuring, “Well, it’s January”, I went to check my bank balance.<p>But rather than seeing an overspend or a direct debit I’d forgotten about, I saw three enormous charges from the food delivery service Deliveroo from the night before. They weren’t mine.<p>I immediately called Deliveroo to say that it wasn’t, in fact, me who ordered £100 worth of food in the space of ten minutes in three separate orders; and told them that the fraudsters had changed my email address, so I couldn’t even get into my account to look at where it was sent. I was told that they would investigate, and I would be sent an email asking for more information immediately.<p>I was not. After an hour, I rang again, to find that actually the email had been sent to the new email address – the one the fraudsters plugged in – so that they had presumably been alerted to the investigation. I complained, got the email re-sent to me, and was then met by radio silence for the rest of the day. When I eventually rang again, the company said it couldn’t actually tell me whether or not I would get my money back, adding that I might not hear from them for nearly a week before they let me know either way.<p>By 5pm, I was getting fed up, so I did what any journalist with a modest Twitter following would do, and tweeted. What I thought would happen was that my case would be bumped on the list, and maybe I’d get my money back sooner (or, indeed, at all). What actually happened was that my replies, DMs and email were all immediately flooded with people who had been a victim of the same fraud, saying, yes, this had happened to them too and no, Deliveroo had never refunded them. Of the roughly 40 people I spoke to, not a single one had been refunded by the delivery service; those who did get their money back had got it from their bank. The people tweeting the account claimed to have experienced fraud ranging from the low hundreds of pounds, like my case, to, in some cases, thousands. One person tweeted me to say that a friend of his was fraudulently charged £3,500 on his account. “Deliveroo offered him a £40 credit as a gesture.”<p>More shockingly, nearly half of these people told me that their cases were still technically “under investigation” by Deliveroo, some for over two months. Most of those who had been waiting for more than a week to hear about their case told me Deliveroo had simply stopped responding to their calls.<p>This problem is not actually new. In 2016, the Telegraph ran an expose of rampant fraud on the food-delivery service, and reported on customers’ shock at Deliveroo’s poor handling of the situation. The same day, a BBC Watchdog programme did a feature on Deliveroo fraud, in which Deliveroo claimed that “instances of fraud on our system are rare”.<p>But dating back several years, Deliveroo’s customer service Twitter account, @DeliverooHelp, has responded to claims of fraud nearly every day – often, in recent months, multiple times a day. They may represent only a small percentage of Deliveroo’s wider customer base, but it’s not at all obvious this is “rare”.<p>However, help for customers – and fines for the delivery service – could be coming from Brussels. Laura Irvine, a regulatory lawyer and Partner at Davidson Chalmers, tells me that Deliveroo may have breached the GDPR regulations introduced last year on multiple counts.<p>The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became European law on 25 May 2018, made sweeping changes to data protection rules across the EU: now, companies are more liable for protecting the data they hold on customers than ever before.<p>Irvine tells me that Deliveroo appears to have breached these regulations three times over. The sixth principle of Article 5, for example, requires companies to have “appropriate security in place to keep your financial and other personal data secure”, she notes. The firm also appears to have breached Article 32, “which provides more detail about what is expected in terms of data security – namely encryption, which appears not to have been in place”.<p>Lastly, there’s Article 34, which requires the “data controller” – that’s Deliveroo – to tell “anyone who may be affected by a data breach about it without undue delay. This applies when the breach is likely to result in a high risk of an impact on the individual. Getting your bank account emptied would, I suggest, meet that threshold.”<p>So what fines could Deliveroo face, if it were to be found guilty of these data breaches? “It could be millions of pounds,” Irvine says.<p>She emphasised that this is a big “could” – the millions of pounds they could be fined would be the upper end of the spectrum. But it is entirely possible, especially given the criticism the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has faced for the small size of its fines in the past. “They were criticised for the small fine imposed on Facebook – £500,000 which was the maximum under the old law,” she tells me. “So I think they will want to use their powers. And they need to keep up with the other regulators,” she adds, noting that Google recently faced a €50m fine in France for breaching GDPR.<p>That said, there are some things that could spare Deliveroo from this fate: if, say, Deliveroo had told the ICO about the data breach within 72 hours, the threshold for fines would be lowered. But, Irvine says, the high volume of incidents and the reported response from Deliveroo suggest they aren’t informing the ICO of their data protection problems.<p>“They may blame other parties, but at the end of the day if you give them your data then they remain responsible – in most cases,” she says. “I am not sure how the bank would stop this.”<p>I put all this to Deliveroo. A spokesperson told me: “Deliveroo takes online security very seriously. Sadly fraudsters rely on the fact that people reuse the same passwords on multiple online services to try and gain entry to different accounts across the web.”<p>Ultimately, though, fines are not the only problems that data leaks of this sort pose to firms like Deliveroo. “Soon people will stop using companies based on how responsible they are with data,” she says. “Particularly financial data – but even your address being out there can be uncomfortable or dangerous for some people.” If she’s right, then this, for Deliveroo, could be just the beginning.<p>Midway through writing this story, I got my money back, by the way – and from Deliveroo itself. Other victims have not been so lucky. |
Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube | In this thread, in social media, and in recent articles that critique YouTube's recommendations, it seems like the anecdotal examples all try to support a claim that YouTube's recommendation algorithm radicalizes viewers towards the far right side of the US political spectrum. This to me seems like a naive, self-serving perspective channeled by those who are on the US political left. Somehow, the same algorithm might help channel viewers to content from say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but no complaints are made in that instance, since that content aligns with the views of those who are complaining.<p>These algorithms are based on what people watch based on prior history. As outsiders, we can't know exactly how it works, but it seems like it would be some mix of the video you are currently watching and other videos in your watch/search history, which then feed into a model that considers all users' behaviors and produces probabilistic relationships between videos. This is a fairly standard way for how recommendations work, and it is reasonable. As others have pointed out, there are also many anecdotes of YouTube recommendations working great - for example with discovery of music. But we should keep in mind that the same recommendations engine supports those same positive anecdotes.<p>For a lot of users, the recommendations some are labeling as incorrect, radicalizing, etcetera are actually the recommendations they want and enjoy. Why should other users or YouTube intervene if that's what user behavior supports? Clearly, the reason is that these other users want to constrain access to views they don't share - which is just another way of saying they support censorship when it applies to others. There is a dangerous concept creep in Google's blog post:<p>> We’ll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines.<p>This is really the first step in expanding their guidelines, and if they cave to either internal political activism or the complaints coming from the outside (a group with very uniform views aligning with the political left), it is a risk for public discourse. This is in part because there are very few alternatives to Google in general, and that applies to YouTube as well. As others have pointed out, BitChute was blackballed by payment processors. Any constraint on free exchange of information on YouTube is dangerous because so much of online discourse is under Google's control, on their platforms.<p>I can't help but think that the BuzzFeed article and others are basically cherry-picked hitjobs to create a false narrative that something more nefarious is going on beyond YouTube simply respecting user behaviors. The impetus to say something is wrong here seems to be based entirely on personal political biases. For example, some people here are bemoaning the fact that watching Joe Rogan's podcasts (which are less political) lead you to watch Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro. If that's the behavior other users who watch a Joe Rogan video are exhibiting, I don't see anything wrong with that recommendation. And if you dislike it, consider that this might be the exposure to different views that people often pay lip service to.<p>Some of the other annoyances outlined by commenters are less related to specific content and more like general usability concerns. A summary:<p>- It is no longer possible to see recommendations based on just the current video. I agree this is poor design. It seems at some point YouTube switched the recommendations feed from being centered on whatever content you are currently seeking (which the currently playing video would be an input for), to just showing recommendations based on everything you've ever done. I think there is a place for the current set of recommendations but it should not be the sole set. Having a "Based on this video" section of recommendations and a "More for you" section of recommendations would solve this problem.<p>- User feedback saying you don't want to watch something is not immediately respected. Other users say that it is respected, if you provide the feedback multiple times. The latter may be appropriate, since a single dislike is likely best interpreted not as an absolute, but a signal that gets ingested into the algorithm and weighted appropriately.<p>- People want to be able to watch a video and not have it feed into their recommendations. This is currently possible by pausing watch history or search history, but that's deep in the settings and much harder to find. I agree, YOuTube should make a privacy mode toggle that is available right next to the video.<p>- Sometimes videos that were already watched are recommended. I'm split on this one - I've certainly seen times they recommend a previously-watched video where I don't think it would make sense to rewatch it. But that is likely based on user behavior as well. And if there are enough users watching some video repeatedly, it might be a fair and correct prediction to suggest it to me. When you click the 'Not Interested' link beneath a video, you can also click 'Tell Us Why' and select the option 'I already watched it' to give them that hint. But the interface is a bit cumbersome, certainly. |
I studied buttons for 7 years and learned why people push them | Modern 'Smart-to-smartstupid' design evolution:<p>1. Once there were consumer devices with a few buttons and switches. They really worked and they were amazing.<p>2. Then manufacturers added extra features, and extra buttons/switches for them. It was a feature trade war. Extra controls meant better. Everybody wins. Buttons and switches were cheap to make. Manufacturing was intricate and people-intensive but the products were plentiful.<p>2a. These buttons and switches had <i>springs</i> that gave them snap and finger feedback. There were standard leaf switches and generic microswitches, made in the billions, that were fitted with custom caps.<p>3. There was always 'proverbial' group that always complained that the "extra controls made it too complicated to use".<p>4. It turns out these complainers were really 'paid consumer focus groups' that wanted to be in the design loop. We never used to listen to such people in real life, just asshole control freaks whose idea of a certain switch being 'useless clutter' was actually their lack of understanding of what it did. These are the kind of people today who if you post a specific question on a hacker forum, you get an answer "why would you want to do that?" with no follow through. But people like this sleazed their way into corporate life. Their projection of the average consumer 'enraged' by too many controls was a self-serving myth to keep them into the design loop and introduce dubious measures that created more confusion than saved cost. We made fun of them and companies that adopted their practices, and continued to buy things with lots of controls.<p>5. Microcontrollers hit the market. Now often the driving logic was digital, but those switches, controls and simple displays were still there and part of the interface. They were polled often enough to simulate the more component-intensive analog experience. It was the golden age of debouncing.<p>6. Displays became matrix and alphanumeric. Almost at once a drive began to eliminate controls in favor of on screen menus and multi-use buttons. This was a boon to complicated processes like industrial control systems, which always maintained separate essential controls, but NOT so much to those consumer devices. On consumer devices something that used to be a switch was now a hidden menu option. Humans can easily memorize switch positions, but started struggling with menus.<p>7. The fall of modern civilization really accelerated with the PLAY button that was also the PAUSE button, the STOP button that forgets where you had been and '<<' and '>>' buttons that change their operation based not how long you held it but also how flaky the button is made. Where once people were angered by membrane and 'chicklet' button membranes, now people accept them even in expensive devices... with their brief lifespan, and for at least half of the brief lifespan the controls are a source of chronic frustration. For the shaky and the elderly, constant frustration.<p>8. Displays became color and HD and touch screens appeared. Web site design rejects -- not engineers or people familiar with previous consumer devices -- were hired to populate the screens and build the menus. There is whitespace and visual clutter, too many levels, few if any actual controls, and often used controls are two operations deep. Onscreen pop-up QWERTY or ABCD keyboards have replaced the simple act of including an actual keyboard with the device, even when it would save frustration in daily use.<p>9. Now Internet connectivity was integrated, postponing a full design cycle even further as devices were released before they could even compete favorable with their previous generations. The Android is probably the best-of-breed of this genre where screen interface and driving logic can be integrated into a brick that is set into other boxes... but at a very steep price. Few suppliers.<p>10. Its thinness is an affront to the serviceability of previous eras. Small displays on large empty panels and empty enclosures, that once were populated with controls performing immediate functions. A tiny window into the whole machine.<p>...<p>Because of those switches and buttons, people used to operate devices while doing something else, while looking somewhere else. In the dark, by rote and by habit. They were 'big' but big meant real speakers, beefy batteries and things that couldn't get lost under a sheet of paper or left on the bus seat.<p>Now you have to gaze intently at a small screen, figure out where you are, stabilize the device to place your fingers just so on a surface that will not work well when wet, squint in the sunlight, fumble while holding things <i>designed</i> to slip out of your hand so the precious glass shatters as it hits the ground... while trying to discern whether present state will accept an operation from pressing a button that isn't there.<p>I predict that the next consumer craze will be things that look and operate like they did in the 1980s. |
