L.A. is finally ditching coal – and replacing it with another polluting fuel - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-utah-coal-los-angeles-climate-20190711-story.html <comment><USER2> Better headline is "LA is reducing carbon output by 50% by replacing coal electricity production with natural gas."

It will be funny when the switch from natural gas to solar in twenty years has a headline of "LA is finally ditching natural gas - and replacing it with another polluting fuel."

<comment><USER3> Yes, but there's both a battle and a war afoot. In isolation, replacing coal with gas is a win, but LA:

1\. Has a political base willing to tolerate more cost than a mere gas plant.

2\. Is comparatively wealthy and thus has the budget for a more expensive option.

3\. Is in a renewables dream zone: mildest climate of any large city (i.e. smallest daily and seasonal usage swings), clear skies almost year round and steady ocean winds blowing over coastal ridge lines.

The thinking to an activist is that LA needs to be doing more, because let's be honest: there are other local governments in the US who will be doing _less_ simply because of political affiliation. And I think that's exactly right.

<comment><USER4> That's mostly because said political base doesn't know where the power comes from until they hear about it. Check out stacked bar graph further down. LA is 30% renewable, 31% natural gas, 18% coal, and 21% something else in 2017.

So they're still getting 49% from fossil fuels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a terribly depressing article, in that it was written with a 2005 mindset, before the astonishing breakthrough in pricing for wind, solar, and storage over the past 15 years.

The irrational attachment to "hard energy," the thermally generates forms, has been dripping away quickly for most of the energy sector as economics are making it less feasible.

The LADWP seems to be a small pocket of backward thinking, however. I just heard about them for the first time yesterday as part of a petty political squabble with the mayor, in television advertisements that decry green energy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good reporting. A few more points:

1\. In the famous California power mix charts, 'Other' includes power bought from different utilities where the exact generating method is abstracted away. You can mentally think of the 'Other' as 'Unsure'.

2\. Intermountain's conversion to natgas has been long rumored, facing both regulatory pressure, environmental pressure, and infrastructure considerations. Large amounts of natgas is already piped through the Kern River Pipeline in this corridor, going to Nevada and California from the Opal hub in Wyoming. This is where Southern Nevada gets most of its electricity -- through natgas power plants alongside I-15.

3\. There is a project called TransWest Express [1], to build a HVDC transmission line from Wyoming to Las Vegas to carry wind power from Wyoming to markets in the Southwest. This will run immediately parallel to the existing Intermountain HVDC line for much of their overlap, and no connection is planned at the Intermountain Power Plant (the latter line's origin) or anywhere else between the two for now. Vegas is presumably the destination for TransWest Express because it's a power exchange hub for many electricity suppliers and consuming utilities, but the overall effect is still a bit silly, because most of the power exchanged at the Vegas hub flows towards Southern California anyway on existing AC lines. One might imagine a different scenario where the Intermountain line gets split in two at Vegas, TransWest express only builds the "missing portion" between Wyoming and Intermountain Power Plant, and then there's an available chain of HVDC lines to ship power between 4 key interchange nodes...

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16452926#16454026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16452926#16454026)

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, gas still outputs CO2 but it's sooooooo much cleaner than coal in terms of everything else (and it's also cleaner in terms of CO2 per watt) that this seems like a solid win considering the lifetime over which power plants exist. It's not like this will be here for 100yr, they will get to choose what to replace it with in 50yr or less at which time we'll hopefully have good enough storage to replace the capacity of the gas plant with something greener.

<comment><USER8> That still doesn't explain why LA finds it necessary to shut down the natural gas facilities in their state while investing in one in Utah. Which is the real story here.

<comment><USER2> Same reason why they ran a coal plant for so long. As a non-Californian, I don't pay too much attention but it just seems like NIMBY clashing with reality of needing power.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't be California if it wasn't NIMBY.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could be worse; they could be burning biomass (wood pellets), the "clean" energy that's causing mass deforestation and even higher particulate pollution than coal.

