How the rise of women turned men into boys - <AUTHOR> http://wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html?1=1,1+1&1=1,1#printMode <comment><USER2> I asked about this article elsewhere in cyberspace, and several of my married women friends upvoted a comment, "The good men are where they have always been, far away from self-absorbed women like her."

<comment><USER3> Good point. All this article tells me is that many priviledged women who live in New York City and write for prestigious publications are having trouble finding men who meet their exacting standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In some ways, I can't help but feel we've created this with our current economic and political climate (and not especially by some "rise of women").

I can tell you for certain that with my own children, when you tell them that they have an important roll to play, they instantly rise to it and never fail to impress me. When they are told that they are not important, they just go and play xbox.

We tell our twenty-somethings that they really don't have an important roll in our society and they agree... and go play xbox.

</comment><comment><USER5> _the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing_

I am far from a Biebersexual, but when I read something like this, that's who I side with. Woman want to see certain things, but men can't honestly advertise them. You can't prove your ability to withstand hardship without, you know, _actually experiencing some hardship_. When a woman looks at a man and visually measures his "fortitude," all she sees is how impressed he is with himself. It's hard to feel impressed with yourself when you've never gone hungry, never even had to sleep on a friend's couch, and never had anyone close to you die. In this privileged life, the men who advertise the ability to withstand and endure are almost all posers, and the women who eat it up are willing suckers. I'm not going to pose for anyone. Hang around until a challenge comes my way, and you'll see how I handle it. Manufacture a challenge for me, and I'm going to raise an eyebrow and ignore you.

Now, a second point. There's a lot of cognitive clean-up everyone needs to do to accommodate the advances of feminism, and it's taking a few generations. Women complaining about the lack of real men are suffering cognitive dissonance from an incomplete assimilation of feminism. Take me, a male who measures up pretty well by most of the standards of the article. I watch grown-up movies and don't play video games. I play a sport. (Wait -- is that good or bad?) I don't smoke pot. I have a corporate job where I fit into a hierarchy and make good money. That's all fine, but I bet I'm not a "man" by the author's definition. Why? Because I don't cultivate that authoritative "I know everything and have everything under control" presence. That's the missing element of "manhood" I refuse to take up. _They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home,_ she says. Nice choice she presents us with. Did patriarchy come back in fashion when I wasn't looking? I refuse to pretend I'm anyone's dad. I won't talk down to people. I don't have all the answers.

Do women really like guys who control everything and think they know everything? No. Yet some women want men to _act_ that way. They are programmed to find that macho arrogance comforting, and they refuse to deprogram themselves. They want to feel that reassuring and directing masculine presence, right up to the moment when there's a disagreement, and then they want to deal with him as an equal. I won't accommodate that immaturity; I refuse to impose that cognitive whiplash on myself. I don't have all the answers. You run your life, not me. I won't let you treat me like an autopilot that you turn on when you want to be possessed by a manly man and then turn off again when you want control back. (Except in bed. Anything is fine in bed or on the way to it. I'll be John Wayne or Justin Bieber or Marv Albert or Daffy Duck in bed.)

I'd say the men who are showing fortitude right now are the ones who are enduring unemployment without letting it crush their spirits, but this author probably thinks they are slacker guy-children who show an irresponsible lack of concern for their failure to win bread. They should stop acting cheerful and optimistic; instead, they should watch Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen movies and practice their rugged, haunted, stoic looks. It may have as much to do with real manliness as a bag of silicone has to do with breast tissue, but that's what this author wants. That's how she can tell the difference between an unemployed "man" who is manfully enduring hard times and an unemployed "guy" who is goofily refusing to grow up.

</comment><comment><USER6> Writer was heavy handed when it came to criticizing "guys." Our society is in a transition, just like our economy is. There are hundreds of undertrained and unemployed who don't seem to have a use in our economy. Same goes for guys. They've broken stereotypes now and they wonder why guys aren't falling in line.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gotta wonder if this is an "adaptation" in the same sense as the "tiger mom" piece.

</comment><comment><USER8> Like most aspects of our country, us Americans re-invented our culture after WW II, then changed a lot through the 60s-70s. We tend to be quick to change whatever isn't working for us.

The nuclear family is largely a post-war invention. The modern schooling style is largely a post-60s invention. I think there are aspects of our choices that are mistakes, like any new system. Older cultures, like older software, has been tested by time more. But overall, I'd rather live in our more fluid way.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Kay S. Hymowitz argues that too many men in their 20s are living in a new > kind of extended adolescence.

And other people say it's not just men, it's everyone:

> JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in > Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life > stage, which he calls "emerging adulthood." - > [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html)

<comment><USER6> That article smacked a little bit of bitterness. It seemed to argue guys are enjoying themselves too much instead of debating the benefits of a stable family unit.

<comment><USER9> The original article? I totally agree. It's insanely condescending, projects its own image of adulthood onto everyone, and is borderline sexist...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article doesn't really explain how women rising has turned any men into boys...

</comment><comment><USER11> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239323> from a few days ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think a big part of it is that most people these days aren't rushing to start a family right after college, and instead focus on their careers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Complete nonsense. Flagged.</comment>


Antarctica losing six times more ice mass annually now than 40 years ago - <AUTHOR> https://news.uci.edu/2019/01/14/uci-jpl-study-antarctica-losing-six-times-more-ice-mass-annually-now-than-40-years-ago/ <comment><USER2> I find headlines like this frustrating and potentially misleading. It provides zero context. Do we know that this is abnormal? Forty years is a short period of time in the grand scheme of things. Six times more than what?

<comment><USER3> "The team was able to discern that between 1979 and 1990, Antarctica shed an average of 40 gigatons of ice mass annually. (A gigaton is 1 billion tons.) From 2009 to 2017, about 252 gigatons per year were lost."

I'm a climate skeptic. This type of research is why I'm a climate skeptic. 252 gigatons per year means a bit less than 0.001% of the mass of the ice sheet of the Antarctic continent. Or, to put it differently, about 1.8cm decrease in average ice height, when the current average is about 1.9km. They are telling me they have a method to estimate an average decrease of 1.8cm? Really? How can anyone claim such a thing with a straight face? Civilian GPS doesn't have this type of vertical resolution. You can achieve better resolution by the law of large numbers, however that is at the rate of the square root of the number of observations, and I doubt there are a tremendous number of observation points in Antarctica.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know less than you think you do.