The AI Threat to Open Societies | I've been interested in science and engineering since my youngest days and I've always considered myself a hacker from way back. At school, my fellow schoolmates nicknamed me 'The Boffin' as back then the terms 'hacker' and 'nerd' hadn't yet been coined. My profession is electronics engineering and IT and for my entire career I've followed and worked with the latest developments in the field. Right: I'm an insatiable technophile!<p>My other studies were in philosophy (ethics, etc.) and government and over the years I've found my formal training in them truly invaluable, they've broadened my perception and worldview about the ways science and engineering dovetail into society and make the world a better place by improving the lives of its citizens.<p>I have to agree with the tenet of George Soros' message for many reasons but from my perspective perhaps the most significant one is that we are moving at a frenetic pace headlong from an industrial age into a post industrial one that's driven by advanced technologies (and primarily through the use of information). We're entering a new era whose paradigms will have morphed into ones so very different from anything humankind has ever before witnessed and the changes are coming so very fast that they'll almost certainly cause fear and social disruption on an unprecedented scale unless we act now to adapt technology to our human needs and not those of governments and large multinational corporations—after all, they ought to be our servants, not vice versa as it is at present.<p>At present, society is both ill prepared and ill equipped to handle monumental changes of such a magnitude without considerable preparation, and we've hardly even begun to discuss the matter let alone draw up viable plans for society to adapt to them.<p>Leaving ML and AI aside for a moment, let's just look at the metaphysical† aspects of the Google/Facebook revolution. Both behemoths, but especially Facebook, are floundering in the mire over very important issues such as those concerning privacy, fake news, damaging effects on democracy and politics in general, and there's precious little light on the horizon to shine upon any potential solution let alone any commonly-agreed methodologies or viable options.<p>Let's look at what has effectively happened here: internet technologies evolved to a stage where worldwide networks such as Facebook became feasible and thus they were built without any real thought of the wider social consequences other than the paramount need to make money. Zuckerberg et al would like us all to believe that they had actually executed both their financial and social objectives as they'd planned but as we now know this is far from being the full truth.<p>Not only did Big Tech companies have secret plans all of their own with the deliberate intention of exploiting users but they kept these intentions hidden from both governments and users alike thus no independent scrutiny was possible until the inevitable leaks occurred. The lesson from this is that with no oversight, undesirable metaphysical effects arose from their complex systems the consequences of which have come back to bite them. Inevitably, this will happen again and again with ML and AI unless careful and sophisticated (and mandatory) regulation is introduced. To think otherwise would be foolhardy in the extreme.<p>It's clear to many that these 'geniuses' of Big Tech would have been fully cognizant of and understood how new physical properties often emerge from complex systems that are not foreseen from just examining their less complex building blocks. Moreover, similar but metaphysical processes evolve in human minds when they encounter complex systems. For instance, examining fine architecture brings an aesthetic experience to humans that no examination of a brick to the nth degree reveals. Therefore, there can be little if any excuse for Zuckerberg and his cronies for not anticipating in advance emergent human problems (such as those that have arisen from the Cambridge Analytica fiasco).<p>When in 1847 Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero* invented nitroglycerine and immediately perceived its extreme dangers he became so scared and concerned about what he'd actually done that he kept the fact secret for over a year. However, unlike Sobrero who clearly had ethics on his side, the likes of Zuckerberg et al never gave any serious consideration of the consequences of their 'inventions'. As day follows night, they were expecting human problems but they simply ignored them until it was too late. Their lack of concern for humans—the hands that actually feed them—is palpable in the extreme; ethically and morally they're bankrupt.<p>As history illustrates yet again, we're now well past the point where it's safe to leave extremely powerful technologies in the hands of political novices who possess so precious few ethics—or whose few ethics are easily trumped on by their zealotry for certain technological fixes and or financial objectives. The fact that they may be the inventors or owners of newer technologies such as Facebook is irrelevant; what matters first and paramount is what is best for the citizenry and society at large.<p>The Google, Facebook et al cases ought to have been a non sequitur from the very beginning as the general will of the populus should have nailed them dead from the outset but it never happened for many reasons, including the highly addictive properties that Big Tech deliberately designed into their pernicious technologies. Tragically, over the past 40-50 years or so, many traditional ethical values which would have put the kibosh on these Tech Giants long before they'd gotten started have largely evaporated as our societies have become more homogeneous and international—nowadays, the lowest common ethical denominator is just that—pretty low.<p>Given that societies are still struggling with very basic ethical issues such as withering of our hard-fought democratic processes, rise of totalitarian power from both governments and Tech Giants then we're not even at ground level when it comes to solving the ethics of ML and AI. For starters, there are serious cultural differences (hence little or no agreement) over how to resolve the infamous trolley car/moral dilemma problem‡. At present, it is abundantly clear the various societies of an international world are not able reach a common worldview or consensus on this conceptual problem let alone a specific ML/AI incarnation thereof, consequentially we have precious little hope for solving even greater moral and ethical dilemmas that undoubtedly will be created by these fast-advancing technologies.<p>It seems to me very first steps must be taken to forge a common moral and ethical consensus for humankind. We need to first begin with the easiest problems to agree upon such as the inviolability of human life and then work upwards. Expect this to take a long time and it will. Of course, the huge dilemma is how to hold technologists and technocrats sans ethics (and common sense) at bay whilst various consensuses are being reached.<p>I am strongly of the opinion that (as I was fortunate enough to experience), we should begin by ensuring that core training for all engineers, scientists, technologists and technocrats—and for that matter, politicians—also include compulsory training in key philosophical subjects, especially ethics, moral philosophy and formal logic as well as basic/essential political science (the study of government).<p>I'm realistic enough to realise that despite such ethical studies being both core and compulsory, there is every that they will only have a minor impact in changing human nature if anything at all (at least in the beginning). Nevertheless their compulsory nature will achieve one major objective which is that every engineer, scientist and technologist and technocrat will be forced to learn the essentials of morals and ethics as they should be practiced in our increasingly technological societies.<p>Thus when their technologies go belly-up and damage both societies and people lives, with compulsory training in ethics under their belts, the Zuckerbergs of this world will no longer be able to claim ignorance as an excuse for their negligence, they will not be able to say that they 'did not know' or that 'we never considered that outcome'. The only likely excuse that they'll have left to argue is that of 'force majeure'—and it'd had better be a pretty good instance thereof or they'll be toast. …And good riddance.<p>Good effort George, keep the pressure up.<p>_____________<p>† As many will be aware, the uncomplicated definition of 'metaphysics' is 'above and beyond physics', that's to say ontological a priori deductive concepts of existence, of being, of becoming, reality etc. As far as Physics is concerned, metaphysics deals with ethereal, intangible concepts that are inconsequential to its Laws but nevertheless they're key to human existence as we know it, what it is to be human, our values, beliefs and ethics are metaphysical.<p>‡ The Moral Machine experiment , Nature, vol. 563, pp59-64, 2018-10-24 <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0637-6" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0637-6</a> Especially note graphs in Fig. 3: 'Country-level clusters'.<p>* Incidentally, Alfred Nobel was a student of chemist Ascanio Sobrero.<p>___ |
Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Events on Linux? | Very interesting, in a different context I had to tackle a pretty similar problem with Redtamarin [0]<p>Traditionally under the CLI you will manage key input wih a readline() command or something similar to kbhit() and depending on your needs you'll use getchar() then track if either a CR or LF is entered for the "end of command", also EOF.<p>This is blocking, so nothing else can happen, and depending on how you do it, you can only read single byte chars and not mutlibyte chars (like CJK input)<p>something like<p><pre><code> while( run )
{
i=kbhit();
if( i != 0 )
{
key = String.fromCharCode( getchar() );
if( (key == "\n") || (key == "\r") )
{
run = false;
}
else
{
buffer += key;
}
i = 0;
}
}
</code></pre>
another way to do it<p><pre><code> while( run )
{
b = fgetc( stdin );
if( b == EOF )
{
if( kbuffer.length == 0 )
{
return null;
}
run = false;
}
else if( b == LF )
{
run = false;
}
else
{
kbuffer.writeByte( b );
}
}
</code></pre>
which has 2 greats advantages, being able to read multiple bytes input (thanks to fgetc() which read the raw byte) and detect EOF (CTRL+D under POSIX, CTRL+Z under WIN32), but still blocking forever, using fgetc() the detection of EOF is done automatically for you (while getchar() getc() etc. do not detect that EOF)<p>now because Redtamarin is based on AVM2 and AS3, there is one part of the API which try to reimplement the Flash API with such things like KeyboardEvent that should be able to be non-blocking but still for a CLI environment<p>That KeyboardEvent should detect keyUp or keyDown but yeah it is hard to detect and if you try to do that for multipel platforms liek Windows / macOS / Linux it gets nigthmarish<p>In a little experiment [1] I found out you can do "stupid things" that actually work, like spawning a child worker (AVM2 uses pthread), blocking on the user input (like above) and then send back a message to your main worker and so receive a "key event", all that allow to listen for input asynchronously<p>But then, what about making the difference between keyUp and keyDown ?
I decided to ignore the keyUp because in fact it does not really matters on the CLI or I least I don't see any use to it, for a GUI yes I can see the use cases, but for a CLI? not so much<p>Purely on the CLI (no X Server) you don't really listen for key events you read the stdin stream,
the only special events are signals like SIGINT SIGHUP etc. or special kind of signals like EOF.<p>The other things you can alterate is the buffering of that stdin and the raw mode/cooked mode and echo off/on.<p>So for a use case like navigating something using the 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' keys you just need to go async to listen for chars input (which key is pressed) and probably a mix of timeout on the last key pressed and a "diff" between the "prev key" and "last key".<p>If last key pressed is 'w' then go up, if you keep receiving a 'w' key you keep going up,
if prev key was 'w' and the last key is different you change direction.<p>And to detect when to stop to go up if last key pressed was 'w' you just keep the time when this key was pressed, if 1 second elapsed and no more key events are received you stop going up, ergo you don't need to detect keyUp, but maybe I'm missing something.<p><pre><code> [0]: https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
[1]: https://twitter.com/redtamarin/status/900794336031510530</code></pre> |
If San Francisco is so great, why is everyone I love leaving? | She says the ones coming in to California <i>"...flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds"</i> while the ones leaving <i>"...leave their families and communities behind on the chance they will, ironically, strike gold."</i><p>In other words they are the same. In both cases they're de-prioritizing more traditional values (home, family, friends, community) to pursue wealth and fortune. To put it bluntly and somewhat negatively (although I'll make a disclaimer in a sec), they're coming for greed, and they're leaving for greed. There's no contradiction.<p>Here's that disclaimer and a bit of a tangent: Greed has a good side, like Gordon Gekko's speech in the ancient movie Wall Street -- "Greed is good. Greed works." Basically greed is just a thing; the desire for more ___. And keep in mind that all things have dual nature dark/light just like the yin/yang symbol shows. Dark and light are not only coiled intimately around each other, but there is also a spot of the one inside the very heart of the other. It's really a brilliant piece of symbology and a good reminder about the world, that participants in fruitless and polarized political debates would do well to pay attention to. (Though nobody wants to hear there's as much evil in them as in their opponents, or that there's as much good in their opponents as themselves... especially when it's true.)<p>Anyway, with that in mind, you can state something like "Steve Jobs was greedy" and see what a perfect statement it is. It captures both sides. But yeah so in that case let's not fail to call out the aspects of the Silicon Valley "dream" that are inherently materialistic. Or opportunistic, might be a better word. Should we really be surprised that such a place, through its own success, begins to crowd out other uses/priorities/values including both traditional ones (home, family) and non-traditional-but-non-materialistic ones (art)?<p>Also what of these other towns where life is cheaper? They are filled with people who stayed put, who chose "home and family" above "gold and glory." Granted some of them had the <i>luxury of choosing</i> let's say "being an artist" because the town is cheap enough to do so. Others had <i>no choice</i> but to be pretty-much without gold or glory because of a general dearth of opportunity. But don't let either one of those things distract you: People in these places, especially people who grew up there, value the things they value. I'd imagine you'd find "home and family" are ranked as higher priorities, as well as "creativity," while "fame and fortune" would be ranked lower. Materialism and opportunism would be lower. Restlessness, shallowness all would be lower. If you could measure things like that.<p>So again, should we be surprised that when people steeped in the Silicon Valley go-go-get-'em environment -- either the ones who already traded "home" for "success" once in order to go there, or the ones who, like the author's friend, are doing it for the first time -- land in those other places, and end up standing out unwelcomely like the proverbial sore thumb? Try to blend in(0) and you might find less "hate." The "angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere" aren't pissed because they think you're rich snobs (though those do stand out more, in part because of their disproportionate ability to influence the actual physical architecture of a place, more on that in a minute); they're mad because by virtue of your very relocations, you display a verifiable history of being at least greedy/opportunistic enough (again, in both good/bad senses) to do so in the first place, and of embracing the values the Valley/Bay is famous for, and of actively disdaining the (apparently now contrary) values these people adhere to, which are ironically the ones whose loss is being lamented in this piece.<p>(0) I shouldn't have said "blend in." "Blending in" sounds too much like fascism. "Harmonize" would be better. Because like people in a band, you might all be playing different instruments and parts, but you sort of have to be playing the same song, don't you.<p>Architecture provides a good metaphor here. An ostentatious new ultra-modern house that makes no effort whatsoever to harmonize with the surrounding architecture -- there are now plenty of those in these towns. If you say you don't like them, people will disingenuously say it's because you're an ass-backwards hick who hates modernity, but that's not the reason. It's because it's artless, jarring and tone-deaf, like someone who joins a band while it's playing and starts playing a different song. |
Ask HN: How do you work with complete beginners? | About a decade ago, while working for a large a multinational headquartered in Silicon Valley, I had the wonderful experience of working with a bunch of interns; an experience I believe to be very relevant to your current challenge. Working with junior employees, irrespective of their area, can be an extremely rewarding experience, both for yourself as well as for the new hires.<p>In my case, the interns were made available due to a direct agreement between my employer and a nearby university (SCU). This reduced the costs of an intern, from a budgetary perspective, to zero. This was significant, imho, because most of colleagues who were assigned interns, considered their value to be equal to their costs, which I believe was a grave mistake. I am mentioning this to further qualify my personal experience.<p>Regardless, even though from a budgetary perspective, the interns were 'cheap labor' I never considered them as such. From my perspective, I had an obligation towards them. My job, with respect to their 1 year internship, was to teach them how to be a professional. The better I was at my job, the more valuable they would be to me and to my company. This was in strong contrast to how my colleagues approached the interns assigned to them. Suffice to say that within months, most interns ended up under my care.<p>Now - to finally answer your question; I developed a particular approach to educating the interns. Briefly summarized, these were the steps:<p>(btw: always try to refer to a framework to aid communication, as you can see below)<p>1. Teach your new hires how to communicate. It is impossible to stress how important this step is. The framework I used was based on a training I had taken my myself and is called SCIPAB. "Situation Complication Implication - Position Action Benefit". What this basically means is, whenever they communication they need to tell what they are talking about (Situation), what the issue is that is making things difficult (complication), why that issue is important (implication), what they think about it (Position), what they think I (or they) should do about it (Action), and why that action will make everything better (Benefit). It helps if you know this framework.