</comment><comment><USER10> So... LA is doing the only feasible thing, apart from building nuclear power, that will avoid power cuts? Seems reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course. If Hydro and Geothermal isn't a option, then Nuclear power is the only alternative that can completly remove carbon emissions. Renewables like solar and wind will always need backup power, which today is either coal, gas, or biofuels (i.e. burn garbage or corn). There is no battery technology today or forthcoming that can power a modern economy overnight or over seasons.

There is no other alternative to nuclear. I find it depressing that neither the media, nor the scientific and environmentalist community is never straight about this fact.

By the way, here is the energy mix of my home province: [http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html](http://live.gridwatch.ca/home- page.html)

When it comes to reducing fossil fuel use for energy generation, outside of gas usage during peak times (and to backup wind deployments), we're almost there. Don't have to wait until 2060 or whatever like Germany was projecting after they closed their Nuclear plants. Don't have to invest in exotic unproven technologies. Don't have to wait for technology innovation to save renewables.

<comment><USER12> "Nuclear power" evokes images of the Chernobyl disaster and mushroom clouds. In reality we should be thinking of France, where ~70% of electricity production comes from nuclear power.

<comment><USER13> "Nuclear power" _does_ evoke France to me. Mis-management and poor safety controls are what Chernobyl evokes for me.

It was close to 90% Nuclear a decade ago though. Some of that has been replaced by renewable sources, some by natural gas :(

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France)</comment></comment></comment>


In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/us-students-have-achieved-world-domination-in-computer-science-skillsfor-now <comment><USER2> > Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major > Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. > Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated.

There is a huge variation among countries in how subjects are taught and tested. I would like to add that many of my peers have resorted to streamlining for whiteboard interviews, and unsurprisingly, they end up with well-paying jobs.

<comment><USER3> I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It's 66 multiple choice questions, and many of them seem like "gotcha" questions where one of the answers is an off-by-one error or something like that.

And how about this lovely question:

> A personal identification number that opens a certain lock consists of a > sequence of 3 DIFFERENT digits from 0 though 9, inclusive. How many possible > PINs are there?

Putting aside the value of this question in the first place, the correct answer is 720 but it also includes the answer 1000 in case you didn't notice the emphasis on "different".

Doesn't seem like a great test to me unless it's about your reading comprehension and ability to decipher code with single-letter variable names.

<comment><USER4> Thinking of the problem as a nested for loop it's intuitive to see how you get 1000 combinations without the numbers being unique but I dont see how to get 720 combinations as the answer when each digit is different. Can you explain where 720 combinations comes from in the context I mentioned?

<comment><USER5> I'd like to highlight this comment for everyone who is saying the question can only be gotten wrong by someone who misreads it.

It can be easy for people to forget that many people (even coders) have never done this type of math before.

<comment><USER6> I believe CS degrees require discreet math (and highschool algebra 2), which means they've done permutations and combinatorics, so yes they've done these types of problems before. The real question is how long has it been?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > making sure that both the educational institutions and students enrolled at > those schools were statistically representative of schools and computer > science students throughout the respective nations.

Given the typical CS student body, this basically means Indian, Chinese, and Russian students studying at US universities performed better than those studying at Indian, Chinese, and Russian universities...

Either because US universities teach better or because the best students come to the US for their education.

<comment><USER8> What about culture? Computer programming languages and paradigms have all been developed under western culture; they're written in english with logic that is derived from western philosophy.

Without being fully absorbed in this culture, you will lack the key thing that makes you go "ah ha! I get it!"

<comment><USER9> Russia is more Western than Eastern country culturally. Historically ~20% of Russia which is oldest, most populated (~80% as per Pareto rule) and influental is the western part of the country, bordering European countries.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and Russian computer scientists are still good, but obviously the US is _more_ Western than Russia, so perhaps that is why they got beat in the competition?

<comment><USER9> According to this logic Russia should be more similar to US in results while India and China should be more distant. Do test results show that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious to see how skills hold up in the era of "every child must code."