GPS is not part of the measurement suite in OP, but better than 1.8 cm vertical resolution from GPS has been possible since the late 1990s, using after the fact orbit determination. It is now routine to get sub-cm vertical accuracy in GPS measurements [1, fig. 3, magenta line]. The horizontal displacements are known to about a mm.

These displacements are known so accurately that you can readily measure groundwater withdrawals, the extra mass related to of high atmospheric pressure over the GPS sensor (daily cadence), and post-glacial rebound (decadal cadence).

Your remarks below about the accuracy of the GRACE gravimetric measurement are also misguided. You can't just choose a baseline mass and say it's impossible to measure a change in that mass to some percent accuracy. The GRACE measurement depends on how well you can measure a distance between two spacecraft, and how well you can eliminate systematics from that difference. It does not depend on a relative mass.

Anyway, the paper uses a different technique to get ice fluxes. If you don't know how they did the measurement, why are you so sure it is wrong?

[1] [https://www.unavco.org/data/gps-gnss/derived- products/docs/H...](https://www.unavco.org/data/gps-gnss/derived- products/docs/Herring_et_al_2016_RevGeophys.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > You know less than you think you do.

Not clear how this ad-hominem enhances your argument.

>If you don't know how they did the measurement, why are you so sure it is wrong?

I'm not "so sure", I'm just skeptical. I find it hard to believe that one can estimate the net ice loss over a huge and dynamic body of ice with an accuracy better than 0.001%, using any type of measurements conceivable.

You are saying that somehow the whole mass of Antarctica is irrelevant as a base mass to calculate accuracy? Why so? The ice naturally compresses and flows and this happens at continental scale. A large iceberg calving on the western coast of the continent may be offset by a relatively modest ice accumulation on the much larger eastern side. However, that accumulation on the eastern side will be conflated by the general compression that will lead to some ice being pushed towards the edges, etc, etc. There's no natural way to take a part of the continent out of the equation and say "well, we are interested only in this subset".

<comment><AUTHOR> > You are saying that somehow the whole mass of Antarctica is irrelevant as a > base mass to calculate accuracy...

Yes, that is correct. The mass of Antartica, whatever that might mean, is not required in itself. Percent error in estimating that is not relevant. Remember that we are interested in mass changes only.

The GRACE measurement is based on explaining the relative position of a pair of orbiting spacecraft by mass changes in 4500 "mascons" \-- equal-area spherical caps that blanket the globe (see figs 2 and 3 of [1]). The fundamental observation is the range and relative velocity of the pair of spacecraft, which can be very accurately determined. The mass within each mascon has an analytically-known relationship to these observations (eqs. 8, 9 of [1] - relating mass sigma to acceleration a).

It's a monthly measurement -- you accumulate a month's worth of orbits, and solve a least-squares problem to fit the range-rate data with the masses. This can also be viewed as maximum a posteriori estimation in the conventional way. See equation 13 of [1].

I hope this clarifies why it does not matter what the ice underneath is doing. The ice has mass, and therefore it affects the gravitational potential that the satellites operate in.

You are correct to be surprised. The measurement is surprising, and it has been revolutionary. Hundreds of papers have been published using it, and it has received scrutiny and undergone improvements for more than a decade. Three independent groups (JPL, UTexas, DLR) have worked on the full retrieval over this time. Lots of what we know about groundwater withdrawals, ice sheets, and more recently deep ocean currents, is based on this measurement.

There _is_ an attribution issue at ice/water boundaries (sec. 6 of [1]). It is due to mixed pixels -- a mascon that is part water, part ice. The mass change observed at the mascon should not be spread evenly over the whole pixel. It is split in constrained way based on errors and priors. But as [1] explains, this is not an "order of magnitude" type error, it's just a correction.

[1] [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2014JB011547)

But to repeat -- the fundamental result of the OP does not rely on GRACE (nor does it rely on GPS). It relies on ice sheet velocity models.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for taking your time to explain all this. It's quite cool. I spent some time with your link and also with the wikipedia page about GRACE. This is quite an ingenious experiment. First I thought the two satellites were at different altitudes, one in LEO and one in, let's say GSO. The high altitude satellite perceives the Earth more or less like a mass point, while the low altitude satellite is much more sensitive to the distribution of mass, especially at the Earth's surface. You could in principle use several satellites at different altitudes, and do some sort of "triangulations". This way, you could potentially learn about the mass distribution deep inside the Earth. Anyway, the actual way it's done is also cool, a lump of mass, like a mountain pulls faster the leading satellite, Jerry, and the second satellite, Tom, lags a little behind. Later on, Tom goes over the same mass and catches on.

That being said, the complexity of this model sounds absolutely humongous. Complex models are exciting for mathy guys to work with, but are inevitably subject to more model risk. As coders say, the number of bugs is roughly proportional with the number of lines of code.

You're going to say that this numerical calculation is bug free. A numerical calculation with 4 thousand mass element (mascons) and distance measurements probably in the billions, and lots and lots of approximations and contributions from the sun and the moon and the planets. Of course you are not going to say it is bug free. Should we trust ice loss calculations coming from GRACE? To be honest, after I read your explanation and all other things about GRACE, I'm less skeptical. I don't fully trust it, but I don't fully distrust it either.

But as you said, this is not that relevant, since the actual result published was not based on GRACE, but rather on ice flow models. Now these models I take with quite a large grain of salt. Why? Models produce estimates, and the estimates generally include an uncertainty level. The uncertainty reflects only how the uncertainty in inputs propagates to the uncertainty in the final result, not the model uncertainty per se.

Take a look at the figure 1 in [1]. It shows the precipitation in Antarctica over 2.5 decades based on several models. The average number (labeled "multi- model mean") shows very little variability from year to year, and you could infer that very little uncertainty as well. However, this is just an artifact of taking the average of several not very highly correlated time series. The model uncertainty is better reflected by the wide range of the numbers produced by the different models. If you look at this range, it's about 200mm/y, which is 10 times the net ice loss we are talking about here.

Do you see why I'm a bit skeptical?

But anyway, thanks again for taking your time with me. I learned something cool today.

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187396521...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873965217300981#fig1)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the reply. I happen to know some of the GRACE team, so I'm personally predisposed to respect their results. But, it's also significant evidence that the retrieval was re-implemented by 2 other teams, one US, one German, with similar results. All 3 datasets are available to the community for comparison.