I made them leave me voicemail messages (max 2 sentences) daily for about two weeks training them on how to communicate to me. The benefit to me was that they could communicate efficiently with me.<p>2. Further I taught them what it meant to be a team member. Group projects at university are a terrible way to prepare people to work in professional teams. I used the Belbin team roles framework to discuss this with them.<p>3. As the final portion of their initial training, I explained to them the different emotional stages they should expect to experience at work. Elation (at getting the job), Fear (not knowing what is expected, nor how to be successful - fear of failing / impostor syndrome), Depression (finally figuring out what is expected, but struggling to keep one's head above water), Confidence (finally knowing what's expected and how to achieve/exceed expectations. I always added that as soon as they reach the confidence level, I'd immediately 'promote' them so they'd go through the cycle again.<p>4. On the first or second day they started, I warned them that I would set them up for failure. Even though I told them in advance that it would happen, it still took them by surprise. You have to make your junior employees fail. Failure is a part of life, it is part of one's career. You, as their mentor or manager, have to create an opportunity for them to fail as part of their training. Giving them an opportunity to fail in an environment you control (a failure which does not negatively impact their careers) will allow them to experience the emotions associated with failure and give them the opportunity on learning how to deal with those emotions constructively.<p>5. As a final point, I had the tendency of implicitly trusting my intern's work. For example, a new intern had joined my team less than three weeks ago. I had gone through the first three steps above and had asked him to prepare a document for me. He had sent me a draft of the document via email and I called him, asking him if the document was ready for review. When he answered 'Yes,' which, of course, it wasn't (the intern was kid - what did he know, right?!) I immediately (and without proof reading) forwarded the document the cross-company team leading my project. The people on that team were of a sufficient level that the interns (and most others on my team) would fear their judgment. Now, my intern (as I expected and I eventually confirmed with others in my team) freaked out completely. Though, in his mind, I ended up with the proverbial egg on my face, from that day forward, he always made sure that whatever document he sent me was either ready for scrutiny, or he would specifically review it with me prior to sending me a copy.<p>This last point, though it seems added as an afterthought, is truly vital. Your employees will deliver work to the level of trust you give them. If you always insist on reviewing their work, they will give you a product in need of review. If you show them you trust their work, they will make sure that they earn that trust. As a side note, if you implicitly trust them and they fail your trust significantly after the first two or three months of employment, you will have to let them go. (This is a difficult thing to learn as a manager. Sometimes it just simply doesn't work out. It benefits neither you, nor your employee, to avoid the inevitable....)<p>This is but a brief summary and is hardly detailed. There are many more steps to making a green hire competent and valuable. Getting them to become valuable members of your team is the most rewarding part of being a manager.<p>Anyway, I wish you all the best on your journey in shaping the new engineers which will make your company great!<p>EDIT: fixing errors in first draft. |
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? | My biggest one would be that about two years ago I read <i>The Goal</i> by Eli Goldratt, who is a physicist-become-industry-consultant.<p>I cannot write a glowing praise of it. On paper, it is an awful book, because it <i>contains</i> a textbook but it is <i>trying to be</i> a novel, and so you have to roll your eye when the main character takes the physicist's advice and suddenly his business life and relationships are all sailing smoothly. Even worse: the mathematical derivation that it provides is performed in a context of a <i>steady demand for named products</i>, a manufacturing context, and so it has almost no value in the software engineering "project context" that most of us face, where everything we produce is essentially different from everything else we produce. To understand that you have to read a sequel called <i>Critical Chain</i>, but that sequel is written even worse: at least with <i>The Goal</i> you could imagine yourself as a brave manager finding "Herbies" and putting them "at the front of the troop." But the sequel is just a textbook that has been artificially forced into anecdotal form.<p>Nevertheless, the points covered by the textbooks <i>deeply</i> changed my view of my purpose at my company and beyond. The essential thesis is that we commit a fallacy: everyone knows the basic accounting knowledge "profit is revenue minus cost" and that the point is to generate more profit, but the fallacy is to assume "there's nothing that I can do to change revenue, that's the job of sales, so the way to maximize profit is to reduce cost, so we will cut costs across the company and then we will be extremely profitable." And it doesn't work! At least, not consistently. What follows is a failure of the greedy algorithm: to improve the efficiency of the system, the greedy algorithm says that you make every single part more efficient, and this is also precisely wrong. The result means that you lose a certain sort of robustness against catastrophe that anyone who has gotten good at backgammon can tell you all about: beginners, who play every move safe, systematically make "good luck" impossible and "bad luck" inevitable: and so they are routinely beaten by the masters who seem to have bad luck all the way until some run of amazing luck causes them to make up their loss and more.<p>As a consequence you create a circumstance where, as Eli puts it, the entire shop has three priority levels: "hot, red hot, and DO IT NOW". You create a circumstance of "end of the month syndrome": you start every month cutting costs and then you end every month throwing away these lofty ideals in order to meet overdue deadlines and save some customers who are getting mighty irate with you.<p>All of these are failures to understand that what we'd now call <i>velocity</i> in fact just <i>is</i> profit. With a bit of help from my econ course back at Cornell, most systems can be described with an "order queue" and each order can be associated with its marginal revenue and a marginal cost. You may have to be creative to uncover these in some contexts, for example marginal revenue for a software team at a mechanical contractor may be "paid for" in some "cost savings" for the contractor as a whole in an informal "this is why we keep you programmers around!" type of situation. Marginal cost, similarly, requires being very careful to say "no, I am not going to count my programmers' time in that, unless I really intend on hiring them specially like contractors for this order and only this order." Generally labor, like the building that you are occupying, is a fixed cost.<p>The velocity of something in the order queue is just the reciprocal of the lead time that it spends in the order queue, and each item in the order queue represents a marginal profit, and your profit comes from creating as much marginal profit as fast as possible -- hence from increasing velocity as much as possible. Furthermore the only reason to prioritize things in that order queue is if you are accepting orders of negative marginal profit and you intend those orders to eventually get cancelled by their recipient -- in the typical case you can mostly ignore all scheduling optimizations and just take orders first-come first-served.<p>So what you're looking at is a sort of physics about how your organization makes money, and about through my second read-through I started to see how that needed to change my own professional behavior and how I could help my companies to do better. And it's just gone beyond my professional life into thinking about how to increase my throughput of things that make me happy, how to increase my throughput in household chores, how to increase my spiritual throughput. There's a sort of nice ubiquity to any sort of physics. |
Ask HN: How are you getting through (and back from) burning out? | > places a lot of self-worth in the quality of his work ...<p>I felt <i>exactly</i> the same way, but over the years I've learned that it's a little more complicated for me. For context, I'm a Senior (Blah Blah Blah) ... 2 decades making stuff with code.<p>I place a lot of <i>demands</i> on myself regarding the <i>quality</i> of my work.<p>I place a lot of my own self-worth on the <i>value</i> of my work.<p>Burnout happens when my work has no value (to me and/or anyone else) any longer. This can be for many reasons, but it's typically because I've recognized that the thing that I'm working on either serves no good purpose, or simply serves no purpose at all. Less frequently, it's because I've reached the end of what I can do/learn -- i.e. that rare occasion where you can go to your boss and say "I'm done, I've finished <i>all</i> of my work" and you literally mean it. It runs. There are no more features. Yeah, I can refactor it another hundred times, but there's literally no reason for me to be here any longer unless I want to make-work myself[0] into a new reason for being here like I did the last 30-or-so times.<p>On the <i>demand</i> side -- I can be a bit nuts about <i>doing things right</i>. I've been around the block -- "best" and "practice" aren't meant ironically -- there are times it is "correct" to break practice in favor of performance, working around a leaky abstractions, actual "correctness" of the outcome requires it. There are times it is "correct" to agonize over architecture details, calculate pricing to the penny/hour/minute). But sometimes that agonizing is being done because if it weren't, there'd be no reason to write the thing in the first place.<p>Your last paragraph hints at something a lot bigger going on in your life, so without details I can't help you terribly well except to say:<p>(1) Don't believe that the situation you've gotten yourself into is unique -- you are not the first to go through it, you won't be the last[0]. There's a solution. It may be "hard" but "hard" problems but I'm guessing if you frequent here you have a few good strategies for breaking down/solving hard problems. If not, well, that's basically the gist of it.<p>(2) Is all of this hinting that maybe "getting through" burning out might be best done by making a change to whatever the "big thing" is that burned you out? For me, I was in a systems job when I wanted to be writing software. So I scripted my job out of existence and writing web-based intranet software became my job (early 00s) within a year and a half.<p>(3) Life, necessarily, involves trials/suffering. My brain is naturally wired up to resist and fear any major change (e.g. changing schools when I was young, changing jobs/careers as an adult) that comes with a large amount of unknowns. The only thing that works for me is remembering that every single other past, major, change -- including the ones that went terribly -- were all somewhere in the range of "<i>far</i> less awful than I thought" to "incredible things that I regret not doing sooner".<p>(4) Be thankful. This is not meant as "First World Shaming" (I have no idea where you live, so there's that!). I can't speak to you, but for me, even at the worst times there has been plenty of good standing right in front of me. At some point I realize I'm actively <i>choosing</i> to be miserable and I either (a) condition myself to focus on everything/everyone that I love in my life or (b) solve whatever it is that is causing me to <i>choose</i> to be miserable. But from that point forward, I actively attack any self-pity with a reminder that I am now actively working toward solving that problem, so I can choose to focus on how great things are going to be when I have completed executing my plan.<p>Nope, it doesn't always work. Most of that advice would fall into things that self-help books peddle pretty hard but who's success is limited to that of the author of the book (and most of the time, probably not even that), but I wish you well and hope you emerge victorious!<p>[0] There was a great song around 07-08 timeframe "This too shall pass" who's music video went viral. I loved it because I was going through some awful stuff at the time and sometimes a simple phrase can calm your mind, but I really appreciated the video. It was a room-sized Goldberg setup that ran the length of the song. The metaphor worked. There are quiet moments, loud moments, and a lot of mess. The worst experience of my entire life made the best part of my life as it is now, possible. |
Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination? | Here's the thing, it's about your value proposition (what are you offering).<p>All things equal, how many days can you work without sleep? How much do you need to get paid to do the job?<p>Age is just a coincidental number that correlates (doesn't cause) to number being able to program for days on end without suffering increasing consequences, and getting a programming job for $15 / hr not being suitable to handle a mortgage, truck payment, kids braces, and the things that come with the higher age number.<p>So, if you are starting out at 40 and someone is competing for a beginner job at 18, they are going to be the obvious choice because 1) they are typically more of an open book, and 2) you can pay them $15 / hr to get the same work that you would need to charge $40/hr to do.<p>That being said. The other side of it is if you have been programming since you were 7 and are now 42 with 20 solid years of professional experience competing with Joe Youngster who wrote his first line of code last year and has been to a programming boot camp.<p>Part of the issues are that you still have the stigma of 1) not being able to sacrifice time/sleep for code, 2) are more expensive.<p>Both of which are accurate.<p>However, if you are competing for a job that an 18 year old qualifies for after 20 years of experience, something is amiss.<p>I've seen this MANY times and am guilty of it myself, where a person will spend years spinning their wheels and not actually increasing their skills. It happens to a lot of people. You could get the same year of experience 20 times over (there was a good article written about that, good read, don't have the link handy). So "20 years of experience" boils down to 1 year of experience that you have practiced 20 times over.<p>After 20 years, younger programmers should not be able to compete with you. Not because they can't write code as well as you. It has nothing to do with that.<p>But the experience should have taught you and made second-nature all the design patterns, all the best practices, all the security tricks, all the devops.<p>An 18 yo can code, but they can't build a palace out of code yet (and if they can, they are typically swept up quickly). It takes years to go from knowing how to lay a brick to how to design a brick building to never crumble even if someone is beating it with a fallen tree.<p>While age descrimination exists (the concept of a senior developer is iffy sometimes), and I experienced it for the first time last year when someone said "no thanks" and hung up when they asked how any years experience I have; it doesn't exist when you are actually shooting for jobs that require 20 legitimate years of experience.<p>Some programmers settle back knowing they could code the world, but don't actually do it. Or code something twice as fast. Or 5 times as solid. Or with 567% less bugs.<p>What makes the 20 year experience you better than the 19 year experience you?<p>If you cannot sell that one year of difference, then it's not age discrimination, it's skill discrimination.<p>And to answer your actual questions.... :-D<p>What is your stack: After 21 years, I've work in .Net/Java/Node.js/LAMP(erl&HP) stacks plus tinkered with others. Now I do application security.<p>How have you gotten around age discrimination: When I've been discriminated against, I feel like I dodged a bullet, because who would want to work with / for someone that judges the content of a book by the wear of the spine?<p>How do you suss out whether a company is right for you? I focus on team and personal questions when I interview a company. What's the team culture, do they support members teaching each other, do they foster speaking at conferences, etc. The more information flow between developers and the industry the better, generally. That indicates a supportive culture rather than a competitive culture. Ask to speak to people you will be working with. "Their references".<p>I ask personal questions of interviewers. What is their next skill they are going to work on? What was the last issue they tackled that really taught them something new? Do they seem themselves with this company in 10 years? What was the last conference they attended? Was that on their own time? When was the last time they had an opportunity to speak at a conference?<p>Don't worry about getting into personal questions relating to their job.<p>I've found that tells me more (not necessarily their answers, but also how they answer) about the culture than the standard shpiels.<p>It's ALL about culture. A crap boss and crap co-workers will never be made for with good pay or high-skills in the long run. |