I believe that a healthy amount of CS/CE students get into the field due to existing (strong) interest in the field. This is probably especially true of people graduating during the outsourcing era (2000ish-2012), when enrollment plunged due to fears that there would be few software engineering jobs left in the US.

I'd be surprised if people in it for the money rather than interest will perform as well. If parents start pushing their children into the field because it pays well, then schools may lower standards in order to increase graduation rates, thus flooding the market with unemployable people (see: India).

</comment><comment><USER11> > When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching > graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, > and Russia.

So much for "world domination".

<comment><USER12> meanwhile European CS students, with their fellow students from the UK, Switzerland, Korea, Japan, [add whatever country you like except the 3 which are - on average - worst than the US in CS) are busy getting even more better than the average CS US student

<comment><USER13> Going to need a citation on that. The US presently dominates the tech sector. Rankings of programs are generally to be taken with a grain of salt, but MIT, Stanford, UCB and Carnegie Mellon all rank the top 4 on almost any list you'll find.

Meanwhile, in the UK CS grads have the highest unemployment among any field, and have maintained that "award" for nearly a decade. That certainly indicates that your educational programs for CS are lacking if you didn't go to a school named Oxford or Cambridge.

There's a lot of ways you can measure which country has the better educational system for a given degree type, but there's very few metrics that indicate anything other than the EU being _way_ behind the US.

<comment><USER14> "That certainly indicates that your educational programs for CS are lacking if you didn't go to a school named Oxford or Cambridge."

lol, you can't judge educational programs by the rate of unemployment! You realize how little sense that makes? The fact that you would even state such a fallacious comment makes me question YOUR educational background. A countries unemployment rate is massively dependent on the economy of the country. You don't say, look at the lack of top tech companies in Russia, it must mean their students are idiots! It has all to do with their governmental policy- making and the sanctions on the country, as well as various historical factors.

The UK has been under government "austerity measures" since the 2008/2009 crash which have massively reduced growth across sectors. The UK actually has a great education system but this doesn't matter if the economy is doing badly and jobs aren't being created.

In fact (I live in California) from all I've seen of the US CS market, US grads are by far the worst in terms of all the nationalities I work with. The fact that the US tech industry is booming has far more to do with the VC world, the booming economy, and the huge amount of people from around the world moving to California, than it has to do with US schools being good at CS. All the top data scientists at my current company are from China!

<comment><USER13> > The fact that you would even state such a fallacious comment makes me > question YOUR educational background.

I'd advise you avoid resorting to personal attacks when you disagree with a non-personal statement, as it really does lead to people ignoring your the premise of your point. Personal attacks when calling out fallacious arguments are particularly off-putting.

That said, you failed to understand the premise because you took one sentence out of context. The point I was making was that Cambridge and Oxford both have top CS programs which can result in jobs outside the UK and EU. Major tech companies routinely nab graduates from those two universities on work visa's in the US.

The importing of UK CS graduates plummets beyond top-tier universities, while China, Russia and India all see massive work visa imports into the US. The UK, outside of Cambridge and Oxford, simply doesn't export a lot of CS graduates, indicating an educational gap (or at the very least, an "interview gap") between those countries and countries with massive work visa exports.

> In fact (I live in California) from all I've seen of the US CS market, US > grads are by far the worst in terms of all the nationalities I work with.

Your anecdata isn't interesting or useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how well US students would ranked on a test written by Russian, Indian, of Chinese testing company instead of a USA testing company.

<comment><USER16> This is a good point. From the article "Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia."

It seems reasonable to expect a test written for a specific education system (either implicitly or explicitly) will be biased against others.

On the other hand, it is not that surprising that the US is a the top. It is a pretty big country with a long tradition for high quality education and a lot of funds going into CS departments. However, I will be surprised if this is not changing towards more dominance by India and China, because both countries are focusing a lot of resources in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What did they want to find out with this study and why did they leave out Europe? Also: Did they consider the possibility that the test was biased since it "was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service"? I guess the exams that Chinese students get might be different from this one, while it is probably a familiar structure for US students...