About fig. 1 of [1]: Of the spectrum of important Earth system models, precipitation is the least well-described. For good reasons: highly non- gaussian, very local in nature, highly dependent on nonlinear condensation/temperature properties. Even in the continental US, precipitation is not well-described. Your remark about deciding on a bogus "uncertainty" of the mean precipitation in fig. 1 is absolutely correct.

But it's of no use to be "skeptical about models" based on poor results of one class of models. The whole reason that paper was published is to draw attention to that fact! They literally say this in their conclusion. ("Most CMIP5 and reanalysis models are unable to simulate a consistent spatial and temporal precipitation pattern for the Antarctic.")

I have come to believe that skepticism is somewhat empty as a value. _That 's why you have experts who know what the state of the art is, and what to be skeptical about._

<comment><USER3> > But it's of no use to be "skeptical about models" based on poor results of > one class of models

This is not just "one class of models". This is the gain side of the gain-loss equation needed for the estimation of ice balance in Antarctica. If that side has an uncertainty 10 times higher than the stated result, then how can I not be skeptical?

>That's why you have experts who know what the state of the art is, and what to be skeptical about.

"Trust the experts" lead to the 2008 financial crisis. "Trust the experts" was what string theorists were telling us until Lee Smolin exposed them. "Trust the experts" is ultimately what religion is.

>skepticism is somewhat empty as a value

That's a surprising (for me at least) point of view for a scientist.

I'm quite sure you wanted so say something else. Something like in your experience, those who describe themselves as climate skeptics (I mean in what other context do people declare themselves skeptics? I'm a skeptic about the dark matter as well, by the way) are simply obstructionists, or ignorants, or have a political agenda or something else. Since we are all more efficient forming Bayesian priors to work in life with, your Bayesian prior in this case is that "skepticism is an empty value". And that's quite fair. I happen to agree that a large part of "climate skeptics" are quite toxic. The way the Trump administration treats the EPA, or science in general seems quite deranged. But that doesn't mean you can't be genuinely skeptic. In this case skepticism has nothing to do with values.

I simply approach this debate and I use my own heuristics. I don't know any climate scientist to use heuristics such as human character, you seem you do. For me, I apply other heuristics, based on my day to day work with models. I reached other conclusions so far than those that you reached.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using TLA+ for fun and profit in the development of ElasticSearch [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYDcbcOVurc <comment><USER2> If you're already familiar with Elasticsearch, the interesting TLA+ presentation begins ~8 minutes in.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYDcbcOVurc&t=479](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYDcbcOVurc&t=479)

</comment><comment><USER3> I spent time frequently mucking with the elasticsearch codebase from 5.x through till 6.4 strictly from durability and resiliency PoV [0]. The improvements it is seeing in 7.x are tremendous. It still had the occasional tendency to go hay-wire and show behaviour that simply didn't make sense and couldn't be recovered from, but I'm confident 7.x will push it to making it even more resilient than 5.x+ [1].

The sheer number of configurable options for the cluster bringup, index setup, plugable components turns it into a very hard to tame beast. There is an opportunity here somewhere for someone to make Elasticsearch on Rails (convention over configuration). With 7.x, I feel the time is just abt right to try something like that.

What excites me most abt 7.x is the overhaul of underlying _distributed engine_ that's been going on for over 2yrs [2] that will enable a whole slew of super nice features [3] that'd put it on par with state-of-the-art distributed databases in terms of not only features but resiliency.

[0] [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/current/index.html)

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/pacific...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/pacifica-replication-in-log-based-distributed-storage- systems/)

[2] [https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/10708](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/10708)

[3] [https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-sequence- ids-6-0](https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-sequence-ids-6-0)

</comment><comment><USER4> Can someone summarize TLA+ functionality in 2-3 sentences. It keeps coming up on hackernews but I haven't heard it any other context (and I have worked at faang, so should've heard of it if it was generally useful). Just trying to figure out if its a niche or something I should know as a distributed systems person.

<comment><USER5> TLA+ allows you to encode your system as a state machine, define invariants that must always be true, and the checker will explore your state machine and verify that the invariants are always true.

An example would be encoding a distributed locking system, with an invariant saying "no lock is owned by more than 1 node at a time". You would encode all of the locking and unlocking behavior in your state machine, and then the checker would verify it.

<comment><USER6> So to ensure that your system follows this state machine you need to write a proof for that in some other theory (like an abstract interpretaion of your program)?

<comment><USER7> In theory (no pun intended) yes.

In practice this is not done. Perhaps never done. I know of only one toy example that you could maybe extend to do this. TLA+ is meant to double-check design level questions and intuitions rather than code level or implementation level ones. That is it attempts to give guidance on whether a design is flawed rather than whether an implementation successfully follows a specified design.

This may sound limiting, but the fact that this is an artifact completely separate from code makes TLA+ much more attractive from a business risk perspective in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For other reports/examples, visit [https://old.reddit.com/r/tlaplus/](https://old.reddit.com/r/tlaplus/)</comment>


Ask HN: What are engineering challenges behind Netflix's 'Skip Intro' button? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I imagine it goes like: ask the producers to give you the intro length and tstamp, add a button that pops 2s before intro starts and that skips intro_length. Get an intern to manually tag older shows.

But knowing netflix they probably dumped 5m on a team of 10 ML experts for 6 months so I might be wrong.</comment>


Common Mental Shortcuts Can Cause Major Physician Errors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/upshot/mental-shortcuts-medical-errors.html <comment><AUTHOR> I think problems like the ones below would be alleviated by using logistic regression models, which do not have left-digit bias.

"We hypothesized that doctors may be overly sensitive to the left-most digit of a patient's age when recommending treatment, and indeed, in cardiac surgery they appear to be. When comparing patients who had a heart attack in the weeks leading up to their 80th birthdays with those who'd recently had an 80th birthday, we found that physicians were significantly less likely to perform a coronary artery bypass surgery for the "older" patients. The doctors might have perceived them to be "in their 80s" rather than "in their 70s." This behavior seems to have translated into meaningful differences for patients. The slightly younger patients, more likely to undergo surgery, were less likely to die within 30 days.

Our study confirms previous work that found doctors are overly responsive to patient age when diagnosing illness, and that showed how seemingly irrelevant factors' such as the difference of a few weeks of age, could govern physicians' decisions about treatment, with potentially life-altering consequences for patients.