Python exceptions considered an anti-pattern | Lets all agree that it is impossible to write code that will never have an unexpected outcome. Imagine that we somehow write a function that is totally bullet-proof. It can't fail, it will always do precisely what it was intended to do. Further, lets say whenever we run this function we run it on N computers and take the consensus result if any of the computers disagree. No matter how large N is, if we run the function enough times eventually we will get a majority of the computers to agree, return the same result, and that result will be wrong. Whether it's from cosmic rays resetting bits in memory, or multiple cosmic ray strikes resetting multiple bits and thus defeating ECC, sooner or later things will break no matter what you do. Even if you shield all the computers with 5 meters of pre-nuclear age lead, eventually it will break.<p>The point is that it is just not possible to get to perfect reliability. Your actual reliability is always going to be less than 100%. You can invest money and effort to get closer to 100%, but obviously you are going to get diminishing returns.<p>The correct analysis is to decide where the optimal trade-off is between investing in reliability and the return on that investment.<p>Example 1: You are calling a web service that checks the weather. The service might be down. If it is down you wait a few seconds and try it again. The 'cost' of it being down is that a user doesn't see the current weather. Is it worthwhile to carefully try to determine whether the error when calling the service is due to a server returning a 500 status code versus invalid json?<p>No, it's not worth it. Either way the client can't use the response. In fact, it doesn't matter what causes the exception, since anything that goes wrong can't be corrected by the client. Whether it's bad json, a network failure, dns failure, the server is being rebooted, the webserver is misconfigured, or the device is in airplane mode, the resolution is always the same, wait and try again in a few seconds. Exceptions work pretty much ideally in this case, you only have to code the 'happy' path and handle all exceptions the same way generically.<p>Example 2: You are writing code to update a database containing financial transactions. If something goes wrong in an unexpected way you need to make sure the financial data isn't updated or left partially updated.<p>Again, you don't care about unexpected exceptions. For failures you expect and are coding to work around them, possibly by catching the generic exception where it happens deep in the call stack, and then raising your own exception class which properly identifies the error and contains the context necessary to perform the recovery. For example, if you need to send an email via receipt for the transaction, you call some function which formats and sends the email. That function fails due to the email server being unreachable. The network exception is caught and an EmailCantBeSent exception is raised with the relevant details in it (the user_id you were emailing, the transaction_id the email is for). The resolution is to log a critical error and insert a record to the database with the relevant details of the email so that someone can make sure it is sent later. Then it continues with the transaction. If something unexpected happens the database transaction is never committed.<p>My point is that there are two kinds of exceptions you run into, the ones you are being careful to trap and resolve as part of your applications design, and the ones that you aren't trying to resolve and so result in just a generic 'this failed' situation.<p>So finally getting back to finding the optimal tradeoff between investment to improve reliability and payback on that investment, you just need to make sure your generic failures are rare enough that you aren't pushed far from that optimal point, which is almost always going to be the case, even if you basically don't ever handle any exceptions and only code for the happy path. Obviously there are tons of counter-examples and sometimes you need to make sure things work even when something goes wrong (if you are working on an autopilot you will require much higher reliability and so much more careful planning to reach it compared to a twitter client, where you just need to not lose what the person typed).<p>Ok that's a lot longer than I intended.<p>TLDR; If you do any kind of analysis on why code fails and what you should do about that, you quickly realize that this library doesn't help at all. This library isn't even bad, the problem it is meant to solve is not well posed. |
Wondering about the link between intelligence and meaning | In the common parlance, it is often said that power corrupts, but this generally applies to people who are personally unstable and spiritually undisciplined, and so once they escape the corset of social obligation, they act out their suppressed inner fantasies with deranged results. The flip side of power is that it teaches a form of compassion, a "tough love," that comes from the necessity of motivating people, because motivating people is both a matter of strict external force and gentler internal reward. If you're going to lead people into battle or business or a volunteer effort, you need to show them that their task is just and there is no other way, but also make them feel a sense of empowerment and world-remaking importance in their job, so that they see it as not only necessary but beneficient to society and self.<p>People are raw material. They come to you a mixed bag: they have strengths, and weaknesses, and fears as well as ambitions. Most of them do not know how to channel their ambitions, so if not given reason to think otherwise, will become egocentric and either seize power, or disclaim it entirely and retreat into personal worlds of amusements and fetishes. On the other hand, if their ambitions are given a clear path and a reason to exist, they can exponentially increase their productivity and acumen simply by the fact of being inspired toward their task. Among other things, this explains how throughout history small groups of men and women have changed the world radically, and how sometimes a smaller army or business can crucify its competitors: its people are more focused and believe in their task more than the opposition.<p>Although amplified by the modern world, throughout history most people have spent their day to day existence in a state of slight depression. The simplest reason for this is that very few of us get to live a life where we are a constant focus of attention, and so we labor mostly unknown except to a few close friends and our families, whose praise means a lot to us, yet, we would prefer to be more widely influential. Further, because life is a long and winding road in which it is necessary to make errors in order to learn the foundations of successes, all of us will have some failings and embarassments lurking in the past. We prefer not to mention them in public, but whenever we consider our next move, doubt arises in the form of these past memories, much like beating a dog with a stick when it soils the carpet will convince it in the future to remember pain and associate it with that act. Our own histories literally condition us to depression.<p>What amplifies this depression in the modern time is the sheer size of our society, and its general course downward, which even the dumbest among us seem to have noticed. We notice such things on a subliminal level more than an articulated one, since to understand the situation in structure and words requires knowing more of it than most lives will see let alone analyze. Since our society is huge, and seems so far beyond our control or even understanding that it is inexorably going to do what it does, most are slightly depressed by their lack of influence on changing a worsening situation. Among the intelligent, it is recognized that masses of morons will undo whatever they achieve, or worse, turn it into a dumbed-down version of itself, missing meaning but preserving appearance. This keeps even the best among us depressed.<p>The catalyst of change for this situation can be a seemingly miniscule change in belief. People now believe they cannot change themselves or the world, and that things will continue as they have been; if given the knowledge that not only are things invisibly changing, but that the future favors this change, and that they can be the implements of such alteration, people will become inspired and find belief in the future. The same energy that fuels their depression can propel their hard work and brilliant invention in remaking the world. Another way to view this is that depression is the result of one's energy having no outlet, thus it works against the individual by creating internal chaos. Give people an outlet that they believe will have positive results, and they will move the world. It is for this reason that stubborn assholes such as this writer believe that as has happened in the past, a small group of determined people will change our world yet again. People of the world, your time is coming.<p>And time is on our side. Every day we grow stronger and more disciplined, the errors of society bear it and its lackeys further into oblivion, crushing them under the weight of a design which is doomed by its own contradictions to failure. Each day that we do not give in and do not parrot their rhetoric, ours is seen more clearly by others, and more respected. And with each passing day, more of the failures of our current civilization come to light, and more people look for alternate answers, perhaps not to act on directly but to support covertly or simply as vessels for their hope of a better future. When people become inspired, they gain a nearly godlike status in their ability to think clearly, act decisively, and make each choice correctly the first time. In this state, the errors and stumbling confusion that hampers us in daily life is minimized, and replaced with a state of pure function that comes of a lack of spiritual doubt about one's course. People of earth, your fortunes are changing.<p>If you've got a modicum of intelligence, you are probably depressed, and you were probably born depressed: society is against you, as it wants to dumb down every aspect of its function to the point where you will be a misfit and your best efforts will not be appreciated even when successful. You are surrounded by idiots, and thanks to democracy and consumerism and popularity, they do have greater power than you - for now. You have no faith in the rotted process of our society, or its calcified judgment, or even life itself, perhaps, for it has delivered you to this state. Yet this is changing, and the same force of life - call it nature, God, or chance; your pick - has brought this cycle toward the beginnings of a close. You must have faith in the process of living and the change it can bring, because at that point, you can see yourself as an agent of this change. As a wise man once said, "I don't know if what I'm doing will make things better, but I feel better working toward something in which I believe." That outlook requires leaving behind the comfort of feeling you cannot change anything, so contenting yourself with distractions like television, drugs, novelty music and social pressures.<p>We live in a world of a lack of absolutes. We cannot "prove" what we're doing is right any more than those who oppose us can, but we can make a firm stand with statements of personal experience and wisdom such as "I prefer" and "I believe." |
Classic Mathematics Books for Lifelong Learners | Some suggestions, aiming for books that will teach you some interesting math rather than teach you <i>about</i> some interesting math like most of the books on that list do (except for "Proofs From the Book" and "What is Mathematics?", which would be on my list below if they weren't already in the submitted list). The following range all over the place in prerequisites, from things you could probably do with just middle school algebra to things that probably need early college level.<p>"Challenging Mathematical Problems with Elementary Solutions" by Yaglom and Yaglom, Volume 1 and 2.<p>Volume 1 contains 100 problems from probability and combinatorics. Volume 2 contains 74 problems from a variety of areas including points and lines, lattices of points in the plane, topology, convex polygons, distribution of objects, nondecimal counting, theory of primes. Complete solutions are included for each problems, as well as hints.<p>Available from Dover so relatively inexpensive but good quality. Here are the Dover links, but of course they are available from Amazon and the other usual places. I'm linking to Dover because that will have the most complete description.<p><a href="http://store.doverpublications.com/0486655369.html" rel="nofollow">http://store.doverpublications.com/0486655369.html</a><p><a href="http://store.doverpublications.com/0486655377.html" rel="nofollow">http://store.doverpublications.com/0486655377.html</a><p>----------------------------------------<p>"Three Pearls of Number Theory" by Khinchin. One of Khinchin's former students was seriously wounded in WWII, and to pass the time during his long recovery in the hospital he wrote to his old professor and asked if he had anything mathematical to study to pass the time.<p>Khinchin wrote back with three problems in elementary number theory that had recently been solved by people who were not a "great number theorist". Khinchin gave his former student the proofs along with guidance, examples, clarifications, and notes to help understand them.<p>Dover link: <a href="http://store.doverpublications.com/0486400263.html" rel="nofollow">http://store.doverpublications.com/0486400263.html</a><p>Review at MAA: <a href="https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/three-pearls-of-number-theory" rel="nofollow">https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/three-pearls-of-number...</a><p>----------------------------------------<p>"The Enjoyment of Math" by Rademacher and Toeplitz. The MAA review has a good summary:<p>> This is a serious math book that has minimal prerequisites: geometry and college algebra, but no trig or calculus. It contains 28 largely independent chapters that solve a variety of famous and difficult math problems, mostly in the areas of plane geometry and number theory. The problems include: Fermat’s last theorem for exponent 4, unique factorization in number fields, a number of geometrical maximization problems including several versions of the isoperimetric problem, some transfinite numbers, the 5-color map coloring theorem, and the arithmetic mean - geometric mean inequality. There’s no analysis per se in the book, but several topics depend on the analytic ideas of continuity and variation.<p>> This book was first published in German in 1930 and in English in 1957 as The Enjoyment of Mathematics, and is still in print today in both languages. This implies that there is still an audience for it, but it is hard to imagine exactly what this audience is. The book was developed out of a series of public lectures and was intended as a “popular math” book. While it is very clear and well-written, the reasoning in all the chapters is very intricate (especially in the geometric problems), and the book is much more difficult than anything that appears in popular math books being written today. It’s also too difficult for a math appreciation text. The modern (2000) Preface to the German edition suggests that the book is suited for bright high-school students who are hungry for learning, and maybe this is its real audience today<p><a href="https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/the-enjoyment-of-math" rel="nofollow">https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/the-enjoyment-of-math</a><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DMWX5FC/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DMWX5FC/</a><p>----------------------------------------<p>Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library is a whole series of books described thusly at the AMS site:<p>> Featuring fresh approaches and broad coverage of topics especially suitable for high school and the first two years of college, the volumes in this series are an excellent source of enrichment material for teachers and students. Good mathematical reading with lively exposition.<p><a href="https://bookstore.ams.org/nml" rel="nofollow">https://bookstore.ams.org/nml</a><p>I read "Ingenuity in Mathematics" by Honsberger in high school and it was good. Kind of like "The Enjoyment of Mathematics" but a lot easier.<p>A lot of books in this series can be good stepping stones to more advances books. For example, Olds "Continued Fractions" could be a reasonable read before then reading Khinchin's "Continued Fractions". The latter is available from Dover and is about 1/3 the price of the Olds book, so personally I'd start with Khinchin, and if it turns out a simpler intro is needed then I'd get Olds.<p>This is a good point to toss in a note about Dover. They like to take older books, often out of print, get the rights to them, and publish a relatively inexpensive but high quality paperback edition. The difficulty level ranges from classic elementary intro texts to advanced material for practicing mathematicians. (And not just math...they do this for physics, chemistry, and various other fields of science and engineering).<p>If you are interested on some math topic and want a book on it, it is usually a good idea to have a look at the Dover catalog to see if they have something about that at the level you are looking for.<p>----------------------------------------<p>"A Book of Abstract Algebra" by Pinter, available as a Dover edition.<p><a href="http://store.doverpublications.com/0486474178.html" rel="nofollow">http://store.doverpublications.com/0486474178.html</a><p>The usual undergraduate abstract algebra stuff: groups, rings, fields, the impossibility of the classic Greek duplicating the cube and trisecting the angle problem, Galois theory and solvability by radicals.<p>What sets this book apart is that although it is rigorous and proves nearly everything, it takes things in smaller steps than a lot of other books, and has a lot of well chosen exercises that further cement the material, often by applying it to some interesting practical area. The exercises are grouped into sections, each of which focuses on a particular concept from the chapter, or develops and proves interesting things. One or two exercises from each of these sections usually has a solution given.<p>Only about $12 at Amazon. If you haven't done much proof-based math before this could be a good first proof-based book. |