</comment><comment><USER18> Yet, Russia consistently dominates programming competitions, which strongly suggests that a multiple choice exam may not actually be representative of real world skills [https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students- dominate-a...](https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-at- the-computer-programming-olympics-and-american-computer-science-students-are- unsurprised/)

<comment><USER19> Are you saying programming competitions are representative of "real world skills"? There's certainly a correlation in the same way the exam is but you'd be hard-pressed to say more than that.

<comment><USER20> But questions asked in interviews of tech companies are similar to programming competitions than mcqs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Details on the test:

[https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science](https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science)

Journal paper is here:

[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116)

<comment><USER22> Of course US students perform better in a US field test. The students should also do Chinese, Russian and Indian tests translated to their languages to eliminate bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It feels like we're at a point where people have to be sorry if they find a difference between genders. This article put the gender graph at the end and moved on without discussion, as compared to every other graph, so I looked at the paper[1] and they do the same thing.

Is this study so flawed that the results are meaningless and shouldn't be discussed, or are the results meaningful and the authors will get backlash if they discuss their findings?

I'm curious why they even put the gender graph in the paper. They didn't look at differences in Elite Institutions like they did for countries. They certainly have more data than I do, but I'm left to make my own uninformed conclusion.

[1]:[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116)

<comment><USER5> I guess people will be blind to information that disagrees with them. They DO discuss it, it's right there at the end:

>In every country, the men came out ahead; the gap overall was smallest in China, and biggest in the U.S.

But if you are looking at a difference of between gender (0.4) and thinking you'd rather hear them talk about that than the difference between nationality ( _double that_ at 0.8) then you clearly are coming to the conversation with a narrative already in mind and are not looking at the data.

<comment><USER23> The line you quoted isn't discussion, it is stating results. In the article and the paper there is discussion about the differences in education between countries. For example...

(From the article)

> CS departments and CS education in general have a longer history and are > much more established in the United States than in China or India > especially.

> A lot more is spent per student in the U.S. than in the other three > countries.

(From the paper)

> United States have likely similar math and science levels as students in > Russia (Implying the difference in CS scores comes from somewhere else)

But the line you quoted was the only "discussion" on the differences in gender in the article. I think there has to be at least something to discuss.Why is the gender gap smallest in China? Why is there a gap at all for people sitting in the same classes? Are there any other metrics (like age?) that had similar differences? Did the size of the gap change when looking at elite institutions?

To be completely fair, there was some discussion in the last paragraph in the paper, but the only hint at what might be causing the difference was that the women in CS aren't high achieving enough. I wouldn't count that as in depth discussion on the cause.

> The gender gap in skills does indicate that more effort is needed to attract > higher-achieving female students into CS [...]

Just putting a chart at stating results the end of a paper and an article isn't a discussion. There is a gap between genders about half as large as the gap between countries. Having questions about that doesn't imply a narrative.

<comment><USER5> You only seem interested in discussing gender to bring up the ghost of genetic predispositions. But if you want to twist the study in that way, you'll have to first say that you think that whites are genetically superior to non-white in the world of computer science. After all, doesn't the study show the gap is even greater for nationality?

Just come out and say it, instead of having this proxy argument over gender.

If it isn't clear: this study can not be used to draw conclusions about racial or gender predispositions. This can only be used to show the status of education _on this particular test_ and _for people graduating right now_. It doesn't control for how those people got there. If you want to twist it in some other way, that's your prerogative, but you're doing shoddy science.

<comment><USER24> > You only seem interested in discussing gender to bring up the ghost of > genetic predispositions. But if you want to twist the study in that way

This feels really disingenuous. The questions they brought up are perfectly fine, it's you who seems to be intent on poisoning the discussion by attacking them instead of discussing the issue.

> you'll have to first say that you think that whites are genetically superior > to non-white in the world of computer science. After all, doesn't the study > show the gap is even greater for nationality?