Left-digit bias could affect many clinical decisions. For example, patients with hemoglobin levels of 9.9 grams per deciliter may be perceived as being substantially more anemic than patients with hemoglobin levels of 10.0 grams per deciliter (the difference in the two values has no clinical significance)."</comment>


What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-performance/ <comment><USER2> Basically, the whole article is that cutting time of X by 90% makes X 10 times faster, not "90% faster".

<comment><USER3> See also 'Why We Should Measure by Gallons per Mile, Not Miles per Gallon': [https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a12367/4324986/](https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a12367/4324986/)

<comment><USER2> Seems to be a stupid article. Both ways to compare are very wrong either way. The correct way is to divide, and then mpg vs pgm does not matter. It just happens, that subtracting in pgm is perceived closer to the real rate you get by division.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's go a level deeper: why do people so often write "90% faster" to describe something that is "10 times as fast". If they were using "90% faster" to describe something that was "1.9 times faster", the likely explanation is that they are trying to deceive their audience while remaining technically correct. But why would someone bragging about a genuine improvement choose a wording that undercuts their message?

My guess would be that some authors feel that "10 times faster" is low brow, unscientific, and therefore unconvincing, while using a percentage comes across as more precise, authoritative, and thus convincing. As others copy this, the social effect strengthens. Are they possibly right about this? Is claiming "90% faster" perhaps more effective marketing despite being wrong?

</comment><comment><USER5> > My bold claim

> If you optimize a task so that it takes 90% less time than before then that > is a ten-times speedup, and it should be described as such.

Hopefully not too bold :)

If I said revenue doubled (increased 100%), I assume that means I get 2x the money over the same period of time.

If I said performance doubled (increased 100%), I assume that means I get 2x the throughout, tasks, start ups whatever over the same period of time.

Just makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is why in realtime applications the correct measures are x times faster than realtime (relative throughput) or total runtime (absolute throughput) and a full histogram of response times. (absolute latency)

Relative latency would be used in games perhaps. (x times faster response than frame time)

</comment><comment><USER7> The article is way too wordy but I appreciate the Raymond Carver reference

</comment><comment><USER8> Relevant xkcd: Percentage Points.

[https://www.xkcd.com/985/](https://www.xkcd.com/985/)</comment>


If wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call  - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/04/if-wishes-were-iphones?retitled <comment><USER2> Mark argues that we should boycott the iPhone if we're bothered by its being closed. But what if we are already boycotting all the other phones because they're so awful?

Maybe the iPhone is a great phone, even for hackers, in spite of being closed?

<comment><USER3> There are other good phones, it's just that most of them are produced by a company with a braindead marketing department (read: Nokia, and its E70, which Maddox raves about here: <http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone>).

Another good phone that is pending release this month and could not possibly be any more open is the Open Moko, a Linux-based, completely-open-sourced option which I think could easily compete with the iPhone given some time. Check out <http://openmoko.com> . It's what I'm waiting for, anyways....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple is a company that's meant to be marginalized. They have decided a long time ago, before most of the folks that's buying their stuff was ever born, to position themselves in a certain way. The Ferrari or computers. The Bugatti of design. People just don't get it. You buy it or don't. Their business model works regardless.

But complaining sure is fun right? You stood in line for 8 hours to buy an iPhone? And you call yourself an Apple loyalist? Ha! I have a Lisa. And I refuse to let it die. I'm a loyalist.</comment>


Facebook Places & Keeping up with the Joneses - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/facebook-places-keeping-up-with-the-joneses/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this keeping-up-with-the-Joneses a second nature of all social media, not just Facebook places?</comment>


Cerebral cortex in rats' brains is set up like the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://news.usc.edu/79313/study-reveals-internet-like-networks-in-cerebral-cortex-of-rats/ <comment><USER2>
      The Internet has countless local area networks that then connect with larger, regional networks and ultimately with the backbone of the Internet. The brain operates in a similar way

These kinds of "news releases" from universities are really annoying to read. How could the brain be set up any _other_ way than "local network areas connected by a bigger network"?

Is that really even notable?

These types of "stories" are simply fluff PR for academic research, and (IMO) get more traction on HN than they deserve given the lack of substance.

<comment><USER3> Actually, yes - there are many topologies that a rat's brain could have but apparently doesn't.

For example, nature could have favoured more ring or star topologies: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_topology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_topology).

<comment><USER4> Well then it would have been remarkable find indeed, as few would expect neural configurations forming a perfect loop or having a single point of failure.

<comment><USER5> Why not? Larger evolutionary structures do seem to have a single point of failure, e.g. the heart.

<comment><USER4> One neuron dying off is much more probable than a fatal heart condition. Heart is a multi-cellar, regenerative organ which often recovers from substantial damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it the internet that's setup like a rat brain?

<comment><USER7> Every densely-meshed network is set up like a brain.

<comment><USER8> A _rat_ brain, we still haven't thoroughly studied other brains. Maybe hippopotamuses have token-ring networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This kind of network topology of the cortex appears to be also supported by research of hydrocephalus patients: [http://boingboing.net/2015/07/28/man- born-with-virtually-no-...](http://boingboing.net/2015/07/28/man-born-with- virtually-no-b.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> So when does the Internet start scurrying around mazes for cheese?</comment>


So I started a conference Space City JS - <AUTHOR> http://spacecityjs.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Been a TON of work. Would love feedback on the design, marketing, etc.

If anyone lives in TX, would love to have you attend :-)</comment>


Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is-investing-3-3b-to-build-clean-data-centers-in-europe/ <comment><USER2> Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) .

It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much cheaper than wholesale power prices, and be fixed into the future, avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.

<comment><USER3> I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?

<comment><USER4> Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.

<comment><USER5> For many a datacenter - balancing the loads across the three-phase power supply is one area that makes one of, if not the biggest difference in the bill/power charged for using. Though that for many a tech, is an area they are more inclined to overlook.

Then quality of the power (clean sine or noise spikes) auditing, then the factor that UPS's do square wave. Though that's more stability and indeed longevity of your kit plugged that appreciates those nuances.

It is one big rabbit hole and can imagine the likes of Google having dedicated teams to focus just on power optimisations as the dividends at that scale - more than pay for the team.