We Lost Our Ability to Mend | I'm very surprised and pleased at both the number of responses and the actual content of those responses (given it was posted on Hacker News). It tells me several things, first that people are actually concerned by the waste created by our throwaway society especially so when the items being thrown away are otherwise serviceable except for minor faults, and second there's still an interest in craft—people (some at least) still want to work with their hands.<p>Recently, this has come to the fore with movements such as those pushing the Right to Repair hi-tech proprietary items such as iPhones and John Deere tractor electronics, etc. I wholeheartedly support these movements, for as a society I reckon we need to relearn how to get our hands 'dirty' by doing physical tradie-like things from time to time.<p>No pun intended but there are many threads to this topic so it's hard to know where to begin or how to paraphrase/limit my comments to a reasonable size. Let's start with life skills and a quote from the article: 'There was once a time when every American child was formally taught the basics of living'. Whilst I understand and agree with the reasons given in the article why most of us seem to have lost many basic life skills, I cannot quite fathom how we let the situation degenerate to such an extent.<p>Surely basic life skills are more than important, they are in fact very important. Why? Well there are many reasons why one should become reasonably proficient at acquiring them and do so at an early age as is possible. Essentially it boils down to one's need to be resourceful, especially so when our modern-day 'crutches' either fail or are otherwise not available and we have to improvise—or just generally (as one can do things much more quickly and efficiently after having acquired them). Secondly, the need to acquire basic skills at an early age is important for learning more advanced skills acquired later on in life, as these build on earlier learning (even when the new skills are quite different from the older ones). The fact is that learning new skills as an adult is considerably easier if one already has the basics fully conquered. For me, this truism is borne out of experience.<p>Years ago, I came up with the quip: 'Question: can one become a good practical engineer if one cannot sew one's buttons back on?' Answer: probably not!'. It arose after seeing how impractical and inept some qualified engineers were at doing certain normal day-to-day manual tasks that one would have expected them to already know how to do (as well as have an intrinsic feeling for doing it well). For example, I've seen too many who've little or no feeling for tightening up a screw or nut to the right tension without either stripping the thread or having it too loose. As adults, they had not yet developed a feeling for say the strength of everyday materials or how to work them (clearly this puts them at a disadvantage to those who already have (assuming all else being equal that is). The question is why, as for the most part, they were bright people.<p>When I delved into the matter a little deeper I often found that as kids they had done very little exploration of the mechanical world around them, they had not done things such as building Meccano models, or pulling the lawnmower engine apart, or attempt to fix broken clocks, etc. Seeing how and why things break is an essential skill to learn at a very early age, especially so for engineers, as it fine tunes one's understanding about how things work. As well, one also develops a practical feeling for the strength of various materials and other relevant properties that are not easily learned by simple observation or from just reading textbooks.<p>It's my experience that really good techies are almost invariably good at most of these simple skills and that they acquired the essence of them at a very young age. It seems manual dexterity and concomitant mental agility (one's overall perception of what needed to achieve the task successfully) continually improved throughout their lives—skills they learned whilst young transferred later on to a newer understanding of how to tackle work that is much more complex. (In his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman', physicist Richard Feynman beautifully illustrates how skills learned early on are useful in later life. Feynman was not only a theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner of the first order but also he was extremely adept with mechanical things—skills he'd well honed as a kid (for instance, his exploits at safecracking are well known, so also is his analysis of why Challenger's rocket seals failed).<p>The general loss of craft, trades and various skills in fixing things has had a large negative impact on the population as a whole. It has meant that essentially the workforce has become deskilled in many areas (and consequently so has the whole population). Combine this with the fact that nowadays corporations are making much more use of proprietary (and increasingly secret) technologies and we have the makings of a large social problem. For starters, there is 'new' unemployment amongst once-skilled workers, and given the fact that many workers, especially males, often are much happier when working or creating things with their hands and who now have been deprived from making their living in this way, has meant considerable distress for many of them.<p>Whilst this may seem contradictory (given what I've already said), it, nevertheless, is all the more reason that we must re-evaluate and upgrade the importance of developing life skills at a very early age (as today workers need to be both nimble and flexible and to do so they need to acquire such capabilities very early on in their lives).<p>This brings me full circle, as a kid my mother taught me to sew on buttons and do basic repairs to clothes (which I did even though I didn’t much care for it). She strongly insisted that boys also needed to know these skills (and I suspect it was also to save her some work). If I had not learned those skills when very young then the army would have insisted I do so under its instruction not to mention learning all those other irksome dress-code-related tasks upon which armies insist in drilling into poor unfortunate recruits such as ironing, shining boots, putting creases in pants in exactly the right places, etc., etc. (As part of ones larger kit was little repair kit that contained some cloth patches, needles and spare buttons, and we were drilled in the use thereof.)<p>My mother also taught me the basics of knitting, as I was forever getting holes in my sweaters and she expected me to fix them (which I did pretty well because when completed my fixes blended in and weren't very obvious). The important point here is that it doesn't take much skill just to do a reasonable repair. I never got past knitting squares and scarfs but even that meant that I'd acquired sufficient skills to do a decent repair job. Moreover, it's not essential that one has to like leaning such skills nor that of actually doing them. As a male, knitting certainly wasn’t my scene but I'm now glad that I've learned the basics (as it's actually turned out to be quite a useful skill).<p>What my mother didn't teach me was how to use a sewing machine. Nevertheless, I learned the basics anyway on her machine much to her chagrin. It was not long before I was forbidden to use it, as I used it to stitch together cardboard and other strange materials for various projects and models I was working on. (Incidentally, it didn't stop me using it in secret but she had a sixth sense and she always knew and caught me out after me having used it—it seems I could never reset the tension knob exactly to her 'default' settings!) ;-)<p>Was learning the basics of using a sewing machine a useful skill for a nine/ten year old boy to acquire? In the end it certainly was, as I later learned the hard way, which was by that time the next generation of women had arrived they had become sufficiently emancipated to have essentially given up sewing machines altogether; so whenever I asked women in my life to repair my clothes they simply told me to go take a running jump. 'Do it yourself or get new ones' was the new mantra, so I had no choice but to comply.<p>Whilst I can say that using a sewing machine is a task that I certainly don't relish, it nonetheless remains a fact that nowadays it's dead easy for me to do simple repairs to torn clothes, or to use the button-hole attachment to replace or renew buttonholes, or for me to take up jeans by a few inches. |
Show HN: SocialAmnesia-An open source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets | Direct link to release with downloadables: <a href="https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/tag/v1.1.0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/...</a><p>What's new?<p>- Social Amnesia now works fully with reddit and twitter 2FA/MFA (2 Factor Authorization/Multi Factor Authorization). If you have MFA set up you will be taken to a sign on page for reddit to allow Social Amnesia to work properly without having to send a new token every hour. Twitter will have the same login process whether you have MFA set up or not.<p>- I've added information text to the login page of the app so that people will know what the limitations of the API are for reddit and twitter.<p>What is this?<p>I’m excited to release 1.1.0 of my side project, Social Amnesia! This completely free and open source software allows you to wipe out old reddit and twitter posts, comments, tweets, and favorites, automatically and on a schedule. It also allows you to configure certain items to be saved based on configuration options like number of upvotes, favorites, or retweets, whether an item has been gilded, how old an item is, or by specifically whitelisting items you would like to have saved.<p>Who is this for?<p>I assume most of you are wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook (if you even have one), etc. However, I can also imagine many of your friends and family are not. At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is to not use any social media. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say no". What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. This is why I've built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively (instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you).<p>Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work with scary configuration text files) or cost money. I wanted to develop one that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. I believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.<p>Why would you need this?<p>If you've been following the news recently you've probably seen cases of celebrities losing out on big career opportunities because of tweets or other internet posts from their past coming back to haunt them. Kevin Hart and The Oscars and James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are two of the more high profile examples of this recently. Make no mistake, this could happen to anyone, not just high profile individuals. If you are going to tweet, cleaning up your old tweets is one of the best ways to keep a nightmare like this from ruining a potential job opportunity or relationship. Since twitter is mainly focused on current events, and as far as I can tell it's rare for people to look far back in someone's twitter history, this shouldn't effect your day to day interaction with twitter.<p>On the reddit side of things, many people maintain pseudonymous accounts to post in places like /r/sex, /r/politics or /r/trees. The more reddit history you have, the higher chance you have of being doxxed by someone who might comb through your posts to try and scrape together details to de-cloak you and reveal your real identity. Keeping your reddit history clean is a good deterrent from being doxxed.<p>Concerns<p>I've received concerns about this software when I've posted it before. I'll try my best to detail some of my arguments here, but please leave a comment if you have anything to share and I'll do my best to respond to you. One of the main concerns I've heard is from people who've gone back to an old reddit post and there have been deleted comments that might have been useful for them (semi-relevant xkcd: <a href="https://xkcd.com/979/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/979/</a>). I hear you, and to try and combat this I've added some features to this software. The first is a whitelist window, which as far as I know is the only of it's kind in free management software for reddit. Opening this window shows you all of your comments or posts and let's you pick ones to save from deletion. Additionally, when you do go to delete anything, the software will show you every item that will be deleted and ask you to confirm your decision. This software doesn't do anything that isn't possible for a user to do by simply going back through their comments and deleting them.<p>I realize this isn't a complete solution, so I'd recommend using this software only if you use your reddit or twitter accounts for more current events or sensitive topics. If you provide helpful advice online and want to make sure it's preserved, be careful using this.<p>The second concern I've heard is related to backups, archives and having a false sense of privacy around using this software. Obviously I can't delete anything from reddit or twitter's internal servers, and I can't remove something if it's archived somewhere else. And I'm also limited by their APIs (which I detail on the login page of the application). However I've done some research, and backups of reddit and twitter are sparse, incomplete, and often hard to find and access. For a while the library of congress was archiving every tweet out there, but they gave up when that became too difficult a task due to the sheer size of twitter. Unless someone is actively archiving your posts, there is a good chance that deleting a tweet or reddit item will actually remove them from the internet. |
Public protest against Amazon | I had a similar horror story from 2014-2015 Seattle Amazon. But I opted to quit rather than being subjected to further abuse.<p>I had a really bad manager whose name was Maulik Patel. He had the worst attributes you could ask for in a manager. Unsupportive, jaded, and emotionally draining. He kept threatening to fire me but never would...for something like 4 months until I said fuck it and quit. His main reasons were that I wasn't fast enough despite finishing the tickets in my sprints pretty much all the time. He had a vendetta against me for being hired to do the job he couldn't. He had flat files of libraries like jQuery and KnockoutJS and d3 committed into our repo. He used the synchronous ajax call flag to download language files...freezing every page for a quarter of a second. There was no way to upgrade all our libraries or fork them properly without undoing all of his mess.<p>I put us on Bower for web packages and rerolled everything. He was pissed about that. Pissed I fixed his mistakes. He would say things like I am level 4 so I need to pull tickets from the next sprint when I am done with the current sprint. Fundamentally he did not understand what role management had in planning and how to do it properly without antagonizing individual contributors.. Maulik attacked team members including me with qualitatives like slow and fast. He would spread his hands like he was showing a quantity and say you are here but need to <i>here</i> [moves hand higher.]<p>It was his first time as a manager. When I took the job Jeff Grote was actually signed on to be my manager..but Jeff pulled a bait and switch early into my start..sticking Maulik as a middle manager under himself. Coulda all been avoided if Jeff did me proper.<p>When I left I sent an email to the team explaining my grievances which I felt they deserved but which is for sure unprofessional. I probably shoulda went to HR but I had heard bad things about HR at large companies. Couldnt have been worse than not getting severence or unemployment. Live and learn... Care to share any similar stories? Would probably make me feel better to hear how someone else dealt with a bad manager scenario. If not its fine.<p>Here's an email I had sent to Jeff (his manager):<p>Jeff,
I'm coming to you about Maulik's behavior. Literally, it's so bad that even when I come home, or I'm off on weekends, I'm thinking about how to deal with the guy. It's totally unsuitable for job satisfaction. My job satisfaction isn't even reflecting the tickets I do anymore, it's literally tarnished, shit on, by the passive-agressive comments Maulik makes on the regular, he usually sticks a smiley face at the end of his insults as if that makes them less offensive.<p>When I came onboard, the javascript and front-end workflow and ui, and code, were absolute chaos. I am not one to cry over spilled milk. I fixed 90% of it and did not insult Maulik, because I understand that it isnt productive to do so.<p>However, I don't know why Maulik feels the need to stomp on me for what amounts to the smallest kind of things. If you look at my ticket resolving rate, I'm like a speed demon, Ashley can vouch for this. So I'm getting my job done.<p>But either Maulik has a personality or managerial deficit, he is somewhat envious that I am doing a category of task right (front-end) that he only was shoddily able to do. Or he has no idea, is oblivious, and thinks his unelegant and critical behavior is conducive to being a good manager. And it isn't, I can tell you, based on my satisfaction and willingness to do good work. He's going against that with his continued vitriol.<p>For example, this timezone issue. He has 100 other issues to deal with. And he chooses to spend 20 minutes researching and finding a library (Which he may not have found...20 minutes could end up empty handed..) Just so he can trump me.<p>And it's a habit with Maulik. He ended up saying "This kind of reserach is what is expected from an Amazon engineer."<p>All too common for me to talk to him, and then he ends up using corporate culture rhetoric to crap on me. "Andrew, most people don't last long here. A lot of people get fired. Amazon culture, you need to learn it" Intimidation tactics, dismissal of my concerns, and basically abusing the idea of Amazon culture to avoid taking personal responsibility.<p>I really need you to step in here and deal with Maulik. He's a new manager and is showing it. A good manager is supposed to improve the teams efficiency, correct? He's actually making me not want to work, because of the amount of vitriol I get for performing well. It's anti-correlated. It's negative reinforcement. |
The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights | From patio11 on twitter:<p><a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html" rel="nofollow">https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html</a><p>Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.<p>In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.<p>Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")<p>Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.<p>The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.<p>Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.<p>The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have mortal locks on distribution.<p>Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.<p>Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth available on the market at the moment at any price.<p>The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.<p>The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.<p>If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz.<p>Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.<p>The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.<p>There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.<p>Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."<p>Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.<p>Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.<p>Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes.<p>The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you.<p>We don't see most of it every day for the same reason abstractions protect us from having to care about metallurgy while programming.<p>CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke.<p>Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's the ambient level of literacy.<p>Serious people in positions of power eat Thanksgiving dinners, too. Guess what they ask at them.<p>Salaries in the tech industry are up <i>a lot</i> in the last few years, caused by: a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like.<p>Investor money <i>does not</i> pay most salaries.<p>This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation.<p>Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it. |