Nationality is not the same thing as race/ethnicity. At the very least, in the US, a substantial percentage of CS majors are of Asian descent, not European.

<comment><USER5> "Did Bush do 9/11? Can jetfuel _really_ melt steel beams? Are other races and genders worse at computer science than me because they are genetically inferior? I'm just asking questions!" said the online poster.

Just because they measured the data, does not imply they were trying to _explain it_. To explain a result would need a very different experimental setup. Every scientist knows this. It's not a conspiracy if a scientist declines to throw darts at a wall on the cause of something. In fact, they specifically say the cause is likely _not explainable_ by the test differences, which were too small.

"The within-country gender gaps in skills are small enough, however, that they may explain little about gender gaps in CS graduates' labor market outcomes".

In fact, the poster is not "just asking questions". They have a clear opinion, and ignored the researcher's own statements to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a question from the other side - what are good courses for people from these countries to study so that they become more skilled ?

Im assuming that most of the Coursera/udacity/etc combo is ineffective, because the students from other countries must already be consuming them. So the difference is clearly originating from college level courses.

Should everyone just do Abelson and Sussman + Knuth and call it a day ?

<comment><USER26> > what are good courses for people from these countries to study so that they > become more skilled ?

Just my opinion, but more doing, less "learning". I've interviewed dozens of Indian candidates at my company, and I've noticed a huge problem: a good 50-60% of them know the jargon and theory, but if you try to probe deeper they don't know what any of it means.

It reminded me strongly of Feynman's account of the Brazilian education system[1]

Basically, I think serious students need to actually build stuff and gain a deep intuition of the concepts they are learning. There seems to be far too much rote memorization of CS concepts and jargon without deep understanding of the _why_ and the _how_.

[1] [http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil- education](http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It compares only India, China, Russia, and the US, where there is a huge variation in education quality for the first 3 countries.

It would have _far_ more interesting to see the US stacked up to other English speaking countries. Wonder why they didn't do that and had the exam translated instead..

</comment><comment><USER28> Completely anecdotally, but I've noticed in other parts of the world, education is almost entirely rote memorization, whereas Western education stresses more critical thinking and creative thinking. This may be more useful when it comes to CS and other subjects.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does ACM ICPC has to do anything with computer science skills? Because that competetion is dominated by Russian and Asian students and US universities come nowhere close.

[https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results](https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results)

Google Summer of Code on the other hand is dominated by Indian Students.

TLDR: If it's a level playing field I don't think US students would be in front of other countries.

<comment><USER29> More likely, the smartest students in each country work on things that have landed older students good jobs. In US, that means preparing for interviews at big tech companies. In Russia and India, it means something different.

Averages in a country don't really say much about the smartest students in that country anyway. It seems likely that the smartest students in China, India and the US are similarly gifted.

If you look at the average high school student in the US, you might conclude that Americans are pretty stupid, but the averages are brought down by the obscene amount of educational inequality in the US. American CS students aren't so affected by this because they mostly come from the "good" schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hold on just a minute. Shouldn't they instead say "students at US schools"?

</comment><comment><USER31> Seems like we're really just testing standard of living or per capita income. It'd be surprising if these results were out of line with figures like that.

Not sure we're doing anything better than these other countries other than remaining the world's only superpower.

</comment><comment><USER32> In my experience, many of the best CS students from foreign countries go to U.S. universities anyways (usually in the upper tier programs). So wouldn't that mean other countries are already at a disadvantage?

</comment><comment><USER33> If buzzfeed can win a pulitzer prize, then ieee can get a magazine with buzzfeed headlines. What a time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know what kind of questions were asked in this survey?

</comment><comment><USER34> Meanwhile, most computer science jobs are not in the U.S.

<comment><USER35> On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.

<comment><USER36> > most technically interesting

Like making six figures a year for screwing people over at Facebook?

Sorry for being snarky, but lots of jobs in IT businesses in the US tend to be somewhat unhelpful for the society at all and not really providing any benefit in the long term.