<comment><USER6> When you deploy a datacenter at this scale you contract for an amount of power and you're basically obligated to use it. The trick is to get more compute out of the same amount of power.

By the way if you still have AC UPS systems that is probably your #1 problem and you definitely will not benefit from some fancy machine learning thing. Just get rid of most of your AC systems. For example you may benefit by adopting Open Rack 48V-to-point-of-load scheme that uses an in-rack DC UPS.

[https://www.opencompute.org/files/External-2018-OCP- Summit-G...](https://www.opencompute.org/files/External-2018-OCP-Summit- Google-48V-Update-Flatbed-and-STC-20180321.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Total, more the company inhouse data center type affairs - big, but not your cloud or google size affairs. Then doing one AC to DC conversion instead of all that overhead per system along with the associated heat and centralising - pays for itself.

The cut-off for that level of work I'd say is if you design your own servers over just speccing from a vendor level is when you would be doing this. Upto that, it's still vendor off shelf. Though been a while and an option some vendors may now offer at lower scales these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Hamina data center is close to Russia without being in Russia. I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers.

In the north data centers can double as heating power plants when coupled with district heating. It's unfortunate that Google puts the excess heat into the sea. Yandex has a big data center in Mäntsälä. Their cooling water is used for heating the area. There are also data centers in Helsinki where heat is used in district heating.

<comment><USER8> Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings.

Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.

<comment><USER9> Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation.

But a French company is having a go at this: [https://www.qarnot.com/computing- heater_qh-1/](https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/)

<comment><USER10> Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?

<comment><USER11> To very good approximation, 100% of the energy used by a contemporary computer is turned to heat. The amount of negentropy generated by the computations is utterly dwarfed by the increase in entropy in the computer's surroundings. Computers are space heaters that happen to do some calculations as a side effect.

<comment><USER12> I wonder if WD and friends do generative braking on the hard drives.

<comment><USER13> :) Regenerative braking when the arm of the HDD starts getting near the target track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Google are doing and I feel nothing more than /eclipsed/ by them. I have found myself wondering: "If you can't beat them join them" on many occasions. I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?

<comment><USER15> You are correct, google is trying to cover all sectors they can, and offer tools to join them even at a loss. After they own everything, they can start raising prices, dictate web standards and so on

<comment><USER16> Your worst case scenario has never happened.

<comment><USER15> I'm quite sure a monopoly is not that alien a concept

<comment><USER16> A monopoly that keeps prices artificially low for years, drives everyone out of business, and then raises prices to make up for the years of lost profit -- I'd like to hear one example - it's never happened as far as i know.

Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.

<comment><USER15> I believe the Rockefeller's General Oil was dissolved as an illegal monopoly.

It used it's massive, over 90% share of the market (and it's vertical supply chain) to deter competition, and made deals with other suppliers to make the inertia of competing a herculean task

<comment><USER17> While a company that controls the majority of a market may be the text book definition of a monopoly, it's the the legal definition in the US. The US law recognizes that a company may naturally (and legally) gain a majority market share (even 100%) and be left alone. It's only when a company with such control over a market uses that to leverage control over _another_ market that it becomes illegal under US law.

Standard Oil owned 90%+ of the oil refineries in the US (they never did drill for oil) yet that wasn't why Standard Oil was broken up. They were broken up because they were using their influence with oil to control the train industry, specifically, train transport of oil. [1]

Microsoft wasn't threatened with breakup over their operating system monopoly on desktop computers, but because they were using _that_ influence with at attempt to control the web browser industry.

[1] And ironically, it was the _breakup_ of Standard Oil that made John. D. Rockefeller the richest man in the world. He was also responsible for saving the world's population of whales. [2]

[2] Half-serious here. Whale oil was big business, until Rockefeller made petroleum products cheap enough to supplant whale oil as a product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Working link:

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is- investing-3-3b-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is- investing-3-3b-to-build-clean-data-centers-in-europe/)

<comment><USER19> God I hate Oath's awful privacy modal.

<comment><USER20> >God I hate Oath's awful privacy modal.

What is "Oath"?

<comment><USER21> It's some kind of entity that is responsible for the full page GDPR popups that block the access to many websites like Techcrunch, Tumblr or Slashdot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Non-shortened url: [https://techerati.com/news-hub/google-3-billion-data- centres...](https://techerati.com/news-hub/google-3-billion-data-centres-data- centers/)

</comment><comment><USER23> TLDR from the TechCrunch article:

> This [...] is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invested since > 2007 in the EU, [...] today's announcement was focused on Google's > commitment to building data centers running on clean energy.

</comment><comment> toper-centage Did you know [Ecosia] (www.ecosia.org) is carbon negative? Google should follow suit if they really care.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not in the UK I guess...

</comment><comment><USER25> This is not relevant to the article, but why is there so many full screen popups with newsletter on american websites?

I have never ever written my email on such form. The first thing I do when I see it is to close it and think its a low-budget website or something.

<comment><USER26> Newsletters can be incredibly profitable for media organizations because it 1) gets people to return to your content on a regular basis 2) can allow for more targeted advertising

I personally hate this trend, but almost everybody's doing it these days

<comment><USER27> and (3) are vastly cheaper than other forms of advertising since they are not paying any platform provider for the ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> These data centers will collect large amounts of personal data. I believe that the future of personal privacy protection issues needs to receive greater attention.

<comment><USER29> This is not on topic.

<comment><USER30> These "omg privacy!" flavor of off topic post seems predictably standard for anything with "google" in the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh, so that's what those Google job listings for datacenter-builders were for...

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder what has bigger impact on climate, driving a car daily or feeding Google and Adtech industry with all your data, that has to be stored and constantly processed.

</comment><comment><USER33> Will these data centers still be subject to mass data collection by the us government (under arrangements similar to the prism program described in the Snowden relevations)? Does it matter at all that these centers are placed outside the us?

<comment><USER6> Just like basically this biggest nit ever, but Snowden revelations didn't reveal anything and nothing was described in them. Snowden exfiltrated a bunch of powerpoints that neither he nor you nor I can understand out of context. The most supportable conclusion you can really glean from Snowden's slide decks is the US intelligence agencies were able to intercept traffic of undersea cables.

<comment> 1-6 Fiber is encrypted you know...