Is the Insect Apocalypse Upon Us? | I wonder if all these beehives and bee keepers are similar to a bunch of pastoral goats and herders? Almost no control of who puts a beehive somewhere (tragedy of the commons). Those bees then strip all of the surrounding area of flower nectar, leaving nothing for the natural insects, which then die. Bee keepers go all over the US to place their hives and then bring them to California to pollenate the nut trees. Plus the rise in the popularity of honey and the trendiness of having hives for fun.<p>In addition, bees' diets by commercial beekeepers are often supplemented by man-made sugars. To continue the analogy, imagine that there was someplace that really wanted a bunch of goats for two weeks a year to eat up a bunch of plants as a brush clearing method. People get paid a lot to have goats arrive at that location every year. The laws of the country are such that goats are allowed to roam anywhere and eat plants on people land and fences have not been invented yet. You only have to own the land where they come back to at night(the corral). The goat herders try to maximize the size of the herd by feeding the goats a cheap but nutritiously deficient food for most of their calories, but goats have to get some vital vitamins, proteins, and minerals from the stuff they eat in the wild. In fact, over the centuries the goats have evolved so that they can run fast and long away from the corral in the morning, just to get somewhere that has not already been stripped of wild food that they need, burning the calories supplied by the goat herder. The goat eats for a few hours somewhere that is not already over-grazed, and then runs back to the corral.<p>When the goat returns it has a way to tell the other goats where it went to find a good place to eat and the next day hundreds of goats head out to that location to strip it to dirt in one day. Other goats head out somewhat randomly on a dead run to try and find somewhere around that has something to eat.<p>This goat hive can only exist in one place when the grass is sprouting or in places that goats have not been in many years. The goat herders corrals are built on huge trucks so that when they need to move the goats to somewhere else, because the local area is completely stripped, they can just start up the truck and be in a new location 500 miles away in a single day.<p>A disease now starts spreading among the goats. They get shipped around everywhere so it spreads to other herds really fast. The goats are dying at a high rate and no one knows why or how to cure it, but the goats breed pretty fast. The goat herders can keep the number of goats high enough to meet the demand of the companies that need the annual grazing clearing, but only because of the increasing price the companies are willing to pay. This incentivizes more goat herders breeding more goats at a furious rate. The surviving herders are now searching hard for the last places that have not been completely stripped mined of wild food. Never a blade of grass springs from the Earth where a goat is not immediately there to eat it.<p>You can imagine what such a system would do to the wild grazing animal population. Anything wild would never find anything to eat, the predator populations would be huge, gorging on the free roaming goats that the herders don't guard. The herders have no way guarding hundreds of thousands of goats. They could not possibly watch over each one and don't even think about how that might be done.<p>Now add in farmers that grow plants the goats can't eat. They cover huge areas where only a small amount of the wild plants survive that the goats need. Around the farms wild plants still grow, but farms are being consolidated and those edge areas are being eliminated. Some wild animals can eat what the farmers grow, so the farmers develop chemicals that kill the animals that eat their crops. This chemical will also kill goats and gets on the few remaining wild plants the goats eat and poison them too.<p>Now imagine that the goats and wild animals are so small that the herders and other people in society don't really notice them at all. They only start to worry about the goats when there are not enough goats arriving every year to clear out the brush where the annual spring picnic is held. Only after that happens do a few quirky scientists start looking into the problem and notice that these wild animals that have to compete with goats have been dropping in numbers like crazy for quite awhile.<p>Just an analogy, but maybe some truth to it? |
Teaching People to Trade Stocks Is Like Starting Them on Heroin – Munger | This obsession with index funds is getting a little out of hand. Sure for many people buying an index might be a good idea. I myself recommend that many people buy an S&P 500 index. But to criticize all active managers is a little wrong. For one, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger are active managers themselves, you do not see them buying an index fund.<p>Lets think about what happens when you buy the S&P 500 index. This is usually the most recommended index, and the one I recommend too. You basically give your money to own stocks of the 500 biggest publicly listed companies in the US. If a company is big enough and it gets their stock listed on the major markets it usually gets included in the S&P 500. (There are some exceptions but generally this is the way it works). Does that make these companies good investments? Not necessarily. There is a way to get big without being especially good at what you do (through mergers). It is possible that certain companies were very good investments before, had their stock appreciate, got into the S&P 500, had a change of management or experienced a change of end markets, and became bad investments. This is what happened to GE, for example.<p>The theory of indexing says that, yes there will be some companies in the S&P 500 that are not very good, but others will be excellent and it will all even itself out and you will make money in general as the economy grows. But that will only work if there are no secondary effects. If putting all money in indexes becomes the usual course of action for institutions as well as individuals then it would be very easy to exploit this. A company just needs to get large enough to get send to the S&P 500 (again this can be done with mergers and without necessarily being very successful or profitable) and then they get a bunch free money send their way by way of indexing. And if you get a bunch of badly run companies merging together to get into the index, indexing will certainly become a rather money losing proposition.<p>The reason why indexing tends to work and it has worked so far, is that indexers are kind of free riding on active investors. Active investors buy and sell stocks and they thus cause the price to move up and down. The price of the most wanted companies moves up and they get put into the top indexes, where the free riding index investors buy their shares. The active investors do not mind because they were first into the shares, and the free riders just increase the value of their holdings. The free riders do not mind because the active investors in a way pick stocks for them.<p>This all works fine but the whole system relies on there being enough active investors to free ride upon. And if this whole buying indexes trend goes out of hand there might not be.<p>Buffet and Munger have some good cause to criticize active managers. Many of them have not been very good at all. Money management is one of those professions where it is not easy to determine ahead of time where someone is good or bad at it. Even excellent money managers can have a couple of bad years and terrible money managers can get lucky once or twice. Thus, you have to wait several years to see whether someone is actually good at managing money and during that time they actually have to have money to manage. So to even test whether someone is a good money manager requires taking on a lot of risk. And because being a money manager can be so very lucrative and glamorous and because it is so hard to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones the whole field attracts a lot of smooth operators that know how to ape the look and talk of a person the public would expect to be a successful money manager but they do not know how to do it.<p>This is a problem with many other professions that are glamorous but where it is hard to initially tell the good from the bad. These include TV/Movie director, TV/Movie writer, politician, newspaper column writer, artist etc.<p>That being said there are money managers that are undoubtedly very good. Buffet and Munger are themselves a couple of examples. There are many others. Perhaps there aren't enough of them. Perhaps we as an economy are having a problem of not being able to train and recognize able money managers. That may be the case, but that does not mean we should abandon the concept of an active investor. The world actually needs active investors, money managers and asset alocators in general. The dream of simple, cheap and easy passive investing cannot work without them. |
Yelp Fired Manager After He Didn't Take Calls, Check Email 24/7, Lawsuit Claims | The case <a href="https://imgur.com/a/qp57XAP" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/qp57XAP</a><p>COMES NOW PLAINTIFF MARK WEATHERS for causes of action, and alleges as follows:
I. ALLEGATIONS<p>1. Plaintiff Mark Weathers ("Mr. Weathers" or "Plaintiff") resides in California and is a former employee of Defendant Yelp Inc. At all relevant times herein, Mr. Weathers worked for Defendant in San Francisco.<p>2. Defendant Yelp Inc. ("Yelp" or "Defendant") hosts an online database of user-generated reviews of local businesses and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.<p>3. The true names and capacities, whether individual, corporate or otherwise, of DOES 1 through 10 are at this time unknown to Plaintiff, who therefore sues* said Defendants by such fictitious names. Plaintiff will ask leave to amend this complaint for damages to reflect their true names and capacities when* the same have been ascertained. Plaintiff is informed and believes, and thereon alleges, that each of said Defendants is responsible, jointly and severally, for the events and injuries described herein and caused damages thereby as alleged herein.<p>4. Plaintiff is informed and believes, and thereon alleges, that at all times mentioned herein each and every co-Defendant was and is the predecessor-in-interest, successor-in-interest, agent, counselor, employee, servant, partner, franchisee and/or joint venturer of each of other co Defendant, and in doing the actions hereinafter mentioned, was and/or is acting within the scope of its authority within such agency, employment, counseling, service, partnership, franchise and/or joint venture or single enterprise, and with the permission and consent of each co-Defendant. Plaintiff alleges that each of said Defendants is responsible, jointly and severally, for the events and injuries described herein and caused damages thereby to Plaintiff as alleged herein.<p>5. In October of 2016, Yelp offered Mr. Weathers the position of Security Manager starting on November 14, 2016, and reporting to the Head of Security Rick Lee.<p>6. Mr. Weathers' duties included overseeing several site managers located throughout the country. His compensation included an annual salary, an equity award, a relocation bonus, and a benefits package that included health, dental, vision, life insurance, long term disability, and 401(k).<p>7. At all times, Mr. Weathers fulfilled the expectations of his . position. In January of 2018, Yelp increased Mr. Weathers' compensation and granted him stock.<p>8. On Saturday, March 31, 2018, which was Easter weekend, Mr. Lee called Mr. Weathers about an email he had sent the previous night (Good Friday) at 11:49 p.m. Mr. Lee wanted to know why Mr. Weathers had not yet responded to an email. Mr. Weathers indicated that he had not checked his email because it was Easter weekend and he was spending time with his family and attending church services. In fact, Mr. Weathers was attending a church-sponsored event when he answered Mr. Lee's phone call. Mr. Lee was upset that no one, including Mr. Weathers, had responded to an employee's ticket request for after-hours access to Yelp's offices in Phoenix the prior evening after normal business hours. Mr. Lee said Mr. Weathers needed to be responsive, even while he was attending church services.<p>9. At 12:40 p.m. on Easter Sunday, April 1, while Mr. Weathers was attending church services with his family, Mr. Lee emailed Mr. Weathers and the site managers regarding this situation. He instructed Mr. Weathers to contact each of the site managers to find out what had happened with the ticket request and how to prevent the situation from recurring. He demanded that Mr. Weathers provide an "after action review" to him by the close of business the following day, necessitating that Mr. Weathers contact each of his co-workers on Easter Sunday. In addition, Mr. Lee admonished, "Each leader on this email should make a regular practice of checking email and setting cell phones to take inbound calls 24/7/365 ... so that your phone still rings even if you set it to 'do not disturb' mode." Otherwise, he threatened to "make some changes" if employees could not "commit to being attentive to [their] inbound communiques."<p>10. On April 2, Mr. Weathers timely provided the information that Mr. Lee had requested. As part of this information, Mr. Weathers explained to Mr. Lee that, "I made a choice to focus on Easter Weekend (Good Friday, Easter Sunday), a very important weekend for me ... I did not check email as I usually would on other weekends." Mr. Lee responded, "You should be checking emails and vmails/inbound calls every day (regardless of weekend or holiday). I understand that church services likely require you to turn off devices. However, a 12-hour gap of non-checking is not acceptable. (Recall that I worked on an incident for 4 hours on Christmas Eve when my personal priority was to be with my family.)" Mr. Lee also verbally told Mr. Weathers, "I don't care about your PTO, religious holidays, your kids or your birthday. I expect a response to my emails." He made this statement despite knowing that Mr. Weathers is a person of faith who is pursuing a degree in ministry leadership and whose son is severely autistic.<p>11. On April 3, Mr. Weathers approached human resources. He told a human resources representative about the incident that had occurred over Easter weekend, and specifically that Mr. Lee demanded that employees be responsive to work issues even during religious and family commitments. Mr. Weathers also conveyed that his direct reports had expressed concerns about being required to work on Easter Sunday or during paid time off. The human resources representative said she would follow up on this issue. She also suggested that he could include this information as part of his feedback in the manager's survey-a companywide anonymous survey completed by all employees, which he did.<p>12. On May 15, the day after the manager's survey results were published, Mr. Lee met with Mr. Weathers for their quarterly conversation. During this meeting, for the first time, Mr. Lee was critical of Mr. Weathers performance. He accused Mr. Weathers of needing 'recognition." He said that Mr. Weathers' work on a physical security review the previous month had been disappointing, even though at the time, he commended Mr. Weathers for having done a "great" job. When Mr. Weathers pointed this out, Mr. Lee claimed that his earlier positive feedback had been a "miscommunication." Mr. Lee also said that there had been a "ranking meeting" in February of 2018, and that he and Yelp's CFO had ranked Mr. Weathers as "third or fourth" in ''performance and potential." He never mentioned before that such a meeting had taken place, or that supposedly there were issues with Mr. Weathers' performance or career potential. In fact, Mr. Lee previously had been complimentary of Mr. Weathers' performance and told him that the CFO had praised Mr. Weathers for having a "growth mindset." Finally, Mr. Lee said that he did not like Mr. Weathers' response to the situation that had occurred over Easter Weekend-in which Mr. Weathers stated, "I made a choice to focus on Easter Weekend (Good Friday, Easter Sunday), a very important weekend for me ... I did not check email as I usually would on other weekends"-and reiterated that he was not concerned about Mr. Weathers' ::hurch or family obligations.<p>13. After this meeting, Mr. Lee all but stopped communicating with VJr. Weathers and sidelined Mr. Weathers from participating in work matters.<p>14. On May 25, 2018, Mr. Lee and the* human resources *epresentative met with Mr. Weathers. Mr. Lee advised Mr. Weathers that he Nas "not a good fit for this role" and presented him with three options: a performance plan, one month's severance, or termination. Mr. Weathers pointed out that Mr. Lee had previously told Mr. Weathers that "people do not survive [performance plans]." In fact, Mr. Lee said this on numerous occasions about various employees. Mr. Weathers pointed out that, in light of this, a performance improvement plan did not seem like a viable option.<p>15. On May 29, the human resources representative told Mr. Weathers that the company was "concerned" about how Mr. Lee had managed the situation and, therefore, would be investigating whether there was retaliation. She interviewed Mr. Weathers over the next few days, including about Mr. Lee's statements that Mr. Weathers and other employees are required to work during paid time off and regardless of church or family obligations.<p>16. On May 31, 2018, the human resources representative told Mr. Weathers that she had "looked into" the situation but supposedly determined that Mr. Lee had not said anything illegal.<p>17. On June 4, 2018, the human resources representative sent Mr. Weathers a meeting request and said that Mr. Lee wanted to present Mr. Weathers with a list of performance issues. Mr. Weathers asked for a copy of the list in advance, so that he could be prepared for their meeting, but no one provided him with a copy.<p>18. Instead, on June 5, when Mr. Weathers met with the human resources representative, she told him that given the "toxic environment," "it would be better" for Mr. Weathers to leave his employment at Yelp. Yelp terminated Mr. Weathers from his employment effective June 5, 2018.<p>19. Plaintiff timely exhausted his administrative remedies by filing a :harge of discrimination with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing and obtaining a right to sue.<p>20. Defendant's actions were undertaken for improper purposes as alleged above and were willful, oppressive and in conscious disregard of Plaintiff's rights, and were designed and intended to cause and did, in fact, cause Plaintiff to suffer severe emotional distress, pain and suffering, and substantial economic damage and, therefore, justify the awarding of exemplary and punitive damages. |