In regard of this I'm always somewhat "happy" that we fail in Europe with building "the next Google", "the next Facebook" or whatever.

<comment><USER37> You must come from a well off background to afford the luxury of morality when choosing jobs.

While you might be happy Europe has no six figure SW jobs, I, not being able afford a decent house in a decent area to raise a family on your average Austrian SW dev salary, am not, and would gladly take a FAANG job any day regardless of how morally questionable it may seem from your McMansion.

My family's well being comes first.

<comment><USER36> You haven't got the slightest idea of my background but rest assured it's rather the opposite of "well off", coming from a small village in the middle of literally nowhere in Germany.

Maybe because of that we're holding values and standards like "do no evil" high, because there are more important things than money.

I can't afford a house in a decent area either, but I'm pretty sure I won't fuck up lives with my job. And I'm still making enough money to support my family and keep everything going.

<comment><USER37> How will working for FAANG fuck up people's lives?

<comment><USER38> If we somehow end up in a dystopian nightmare, I'm 99% certain it will be (at least in part) because of one of those 5 companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It could be that my memory of hypothesis testing is outdated, but being 1 standard deviation away from the mean isn't evidence of a significant difference in skills.

<comment><USER40> Except that this isn't hypothesis testing. The graphs are not clearly labelled, but I'm interpreting the results as indicating that the entire population is shifted. This would be a significant advantage.

(If it was hypothesis testing, 1 sigma could be statistically significant depending on sample size. You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance.)

<comment><USER39> > You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean > variance.

That's exactly what I'm doing - thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Of course, they get all the money of rich parents, because other countries can't keep up.

</comment><comment><USER42> > When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching > graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, > and Russia.

There are a few explanations for this

1.) Programming is an English skillset, which the native English-speaking countries have an advantage. Out of the native English speaking countries (US, England, Canada, Australia, and others), US has the biggest economy, the best tech companies that can train students as interns, and the best infrastructure to grow the students. Where as China, while it does have the population advantage, doesn't have the English capability. Chinese government is currently actively engaging in nationalism (maligning foreign brands, censoring foreign cultures, destroying churches, arresting pastors, saying winnie the pooh is an evil foreign influence), thus will have less and less English skillset overtime.

2.) more innovative/risk taking mindsets. This allows a more creative problem- solving skills amongst students. The Chinese education style is regurgitation and there is a culture of copying and cheating amongst students. Rote learning is widely practiced in schools in India as well, which isn't conducive to innovative problem solving.

<comment><USER25> I don't think so. I'm specifically referring to India, which is all English. All education in India happens in English - it is our primary official language.

I think the difference is in the teachers. This difference is most likely originating because of the education given in univs by good professors.

Everyone has access to the online courses/MOOC

<comment><USER42> > All education in India happens in English

That is incorrect. In urban areas in India, schools teach in English but in rural areas it's in Hindi. In urban areas, only if it's a big city, then peer to peer communication is in English. However, in other cities, the only interaction in English is with a teacher; other times is in the native tongue.

And even if the students in big cities are learning mainly in English, the teachers are usually not native English speakers, which means that the grammer/pronounciation suffers. which is what you see with Indian engineers that have migrated to other countries.

[https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in- In...](https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-India-Hindi- English-or-the-provincial)

<comment><USER25> You are accurate of course - but for the entire sample set that would even be in the running for a computer science test would be entirely native to english for most of their lives in India.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wheel of Stars: A music box made from 118,218 stars - <AUTHOR> http://wheelof.com/stars/

<comment><USER2> sounds like a super fun programming project. one of his other projects, musical chess, is cool, too: <http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2009/05/musical- chess/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Just loved it. Actually left it on for quite a while. The music of the spheres...</comment>


A systematic study of the advice people would give to their younger selves - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/06/06/first-systematic-study-of-the-advice-people-would-give-to-their-younger-selves/ <comment><USER2> This is a funny one. Just imagine if you do go back in time, tell your younger self to "not marry her" and you actually don't marry her, then you may end up in a different position like being alone or wasting your life chasing other feel good things. Then that new you may grow up with even more regrets and dream of being able to go back in time to tell themselves to DO marry her.