<comment><USER29> They weren't back then. Google had plans but they didn't start yet. They prioritised that after the leaks. Now they are encrypted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They might be (a lot) less bad than other data centers, but unless these google data centers have a neutral carbon footprint, they are not clean, and unless they have a negative footprint they are not "environmentally friendly".

<comment><USER35> Google's datacenters are already carbon neutral. This is about going one step further and using locally-generated renewable energy to power the datacenters.

<comment><USER34> No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet.

On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either.

Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental costs, but that's another question entirely. And you might argue that google did a lot of things to reduce their footprint (and they did) but it's hardly close to zero, let alone negative.

<comment><USER36> Renewablea aren't carbon neutral "yet" is how I would put it.

<comment><USER34> Indeed, but the point is, it isn't carbon neutral yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What'd be better for the environment is to not build anything at all, and force people to use existing resources more efficiently through higher pricing rather than buying more resources to run at 1/30th the speed a real programming language would be able to do. Not a realistic proposition, but let's not get taken by the narrative that a multi-megawatt datacenter can somehow be as green as they claim, once you consider the downstream effects.

</comment><comment><USER38> At Google Next in April, I attended a talk by the C-level in charge of Google's Datacenters, and they bragged about using machine learning to manage/anticipate their power draw, and the subsequent efficiencies those brought. They also bragged about how much they're trying to make these centers powered by renewables.

When an audience member asked if they would be releasing their models that help them manage power, the speaker quickly changed the topic, which I felt told me all I needed to know about the sincerity of their motivations.

<comment><USER39> I did a bunch of work on managing/anticipating the power draw. ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747481) ). Something nobody talks about is how grossly wasteful & inefficient Hadoop is. There's a bunch of cited papers ([https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.580.5685&rep=rep1&type=pdf) ) that study power consumption of Hadoop nodes, but nothing on how to actually reduce the consumption.

So here's something you can personally do to make a dent to this problem. Most of the Hadoop jobs that you write will involve some statistical summary over a dataset. Find the total, or the mean, median, 90th quantile, whatever. Writing a Hadoop map-reduce job is the single worst way to do this.Almost always, you can sample say a 1000 points, get a kernel density estimate via Parzen & then use a table. All quantiles, order statistics, functions of order stats...these can be hand computed for several univariate distributions & their location- scale families, and your real-life data can easily be bounded above below by these estimates. So you can get to > 95% accuracy just by hand-calculating. I can go into details if you like, but I suspect most of you already know how to do this.

<comment><USER40> You're exactly right. Hadoop and it's ecosystem are... a very poor replica of the system whose predecessor the respective Google papers were written about. There's glaring efficiency things like not supporting complex encodings (last I used HDFS, at least, it could only do full replication) or the query engines on top not implementing sampling in their aggregates as a default/out of the box, which the Google tools do.</comment></comment></comment>


Hardware Hacks Are Easier Than They Seem. What Does It Mean for the Future? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/annashedletsky/2018/10/04/hardware-hacks-are-easier-than-they-seem-what-does-it-mean-for-the-future/#417d9df25ecf <comment><USER2> The hardware is now part of the attack surface, as well, and that will make it much harder to design chips that can withstand attacks years after they are initially designed. The attackers are getting smarter, and at this point anything appears to be a possible target[https://semiengineering.com/designing-hardware-for- security/](https://semiengineering.com/designing-hardware-for-security/)</comment>


"I Am Skeptical That Capitalism Has a Future" --Cory Doctorow - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory-doctorow-boing-boing-homeland-little-brother-snowden-poitras/ <comment><USER2> Bad Link it tries to use a Chrome extension, the article referenced is here: [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory-doctorow-boing- boing...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory-doctorow-boing-boing- homeland-little-brother-snowden-poitras/)

Can someone please fix the link?

<comment><USER3> Sure. Changed from [http://chrome- extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/s...](http://chrome- extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#uri=https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory- doctorow-boing-boing-homeland-little-brother-snowden-poitras/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The interview was really all over the place and never focused on a coherent theme.

But I always feel people like Cory really don't understand their own ideology and feel compelled to conform to some stereotype that they think people that they want to like them will feel comfortable with.

In other words, they always want to skirt around the fact that the state always has the power and so they feel compelled to interject something about corporations...state...it's all the same.

I just wish people like Cory would really understand the world as it is and not like a groupthink of internet people want them to think it is.</comment>


Master of the Game (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://crick.com/gamemaster.html <comment><USER2> _His father, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, won the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine by solving another very complex puzzle: the double-helix structure of DNA molecules.

Crick left home in Northampton, England, in the early 1960s to follow in his father's footsteps. He entered Harvard Medical School's neurophysiology program for his doctorate.

Then his life took a twist.

Crick fell in with a group of computer programmers at MIT, dropped out of the neurophysiology program and got a job with a computer company.

"It is probably what my father would have done if he went through graduate school at the same time I did,'' Crick said._

How many revolutions in biology, math, and physics lost to computer departments?

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of the Feynman "computer disease" quote:

 _"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It 's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you _play _with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it 's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We _had _tables of arc-tangents. But if you 've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the _delight _in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing."_

I haven't dug up and read that quote in a while - its persistent accuracy and relevance pleases me :)</comment></comment>


Small Clojure Interpreter - <AUTHOR> https://npmjs.com/package/@borkdude/sci <comment><USER2> This looks great. Are there plans on integrating this in clj-kondo?

<comment><AUTHOR> That might indeed be useful.

[https://github.com/borkdude/clj- kondo/issues/468](https://github.com/borkdude/clj-kondo/issues/468)</comment></comment>


T-Mobile G1 unlock possible; Android Community celebrates with giveaway - <AUTHOR> http://androidcommunity.com/t-mobile-g1-unlock-possible-android-community-celebrates-with-giveaway-20081029/ <comment><USER2> Er, _their_ first unlock. I've seen several forum posts about people unlocking their G1s already.

Anyone know a reputable source for buying a G1 full price? My experience attempting to sign up with T-mobile a few days ago has lost me as a customer for them.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.loveforbiz.com/getting-started-with-an- unactivate...](http://www.loveforbiz.com/getting-started-with-an-unactivated- t-mobile-g1)

According to the above article, if you are persistent, you can eventually find a t-mobile dealer who will sell you a full price gphone for $399. It would be nice to have a cover story that you are an android developer, blah blah blah, and don't need a service contract.