Ask HN: How Can I Sell My Project? | There's a really hard problem when you're dealing with an online audience of classical musicians + fans/supporters in a social media setting. The problem is that the people who are most knowledgeable and passionate about classical music are mostly the performers, and classical musicians are a terrible demographic for making money. The basic problem is that your most enthusiastic users have no disposable income. The vast majority of classical musicians live a gig-hustle lifestyle + private teaching, and supply <i>far</i> outweighs demand for classical performers and teachers. I did that life for 20+ years and was pretty good at it, but there's just not a lot left over at the end of the day. Full-time salaried positions for classical musicians boil down to low-paying university positions and decently paying professional orchestra positions, and both are extremely hard to get and very limited in quantity. So if you're buyer has any sense, it's going to be hard for them to figure out a business model.<p>That means if you want to sell, you have to pitch the business model. Aside from the actual musicians, you probably have as some part of your user base, classical music supporters. And these people are where the potential money is made. This are two segments. One is the traditional arts supporter: Older (60-65+), white, Democrat, female, tons of disposable income. Your user base is unfortunately not likely to have much of this segment. The next segment you want to look for among your users are people who used to be musicians that have moved on to other, more stable and lucrative careers. That group is disproportionately male, in their mid-30s to mid-40s, left-leaning politically, has disposable income, and is generally pretty eager to spend because they used to be really broke and are typically interested in treating themselves to nice things.<p>That's going to be the bulk of your value proposition if the business model is going to be to monetize your users directly. So I'd try to figure out approximately the size of that demo in your user base. When I worked in the market research industry, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for several orchestras around the U.S. studying their audiences and trying to help them figure out pricing models. That was about 10 years ago, so my data is old. But given the nature of the beast, I doubt they've changed substantially since then.<p>All in all, I think you have a tough proposition for a potential buyer in the sort of traditional, "I have the eyeballs, now show me the money." kind of model. But I would encourage you to maybe consider some other options.<p>As I said before, there is an entire class of people--basically the older, white, liberal aristocracy--who support classical music and the arts almost out of a sense of class obligation. You (or a potential buyer who was motivated) could try to find an investor willing to fund this project at a very moderate rate of return as a sort-of "break-even + a little extra" investment that also promotes the arts. Your business model there would eschew advertising because it's not really going to give you much of anything as income anyway and just annoy your users. Instead, you'd need to find some value in premium features such that you could charge a subscription for them.<p>Along similar lines, this could be spun off into a non-profit with a mission to spread the beauty and joy of classical music through social technology. You (or again, buyer) might have a lot more success here, especially if there are existing connections with the donor community for classical music.<p>The last idea before I switch gears is that you might be able to sell directly to an Orchestra. It's true every orchestra around the world is struggling financially. But these kinds of projects are things that donors can get really excited about. Arts organizations everywhere are trying all kinds of different ways to improve audience engagement and mostly failing miserably for reasons I won't go into here. But I could easily see the board of a major orchestra diving in and using your existing audience and technology to try and juice their attendance and revenue through various partnerships + really targeted ads.<p>Switching gears for a moment. . . . This is going to sound totally nuts, and I don't even know how to start down this path. But it strikes me (as well as everyone else, probably) that Apple is absolute shit at social networks. Especially social networks revolving around music. You could make a strong case for being acquired by Apple on the grounds that you've built up a sizable audience in a very difficult market without blasting ads or invading user privacy--all values which align with Apple in general and where possible. How to go about getting to have that conversation, I'm really no help at all. But maybe someone else here does.<p>I really wish you the best of luck. I love this project, and if I had the cash I'd buy it off you, quit my day job, and figure out how to make this work right now. Feel free to reach out by email in my profile if you want to talk any more about this or anything or if there's other ways I might be able to help. |
How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You | Example of the arrogance mentioned in the first point: I have met folks who have seriously argued to me that their code contained no technical debt because "We wrote it right the first time." The code at the time was something in the range of 50,000 lines (so assuming 30 lines of code per page, 500 pages per textbook, you'd have to read ~3 textbooks on the subject of what their code does to understand it) and contained no test suite... and maybe 5% of the code was comments.<p>Sloppiness seems to come with enough examples... but I must say that it's not really a direct problem <i>unless</i> you are in a supervisory role and <i>nevertheless</i> insist on modifying the codebase, as that makes it significantly harder to correct you on your sloppiness.<p>Disrespect of others' time is being directly connected to meetings here -- I sympathize but I do think that the bigger issue is that "deep work" is best done in ~2-hour uninterrupted batches, and so a company culture which encourages actively scheduling those on shared calendars so that we can have "open spaces" for meetings during other parts of the day, would help a lot. Especially, I am growing more confident that meetings which exist should revolve around some decision to be made that needs input from a bunch of people -- in other words, every meeting is a negotiation and if it's just a "progress update" or a "question and answer" session it should be moved to an asynchronous medium like Slack or (to a lesser extent) email. If you insist on daily standups at least have the courtesy to schedule them in the afternoon so that when I come in off of my morning commute having thought, "I am going to do X, then Y, then Z" I am not burdened by "I have only 1 hour to work on X before I have to drop everything for the daily standup..."<p>I am probably more guilty of the constant negativity, I think a piece of wisdom from Seth Freeman is helpful here: that one wants to separate problems from people and be hard on problems, soft on people. You can be constantly be negative towards a problem and this will be tolerable if you are consistently cheerful towards the people who might have other needs with which they pursue those ends. "I am really worried that without a proper auth strategy we may get hacked, I know that you all strongly value being able to go forward without wasting time on such a frustratingly difficult problem, I fully understand that, but there has got to be some way that we can get a proper auth strategy which doesn't bog us down so that we're also not trivially hackable" is a very negative position but it somehow doesn't carry the same "drag" as "you're so stupid, trying to implement this insecure thing, you're going to be the reason we get hacked."<p>Greediness is a hard thing, definitely, but I would observe that all of the examples seem to have to do with private communication channels, and I wonder whether that's endemic to the situation. I also wonder how it subdivides with a manager taking credit for the successes of their team -- in some cases this respect is due and in some cases you feel like "we spent more time evading my boss than being led by them!"...<p>I think the weakest part of the article was "disregard for the team," I feel like that's just a catchall for "doing anything that was annoying to me personally" and it's like "well yeah but that's not helpful." I think any friction can be couched as "disregarding the team" whereas true disregard has something to do with "you went off and made your own decisions and never told any of the rest of us about it and we could have told you that they were not wise decisions because of needs that you would not have been expected to anticipate" -- but the sin there is really just falling out of step with the community and thinking "I can sail this ship entirely on my own!" and I think it's less disregard-for than lack-of-community-with. Like it's great to have ownership of some problem, but keep in constant conversation as well.<p>Lack-of-focus is I guess an irritant but I've never worked with someone where it was so bad as to "hate to work with you"... I think some of that is a lack of leadership-focus, if you have an aggressive timeline to deliver an aggressively minimal product then there is very little room to dither? But that may just be that I have not worked on a hard enough problem where one needs to upfront a serious enough amount of investment to force such dithering.<p>I was also frustrated to see "lack of accountability" defined as "more focused on making excuses than solving problems" because to my mind those are two separate issues, the "I am never to blame because I will point the finger at someone else!" is toxic, but it doesn't become less toxic if someone is like "yeah I mean I was just doing my best with the API results that Phil was giving me, Phil really screwed us over with this one, let's solve the problem by creating an API v2 that doesn't have his shitty endpoint in it, instead the endpoint will work like this, and then I can write code that's actually correct." That revolves around a solution while still having the attendant point-the-finger-and-blame attitude and I don't think that the solution-focus really removes the awfulness of the negativity.<p>Kind of my take aways are:<p>1. Keep learning and growing, shun practices which set you up as someone who knows everything and has nowhere to grow.<p>2. Keep honest with yourself about what's really going on, you can massage the description to others but you should be clear on 'we are not meeting this deadline because our contractor is two weeks late delivering this component and we cannot start building this next part without it' -- use that clarity to try to creatively evade those restrictions in the future, 'can we agree on a black-box specification so that you are not blocking my peer developers from working? Like, here's an example JSON file or two that your API will return in response to this query?" -- Do not lie to yourself in cases of "I am screwing this up" or "I am overburdened" or whatever, as those lies breed bigger lies later, that developer who is like "It will be done this week!" for weeks on end.<p>3. Keep compassion in your heart for everyone else. I am trying to separate that empathy as much as possible from these other criteria and just dump it in one. Do not be aggressive or negative or so with others, they are not the problem, they are not to be recipients of blame... they are fellow human beings who need to also grow and be respected just like you do. Don't say anything which you would not want someone to hear if you said it to their face, for example.<p>4. This was not really discussed explicitly in this article, but don't settle for mediocrity. Go out on a limb, take a risk, try to do things that might fail. I think one of the things that can really make me hate to work with you is that you would rather copy-paste some convoluted solution that worked once to a problem with considerable limitations, rather than that you're really trying new things, refactoring, simplifying. One thing I perversely love to see in source code is a brute-force approach. Just an "I don't know what the right way is to solve this but there are only 8! different ways this can happen so I'm just going to iterate through the 40,320 of them and see which one is best, we can improve this with some heuristics later." But it has to be an interesting problem of "which of these things is going to be most effective for our users?" for me to have that respect. You stuck your neck out and did something that other people would have just shrugged and said "that sounds impossible, let's move on" and I love that spirit.<p>5. And finally there is some sort of pride/humility thing going on, don't think that you are the center of the universe and that every other developer exists to make you effective, but rather give up your ego in service of the art that you are creating. If you understand this code as a vehicle for yourself to be validated then I will probably not like working with you, if you understand this code as a joint effort of love and service, I will probably call you my brother or sister. |
Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line | I fit the concept of the Volt perfectly; Married, Mid 40's male, one kid (6yo), under 50 miles 5 of 7 days a week, wife drives SUV so we have that when needed. Spring of 2017 I was ready for new car and I so wanted to get a Volt as I've been eyeing it for a few years (especially the new revamped model) thinking I would be ahead of all our friends in going EV and saw myself at parties telling people how I haven't been to gas station in months, etc. I lurked Volt Forums, read all car review sites and was ready.<p>Then the actual shopping started and reality set... I visited all Chevy dealers in a 30 mile radius of my house, about 4 of them. It quickly became very apparent how this car was just a thorn in GM's side and I got the feeling they did not want to sell this car if they could help it.<p>First dealer I went to for a specific one they had I wanted. When I got there I was told it was at their spillover lot and they couldn't get it that late (7p). But they had one exactly like it just different color right outside I could test drive. The salesman finding the keys for it were a
"challenge" and I waited 20 minutes for him to locate them. In the meantime while waiting he asked me if I would be interested in any other of their models, some they have "below wholesale" deals for that would be better than the Volt to own. After telling him no, we got the keys and went to the car outside. I get in to start it, drive it around and notice that we are on the combustion engine the WHOLE time. He didn't know what I was talking about as I explained what the dash was showing - that the main battery was dead and needed an over night charge. He comes back to look for a battery charger and I again tell him he doesn't understand as it isn't a starter type battery typically in cars that needed a charge. I frustratingly left.<p>Second dealer would not go more than $1k lower from sticker on the one I wanted. Wouldn't budge. I showed him how far off he was to Truecar pricing, explained that these things aren't selling well and here I am for a deal I can feel good about. He then tried to suggest I would be better off in the used Volt market for the price I was trying to get, which wasn't out of realm to what others were getting deals at on Forums. I left.<p>Other two dealers didn't even have that many Volts on hand but said they could order. Again we got to prices and I'd order one if right for me and they both told me same as above that this city this car is a premium and there are no discounts given, best they could do blah blah. Especially if they have to order one. I was able to test drive one fully charged at one of these dealers though.<p>The test drive was with my son this time. Him with me realized just how compact this car was, and he wasn't getting smaller. My previous car was a 2007 Mazda3 and it felt roomier inside. With my seat all the way back for my desired driving position, we would not be able to fit a second kid back there. I'd have to scoot pretty far up for him to sit behind me. The quality of the interior actually impressed me and the tech is very cool, but this car even felt smaller than the new Cruze model they had in same showroom.<p>The size of this car is what ultimately made it fail IMO as well as them just not wanting to sell/push for it compared to even the Cruze or Malibu. It seems like they were more interested in selling the Equinox, Malibu and pickup trucks as those dominated the lots. Buyers as a whole have started to want more room and larger vehicles as evident in the sales numbers past few years in USA, and compact cars were a dead man walking. This is what this car was. A Subcompact car with a 33k sticker price that a majority would take one look at and wonder who hell buys this when the Cruze is 20k. It takes a LOT of miles/gas to make up that difference.<p>There is also the 7.5k tax credit that would, on paper, drop this car down in price, but still more than a fully loaded Cruze and in some cases I could get a bigger Malibu for not much more (this all at the time over a year ago). To get that tax credit means you have to owe the IRS that much in taxes, which we never come close to each year. You owe less that 7.5k, your tax credit is less! You owe nothing or get refunds each year (us) you get ZERO credit.<p>I then started to look at used market and started to notice these things were asking prices of more than what new would cost with a full tax credit and there were also very few of them in my area to choose from that had low miles. Basically all ridiculously overpriced enough to where even expert negotiating would be hard pressed to get me a good deal.<p>In the end, I just ended up realizing the Volt wasn't for me, no matter how much I wanted it. I'd be sacrificing space and my wife even asked how I could even think of getting such a small car as my last one was small enough. It was priced as premium from dealers who were oblivious to how poor it was selling it seemed and didn't want to move it regardless. I'd have to really change up our W4's so we could maybe even get the full tax credit. Plus with the poor dealership mentality of this car all in my area, I even questioned how well they'd handle warranty issues or repair when I eventually needed them.<p>The Bolt was so new at the time so it wasn't an option/available in my area and any that were in next state over were MSRP and no budge. I'd be highly interested in the Bolt if I was doing it all over right now, but in the end I moved on from the Volt never to really think again about owning one. America has moved on from compact cars as well. I have one year left on a lease and next year i will look at the Kona and Bolt but also in a segment I thought i'd never want to drive - the compact SUV. CX-5 or Rav4 types. I want an EV bad but it is hard to justify from a economic standpoint still in 2019. |
Ask HN: Delivery guy is a chemist with 2 teenage kids. Can this happen to me? | > I'm terrified that I'm going to end up the same way.<p>First off - we don't know that guy's life situation. That is, what did he do after graduation? Or - maybe he was successful, and does delivery just to have something to do while he gains royalties on all his patents? Or maybe he enjoys physical work more than doing chemistry at some company? Or maybe he was employed, then convicted of some crime he was a part of with an employer? Tons of possibilities, we (and probably you) just don't know what led him from there to here.<p>There's no way to know if this is how you'll end up; but your first question should be why you feel you may end up the same way?<p>What is it about your current situation (employment, life, etc) that may cause you to "fall down the ladder"? If you can answer that, then you'll have at least a clue as to what to do or try to prevent it.<p>I'll use my current situation as an example (maybe even a warning?):<p>I'm a software engineer - big whoop, right? So are a lot of people.<p>I'm also 45 years old. I've been a professional SE since I was 19. Unfortunately, I didn't do everything I probably should have done, and now I am making up for "lost time".<p>Biggest mistake: Not saving my money early. In fact, it took me a long while to learn to save money - and also to get off the credit spending cycle. Fortunately for me, I broke out of it - and today I am "debt free" (I call it "Dave Ramsey Debt Free" because I still have a mortgage - but that is secured debt, so it doesn't really count). I have a lot of savings - not as much as I could have had, but more than the average American does.<p>That gives me some flexibility - mainly in my career. I have what could be termed "FU" savings. Basically, I can tell my employer to "take a hike" if I want, and still be able to live comfortably for a while until I can find another job (not that I want to - I like where I'm at right now).<p>One thing I have done over the years to insulate myself from being unemployed has been two-part: I keep my skills up-to-date and varied (everyone should do this), but I also, in the field of being an SE, keep my skills general enough that I can apply my knowledge to get up to speed on whatever it is that my employer may need or want me to do.<p>I don't focus on the skill or language "du jour" so-to-speak. Chasing that demon will only lead to fruitless heartache, if not a lot of stress. Instead, I seek to improve my skills in more general avenues that can be applied more narrowly to situations.<p>To that end, in recent years I've been pursuing using online resources - learning what I can about ML/AI; I've yet to use what I've learned at an employer (these new skills have included a focus on self-driving vehicle technology - but there's a lot of general skills even in that which could be applied more broadly, which is the takeaway I seek when I pursue self education opportunities) - but I believe that having them may help me to find future employment if necessary.<p>That said, I do worry about hitting some kind of an "age ceiling" given my current age; one area that I've never had an opportunity to try has been that of "management" - I've never been a team lead, or a manager of a team, or anything like that. I don't know how to gain that experience except by doing it, but if you are never given the chance to do it, you never gain it. Furthermore, I am not sure I would be good at it - but I've never been tasked with it. I worry that this lack of management experience may hinder me going forward as I get older.<p>But I have no choice here, except to keep doing what I have been doing that's been successful for me.<p>That's about all you can do yourself - try to find a career you can enjoy going to every day, make yourself relevant to the business needs, continue your education, especially towards more general knowledge in the problem domain that can be adapted more narrowly if needed, and in the meantime, increase your savings and reduce your unsecured debt load (ideally to zero).<p>I can't speak toward investment or anything like that - those are other skills and such that I lack, and I don't know how to gain them. I'm not even sure at this late date if such knowledge would matter. But if you are young, you might look into such a thing, whatever "investment" means for you.<p>There's no guarantee that any of this will prevent you from becoming a "service worker" - or someone with an advanced degree working for a pittance. All you can do is to do what you can to prevent it, and know that may not be enough in the end. But it may be enough to slow things down during the "fall" - should that happen - that you can pick yourself up and figure something else out to reverse your fortunes.<p>Oh - one other thing I forgot: I don't have kids - that was a decision my wife and I made a long time ago. Not having kids helps greatly with savings and debt-load issues. But that's another choice to make; everyone is different in regards to whether to have children or not, just realize that they can be both a "burden" and a "blessing" - and to plan accordingly, for before and after should you decide to raise some. |
Ask HN: Relationship between set theory and category theory | I think the blue-eyed islanders problem [1] suggests a solution for replacing sets with categories as the foundations of mathematics. My reasoning is as follows:<p>1. Non-existance is not a well-defined concept if in isolation. It can only have meaning as attached to that which exists.<p>2. To exist is to be possible. To not exist is to be impossible. Non-existance is a parasitic concept. Therefore, everything must start with one empty set, which necessarily exists.<p>3. Once something exists, two things exist. The set, and that which is not it.<p>4. Two sets exist implies three sets exist, etc.<p>5. The empty set is always attached to the total set. They envelop each other. That's where motion comes from. A new quanta of energy is added for every new set.<p>6. 3, 4, 5... this is the expansion of the universe in the category of sets.<p>7. Sets are both physical and mathematical. The paradoxes from the math manifest as an inability of the maximally expanded universe to channel the energy flow (motion ceases for one frame). The rate of energy expansion (set expansion, mathematically) exceeds the capacity of the current Universe topology to accomodate it (and I don't know enough to understand how that happens), which leads to symmetry breaking (fractalization). This causes a "stepping up" of the game (it's literally a step change). After the symmetry breaking, the matter in the region of the new fractalic branch is in the next higher topology. For us, it means we have transitioned to matter with categories replacing sets (this adds 1 bit of information to the existing Universe).<p>8. It seems the Universe enumerates all states that are possible up until the energy flow limit occurs. They are by definition finite, so they will cycle. They must be finite, but for a reason I am not qualified to understand. I only believe it because I can count several times this has already happened in the past, so it must continue to happen. Handwaving, it should be possible to prove that the energy flows (and I don't quite know what that means really; I think it means bits) will always exceed the expansion that happens in the current topology, making the next symmetry breaking necessary. This is the part that I don't know if it makes sense.<p>9. After enumerating all possible states in one topology, the flow cracks the fabric of the fractal to start a new zoom level with the next higher topology, adding one bit of information and room to swirl into (one bit is enough for the shuffle to work).<p>10. The Universe explores all possible states adding one bit for each fractalization. These fractalizations are new Big Bangs embedded in the expansion of the previous Big Bang, which now expand into the higher topology, until the new flow capacity is exceeded.<p>11. Etc.<p>The consequence of this is that once the fractalization occurs, the game is fundamentally changed. Moebius strips of energy flows can now be broken, whereas in the set topology they are necessarily there because of the liar's paradox. Coincidentally, this is Buddha's statement:
- to be is to not be (1)
- to not be is to be (2)<p>This cannot be otherwise because the set is not yet attached to the nothing. It is that addition to the structure (1 bit of information) that allows the expansion to continue, because now there is more empty space available, just enough to start another shuffle. Of course, only in the deepest region of the fractal does the new topology exist. In this case, that space would be in our own brains, which are predicated on sets (on a fundamental physical level).<p>12. Liar's paradox turns into a tautology in the world of categories:
- the meaning of to be is the meaning of to not be (3)<p>Which just says that a new bit of information is attached to every set, after which we identify the yin with the yang. This simply give more space for it to end its cessation and continue with moving inside a bigger space.<p>This eliminates the set paradoxes which cannot be resolved otherwise. This now seems to say that, fundamentally, until this symmetry breaking occurs, we cannot have access to better foundations for mathematics. The only thing necessary for categories to replace sets is to add the nothing category to the collection of all categories, which (3) expresses.<p>This immediately reminded me of the blue-eyed islanders problem, where one new bit of information is introduced by the person who speaks first. That person only states the obvious, but that is a new bit. The bit says that the game finished. This can simply be stated as:<p>The meaning of no category is every category. (4)<p>Which is just the 'nothing' category added to every other category, similar to the process of set expansion based on introducing the empty set. This restructuring replaces the set expansion with category expansion (in a much bigger logical space).<p>The parallel with the blue-eyed islanders made me write this note in the remote case it is useful. Please excuse any inaccuracies. I am not a professional mathematician.<p>Thanks for reading.<p>[1] <a href="https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-blue-eyed-islanders-puzzle/" rel="nofollow">https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-blue-eyed-isla...</a> |
The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2019 | Here's the consolidated list, with comparison to last year:<p><pre><code> 2018 2019
Apple 01 Meituan Dianping
Netflix 02 Grab
Square 03 NBA
Tencent 04 The Walt Disney Company
Amazon 05 Stitch Fix
Patagonia 06 Sweetgreen
CVS Health 07 Apeel Sciences
The Washington Post 08 Square
Spotify 09 Oatly
NBA 10 Twitch
Marvel Studios 11 Target
Instagram 12 Shopify
Stitch Fix 13 Anchorfree
Spacex 14 Peloton
Walmart 15 Alibaba Group
Bytedance 16 Truepic
Reliance Jio 17 Apple
Nintendo 18 Unity Technologies
Social Capital 19 Domino's
Alivecor 20 Plaid
Novartis 21 Universal Music Group
Oneome 22 Airtable
Thumbtack 23 Lineage Logistics
Ford Foundation 24 Kano
Peloton 25 Winc
Kakao Bank 26 Zola
Darktrace 27 Lanzatech
Waze 28 Jiosaavn
Vipkid 29 Jumio
Gucci 30 Foundation Medicine
Paytm 31 Arterys
Slack 32 Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Hopper 33 Beautycounter
Compass Group 34 Sonder
Dji 35 Indigo Ag
Sephora 36 Nubank
Cava 37 Goat
Activision Blizzard 38 Snøhetta
Patreon 39 African Leadership University
Everlane 40 Fanatics
Pinterest 41 Unmade
Stripe 42 Modern Fertility
Sugarfina 43 Rocket Lab
Duolingo 44 A24
Diamond Foundry 45 Teachers Pay Teachers
Hello Alfred 46 Ammunition
Commonbond 47 Sesame Workshop
Rover 48 Acorns
The Muse 49 Mozilla
Graduate Hotels 50 Punch Bowl Social</code></pre> |
A random dungeon generator in C, small enough to fit on a business card | Author here. I love all of the deobfuscations. Usually, when I put code online, I try to make it as <i>clear</i> as possible. It's really interesting to see that going the other direction actually makes it a more interactive experience for the reader.<p>This one is great: <a href="https://gist.github.com/airstrike/66e0152e75c3a81fd1496bfbf590105a" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/airstrike/66e0152e75c3a81fd1496bfbf5...</a><p>A couple of remarks:<p><pre><code> // The door should not be created in the cave's corner or over
// another door, or in another cave's corner. It's impossible
// to make a cave without a door, because randInt(1) always
// returns 0.
if (atWallButNotAtCorner && FIELD[y][x] == TILE_WALL) {
doorCounter++;
if (randInt(doorCounter) == 0) {
doorX = x;
doorY = y;
}
}
</code></pre>
The randInt() part here is pretty confusing. Here's the intent of the code. It picks a random boundary for the new room. Then it walks over the edges and finds every tile where the room's wall overlaps the wall of an existing room. Those are candidates where a door can be placed to connect this room to the existing one.<p>If no candidates are found, the room is discarded. This ensures the dungeon is always connected.<p>If there are <i>multiple</i> candidates, we only need to pick one. We want to pick one randomly because otherwise you'd get obviously biased choices where the door always appeared at the left-most edge between two rooms or something. The obvious way to do that is to build a list of the candidate coordinates and then choose a random element from the list.<p>But that's a lot of code. Instead, I use Algorithm R [0]. It's a streaming algorithm for selecting a random item as you walk the set of items being sampled. The idea is that you keep a running winner. Each new element, you have a random chance of replacing the winner. As the number of elements visited increases, the chances of replacing the winner decreases. So the first element has a 1/1 chance of being the winner. The second has a 1/2 chance of replacing the winner, the third 1/3, etc.<p><pre><code> // If the cave's walls were made completely out of corners
// and doors, don't make such a cave
if (doorCounter == 0) { return; }
</code></pre>
This case actually means the new room didn't share a wall with any existing room.<p><pre><code> // We need to somehow record corners of all caves to check
// for intersections later, so we use a special tile for it
FIELD[y][x] = atCorner
? TILE_CORNER
: (atWallButNotAtCorner ? TILE_WALL : TILE_FLOOR);
</code></pre>
For a room to connect to an existing one, they need to share a tile on their actual sides, like:<p><pre><code> #####
#...#
#...#####
#...X...#
#####...#
#...#
#####
</code></pre>
That's leaves at least one tile where we can place a door. If only the corners overlap, there may not be enough room to connect them:<p><pre><code> #####
#...#
#...#
#...#####
#####...# ???
#...#
#...#
#####
#####
#...#
#...#
#...#
######### ???
#...#
#...#
#...#
#####
</code></pre>
So, during room placement, the corners are not treated as part of the room:<p><pre><code> ###
#...#
#...####
#...X...#
####...#
#...#
###
###
#...#
#...#
#...####
####...# ???
#...#
#...#
###
###
#...#
#...#
#...#
### ### ???
#...#
#...#
#...#
###
</code></pre>
But, when rendering the rooms, I want them to look rectangular. So the special "!" means "render like a wall, but don't act like a wall".<p><pre><code> // 1d6 of entities total, 25% chance of gold, 75% of a mob.
// Mob letters range from 'A' to '~', inclusive
</code></pre>
Technically, the "mob" case includes all of the non-"$" treasure too. Punctuation characters are in that character range as well and represent items.<p>Otherwise, the comments are all spot on. It's really gratifying seeing people figure this all out.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling#Algorithm_R" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling#Algorithm_R</a> |
'Big Data' Has Come to Mean 'Small Sampled Data' | I'd just commented on this at HN a few days ago[1], noting both that a fair amount of "big data" is actually surprisingly small, and that sampling-based methods are very, very, very often not only <i>good enough</i>, but tremendously reduce costs and complexity. There are other factors, some of which favour the smaller-is-better approach, some of which favour more comprehensive approaches.<p>Background: though my pseudonymity precludes giving specifics, I've worked in and around data analytics for much of three decades, across various fields. What was "big data" at the onset of my career -- when multiple departments of over thirty analysts shared access to a few GB of storage distributed over multiple cluster systems -- is now something I can trivially tackle on a modest and decade-and-a-half-old desktop system. Newer boxen, with yet more memory and SSD or hybrid drives are even more capable.<p>Under my present 'nym, I've done analysis especially of Google+ since 2015 (largely out of personal interest and realising methods <i>were</i> available to me). Much of that has been based on sampling methods, some has relied on more comprehensive analysis, though again, with an eye to limiting total data processing.<p>In the case of Google+, the questions of how many actively-posting users and how many active Communities exist have come up. Sampling methods have been <i>reasonably</i> useful in assessing these.<p>Google's sitemaps files (from <a href="https://plus.google.com/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/robots.txt</a>) supplied <i>total</i> counts of profiles, communities, and several other categories. This itself takes some work -- there are 50,000 Profile sitemap files, and 100 Communities files, containing 3.4 billion and 8.1 million entries, respectively. Even downloading <i>just</i> the Profile sitemaps itself is roughly 37 GB of data.<p>For a <i>rough</i> estimate of active profiles, <i>it only took about 100 randomly sampled observations to come up with pretty solid value:</i> about 9% of profiles had posted publicly ever (a ratio which remains true). <i>Finer-level</i> detail for more frequently posting accounts takes a far larger sample <i>because those highly-active profiles are so much rarer</i>. I'd done my first analysis based on about 50,000 records, while Stone Temple Consulting independently confirmed and extended my analysis to find an estimate of profiles posting 100+ times per month (about 50,000 across the full site). That is, 0.0015625% of all G+ profiles extant at the time (about 3.2 billion).<p>When I first tackled the G+ Communities question, I was trying to get a sense of:<p>1. How many there were.<p>2. What typical membership was.<p>3. How many were "reasonably active", based on ... somewhat contrived measures.<p>I adopted a sampling approach -- it was easy to pull a full <i>listing</i> of Communities, but web-scraping these would take time (at about 1.5s per URL). So my first approach utilised a 12,000 record sample. That gave a good overall view, but turned out to be thin on the very largest communities, so I ran a second pull based on 36,000 records, also randomly sampled. (A test of sampling: how many communities should be in both samples. The expected and actual result matched: 53.)<p>Even then, representation from the very largest communities was thin. Fortunately, I found someone able to sample all 8.1 million communities rapidly, and from this compiled a list of 105,000 communities, with 100+ members <i>and</i> posting activity within the 31 previous days (based on Jan 5-6, 2019).<p>Note that this highlights another aspect of media: of <i>all 8.1 million</i> communities, only 1.3% fell into the active list. That is <i>media and community activity tend to focus most ACTIVITY on a VANISHINGLY small subset of total members, groups, posts, or other entities.</i> That is, attention is highly rivalrous, and is <i>exceedingly</i> unequally distributed.<p>The challenge is in finding the active entities. Given my approach, via sitemaps, this was difficult (though a few options may have been available).<p>The upshot is that in the case of both users and communities, the <i>really active</i> and <i>interesting</i> set is, by modern standards, <i>small data</i>. There are 50,000 to a few million active users, a few thousands (and far fewer than 100,000) truely active communities. Even the total post volume of G+ communities is, by modern standards, strikingly small -- from January 2013 to January 2019, about 300 GB of post text was submitted. Image content and the surrounding Web payload (800 kiB per post) inflate that considerably, but yes, <i>over half a decade</i> of a reasonably large social media's community discussions could sit comfortably on most modern hard drives, or even much mobile storage.<p>I'll skip over the questions of truly social analysis of such data, with connections between users and other entities, though I'll note that <i>even for very large systems</i>, managing these at scale is difficult and the results may not be particularly usefully interpreted. Combinatorial maths remains challenging, even with beefy iron.<p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. See: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19294024" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19294024</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19294004" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19294004</a>, on the often surprisingly <i>small</i> scale of "big data" and the value of sampling, respectively. |
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