You can also activate it by temporarily borrowing a valid t-mobile sim card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does unlocking the phone cost $22.99? T-Mobile should unlock your phone for free if you just tell them you want to travel abroad.

<comment><USER2> Well, they want you to have had service with them (on some contract, not necessarily the G1 contract) for three months, first. If you buy the G1 locked from some third party, you may not have that option.</comment></comment>


French kids know how to play - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2016/05/28/french_kids_know_how_to_play_american_parents_obsession_with_structured_playtime_is_stifling_our_kids/ <comment><USER2> In books and news articles, France often plays the foil to America, just as it once did to England. The French language serves as a sign of socio-economic distinction, a class marker, and for its disciples, it is probably easy to think that French ways are superior in everything from cooking to flirtation to parenthood.

Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.

After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" \-- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind.

Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually.

So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.

<comment><USER3> >a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.

Okay, I was with you until this bit. Food doesn't necessarily need to be fresh to be good or healthy, and there's nothing inherently good in organics. Putting fresh/local and organic food on a pedestal stinks of privilege at best, and represents a rather problematic neo-luddite worldview at worst.

<comment><USER2> Good food, and innovations in food, follow the money. The money's not really in France. What ideas they had to contribute, other countries have now absorbed. There is as much good food and wine to be had in the Bay area as there is to be eaten in Paris, if not more.

<comment><USER4> But food culture, like all culture, takes a lot to build up.

The US might have a lot of high quality restaurants, but it also has walmart selling a ton of kinds of "asiago", most of them spreadable.

The fact that a movie like "supersize me" can be produced, is a symptom of a totally broken approach to food, not because eating pizza margherita and drinking wine for a month would be healthier than mcdonald's, but because any 10 year old would tell you it's idiotic to have a monotonous diet.

(For the uninitiated, Asiago is a single kind of cheese with a couple minor variations produced in northern italy. It is very much non-spreadable.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anecdote, I've stayed at an AirBnB in the outskirts of Paris where the host was a father of a daughter. Daughter had some friends over and they seemed pretty chilled. They just ran around the house talking French and doing whatever kids do. Father was pretty relaxed about parenting.

This concept of structured playtime seems foreign to me. I grew up in Thailand where my parents would just let me run around the neighborhood with some friends. We would start fires and explore abandoned buildings.

Trying to plan out kids playtime just seems counterintuitive. Seems like helicopter parenting to me.

<comment><USER4> IMO things are just getting out of hand as time goes by.

I grew up in italy and I guess I had similar experiences (at least, I did start fires and explore abandoned buildings :) ).

But my friends' kids in my home town don't do that anymore.

It seems to me this is in a way a result of the replacement of the "local community" with a wider world, which often brings a sense of uneaseness or unsafety.

I.e. if you know basically everyone who lives in your neighborhood you feel kids are pretty safe, and at most tell them not to go play near the "bad people".

If you don't know who lives near to you, and you hear a lot of news about kids being abducted/molested/injured (which might have happened before, but it was less often in the news) you get worried about kids running around unsupervised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> These blog posts are all the same. Effectively this person has discovered she does not like or share the same values as the set of parents she is friends with in the US. Instead of trying to find new friends who take a similar parenting attitude, the rational choice, she has decided the entire country is on the wrong path. Maybe she just needs to find new friends.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems to be a problem mainly among upper-middle-class toffs who are afraid their kids might not get into Harvard if they aren't signed for as much personal development stuff as can fit in a week since they could walk. And a very recent development at that.

In a recent article I saw on HN on how ugly, oppressive, and _typically American_ suburbs are, the author stated that the design of suburbs forces children out of unstructured play and necessarily makes their parents structure their free time around play dates. Which conflicts with my lived experience of going to a friend's house in Upper West Burbville, riding bikes and messing around with every kid in the neighborhood. The scenery was bland, but the _people_ made the experience memorable.

</comment><comment><USER8> I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.

<comment><USER9> Why is rearranging your life around your children is bad for you?

<comment><USER10> Because you need to be you. You have a partner and they need that you too. The kids need to understand that adults need to be adults with adult activities. Subverting everything for the children puts you in stasis and doesn't properly teach the children about growing up and being an individual or how to be with a partner. If the children cannot fill the unstructured time then they will never truly be adults.

<comment><USER9> So you can stay partying till 1 am and not spend time with your kids, working till 9 and let a babysitter put your kids to bed? Spend your weekend drinking beer and having fun with your friends instead of teaching your kid riding a bike or something else. Until you have kids you won't realize - it is actually fun and joy to spend your day with your kids and they appreciate it when they grow up and will want to spend time with you when they grow up, instead of not knowing their parents because they spend all time with a baby sitter while their parents are being "adults with adult activities"

<comment><USER10> Only on a message board would someone think I said that. We are talking about rearranging your whole life. I am most certainly not saying going to the other extreme.

<comment><USER9> So let's say you had a gym session at 8 am, and now you have to drop your kid at school at 8, according to your words "kids should understand that you have your activities" And you can just go to gym while your babysitter will cook breakfast and drop them at school? Why have kids then if you can't and don't want to change something in your life to be with them more?

<comment><USER10> Nope, that's not what I said or meant. Your a family and you balance. We are talking about people obsessing about scheduling and removing all adult time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It must depend on the neighborhood, or on the social class. As a middle-class frenchman living in the outskirts of NYC and accompanying my kids to plenty of birthday parties or playdates my experiences are anything but "structured". If anything compared to France parties tend to happen more often at stores or specialized venues than at people's home, but schedules are pretty much the same: play, eat, and more play, with light parental/staff supervision.

</comment><comment><USER12> When growing up I ended up going through both systems (living in Texas and France), so I feel qualified to talk about this:

I would finish school at 3 in the US, at 5/6 in France. There's 3 hours of the day that French kids can't spend in structured things. That alone completely changes dynamics. Basically you get to have one structured activity (like learning an instrument) and that's about it.

The French education system also doesn't promote much in terms of extracurricular activities. There's gym but you don't have sports in school or whatnot. Most depressing thing for me going from TX to France was losing Orchestra as a school class. Tried signing up to a conservatory but it would have ended up being my "1 thing" that I could do.

Honestly I preferred the American system much better. It gives you more flexibility for things like Boy Scouts, sports, or learning to program. And I still had loads of time to go to my friends house to do whatever.

So in the end the US system gives you more structured activities AND more unstructured time. School as an educational system is overrated. School as a socialised event organiser (like for Orchestra, Arts, and the like) is way underrated, and totally not a part of the French system.

The counterpoint is that I've heard recently that US schools have started giving waaaay too much homework, eating up at the unstructured time. I'm a fan of letting kids investigate what they want to do. Homework's important but so is giving people the opportunity to discover things.

Side note about the article: who brings their kids to Yoga class? Is that a thing?

<comment><USER13> The elementary school I went to in France would finish at 4:30pm _, and most busy days in middle school at 5pm. Did you go to some private school?

In elementary school there's the long playground times, one in the morning, one big at lunch, and one in the afternoon. Kids have plenty of time to play soccer.

In middle school the Wednesdays afternoon are always free, you have time do extracurricular activities there: soccer, swimming, tennis, music, whatever. There was time to do those things in elementary school, I don't remember exactly when.

_ There was a special extra hours until 6 for those who want to, but basically at the end of those you'd be completely done with your homework.

<comment><USER12> Oh, yeah, forgot about Wednesdays. Like you said, it's a good opportunity for sports and whatnot. I also had the half days on Wednesdays but basically my classes always ended between 5 and 6PM (This was High School).

There are the recesses in between, but it was like 20 minute breaks. I could sit and read, but usually ended up just chatting with friends. A nice break but kinda felt forced for me. I would have much rather taken most of that time and gotten out of school earlier and go to a friend's house or something...

The schoolwork thing is a good point, I don't remember having much schoolwork for home in France compared to the US. There were books to read or things to study but I had math homework every day in the US.

I think the big thing I dislike about the French system is the lack of many elective courses (apart from art, latin, or something like an extra foreign language). Felt like I had a lot more choice in the US (at least in my well- funded school). On the other hand, the French system isn't just multiple choice questions...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this actually happen? Can any American parents here confirm that they actually do structure every free minute of their kids' time and never let them simply run around and play on their own?

We raise our kids kinda like the author describes as the "French" way. You know, taking them along as we live our lives, and letting them play however they like. As it happens, we do actually live in France, but it never occurred to me that we were doing anything particularly novel.

If anything I thought our way of raising kids was the "American" way, and that the French are too stifling in the way they confine their kids to pushchairs with pacifiers in their mouths to sit quietly in the corner until age 5.

The only case I can think of among my acquaintance of the overscheduling described in the article was an English mother. Still, I wouldn't use that as an example to base an article like this on.

In short, I don't buy it. Surely nobody actually thinks that is a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> _No longer is it enough to spend the weekend running errands, doing what we normally do, and knowing that my daughter Sophie will find a way to play, whether juggling the grapes in the grocery store cart or throwing rocks into the water at Walden Pond. No: We must pay for playtime, and have it be organized for us._

"No longer is it enough?"――and who exactly is forcing this except the parents' own minds?

</comment><comment><USER16> > To help kids become more creative, we actually need to start doing less.

Yes to doing less, yes to let kids getting bored, because "boredom" is fertile and even necessary. But the aim is not to make kids "more creative", this is not something you really want for your kids as a parent. What you really want is to maximise chances that your kids will have a "good (enough) life".

<comment><USER17> That's entirely unsustainable. If enough people do what you suggest, your children will find themselves facing a Malthusian catastrophe with the wrong values to avoid it. It's also quite selfish.

<comment><USER18> Depends on what you understand as "good life", and differences in that understanding are probably why we aren't in the middle of that catastrophe yet (at least in this area of life). But if everyone were to raise their kids for optimal job-market value, then yeah, that would start sucking pretty quickly.

> _It 's also quite selfish._

Seems that having children in general does that to you. It's something that I hope I'll be able to avoid when I have children of my own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe it depends on where you are?I have several (male) french friends in the DC area, and they are some of the most structured and, frankly, unplayful parents I've ever seen. They almost seem uncomfortable even being around children. But, DC is pretty serious and high strung in general, so maybe it's the type of people the area attracts.

</comment><comment><USER20> Unsolicited parenting advice is a flaming bag of shit on your doorstep.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's like the author has never even heard of the phrase, "The grass is always greener..." and taken a moment to think of why that is. A glimpse of something, at a moment in time, doesn't give you a real sense of it's long-term efficacy or real costs.

<comment><USER22> You should put a finer point on it, and say why you think it is. I am 99.999% certain the author, as a writer, has heard the phrase "The grass is always greener...."

<comment><USER23> The article's author is making a point that the GP disagrees with, therefore the article's author must not be rational. It's a tired trope.[1]

1\. [https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:ne...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:news.ycombinator.com)

<comment><USER21> Meanwhile half-assed assumptions about other people based on a single post? I don't know about tropes, but it gets exhausting after a while.

<comment><USER23> You're right. I'm sorry.

<comment><USER21> Apology accepted, thanks for that.

<comment><USER22> And yet you _still_ didn't explain what you don't like about the OP.

<comment><USER21> I did in my original post, just not to your satisfaction apparently.

<comment><USER22> Yes, you referred to a bunch of cliches.....you FAILED to show why they apply in this situation.

It's easy for me to point out that you are the type of person who doesn't see the forest for the trees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seriously why are we liking Salon?

For more self reinforced rubbish that has zero citations?

Left wing person is outrage now about a self perceived issue they once saw!

There's plenty of real sites that talk about this re-occurring perceived issue we've all heard a million times before.</comment>


GNU Autotools (aka GNU Build System) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Autotools <comment><AUTHOR> One finds a description of GNU Autotools (aka the GNU Build System) on this page...

One also finds the following quote:

"In his column for ACM Queue, FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp criticized the GNU Build System:[8]

 _The idea is that the configure script performs approximately 200 automated tests, so that the user is not burdened with configuring libtool manually. This is a horribly bad idea, already much criticized back in the 1980s when it appeared, as it allows source code to pretend to be portable behind the veneer of the configure script, rather than actually having the quality of portability to begin with. It is a travesty that the configure idea survived.

Kamp sketches the history of the build system in the portability problems inherent in the multitude of 1980s Unix variants, and bemoans the need for such build systems to exist:

the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.h> and <stdlib.h> exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code."_

Now, I don't know if I personally agree with that criticism -- but I think of Poul-Henning Kamp's quote as something to be potentially reviewed and/or thought about, by developers of future cross-platform build systems...</comment>