<comment><USER3> I find this comic sums up that feeling quite well: [https://existentialcomics.com/comic/33](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/33)

<comment><USER4> "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world's foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."

– Søren Kierkegaard

<comment><USER5> Whenever this is posted to HN commenters usually ask how you can regret something after having hanged yourself. Or maybe it's in the split second before the rope snaps and you lose consciousness?

<comment><USER6> He was a Christian and I think he could believe in death and regret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've wanted to build this as a service (for fun). Basically a sight to give advice to yourself from two years in the past. Why two years? It's long enough to have some perspective while retaining enough detail to be useful. The fun bit would be that you would have to contribute your advice before you got advice from people similar to yourself.

It would be a lot of fun to try to get basic demographics out of people giving the advice and try to find out the best way to pair advice given with advice seekers. Age? Some life choice your contemplating? Gender/Orientation/Race who knows what would make advice actually useful!

Probably a terrible idea but it's fun to think about.

<comment><USER8> [https://heyfromthefuture.com/age/](https://heyfromthefuture.com/age/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902561)

<comment><USER7> That's great! I'm so glad it exists!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note sure if it's taken out of context, but I always use this quote to tell myself that I cannot make a decision that's 100% right or wrong:

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7511-i-saw-my-life- branchin...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7511-i-saw-my-life-branching- out-before-me-like-the)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Key quote from the article:

> Participants mostly gave themselves advice around relationships ("Don't > marry her. Do. Not. Marry. Her."), education ("Go to college"), selfhood > ("Be yourself"), direction and goals ("Keep moving, keep taking chances, and > keep bettering yourself"), and money ("Save more, spend less"). These topics > closely match the most common topics mentioned in research on people's > regrets.

> Most participants said that the advice they offered was tied to a pivotal > event in their past, such as a time they were bullied, a relationship > breakup, or an incident involving drink or drugs, and about half the time > they had regret for what had happened. The timing of these pivotal events > was most commonly between age 10 and 30 (consistent with research into the > reminiscence bump – the way that we tend to recall more autobiographical > memories from our teens and early adulthood).

<comment><USER10> > The majority of participants also said that following the advice would have > brought their younger self closer to the kind of person they aspired to be, > rather than making them more like their "ought self" (that is, the kind of > person that other people or society said they should be).

This was the most important sentence for me.

<comment><USER11> Me too. But it also made me wonder how you draw a line between the 2. We're social creatures, and to a degree our aspirations are created by social expectations; the boundaries of who we are are fuzzy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now I need the study that tells me whether following that advice leads to the expected outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER13> Context is the crux of it all IMO. We try this with our kids. It doesn't work all that well. They have to have some context or experience to understand what the advice means as for myself, I would have a difficult time blindly acting on advice without understanding and unfortunately, hitting a wall with your head is a very good lesson.

<comment><USER14> This is the struggle is it not? While it seems like some lessons are best learned the hard way, it also feels like a waste of time to not learn from someone else's mistakes.

<comment><USER13> I think so too. My father was a teacher and then a school principle. He is a very likable fellow and had an ease with most all of his students in relating with them and getting them to listen to what he had to say, particularly the difficult ones others didn't like, probably his high likability factor helped tremendously and very happy disposition. It is having that bridge or way over to relate to others or hook them in that really allows advice or words to have a deeper meaning in terms of sinking in knowledge or advice. Years later I've seen fairly often students of his past recognizing him and thanking him for things he told them. Pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Spend more time on discussion forums, young Frog"!

<comment><USER16> Future Frog here...

You first learned about the VR startup that has replaced Facebook and LinkedIn from an article on HN in 2020, so keep on surfing baby (p.s. go-all-in)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Advice I'd give:

\- Discipline yourself to train your musical skill between 14 and 20. It is fine to also try to win over girls with it (I thought it was disingenuous at the time, I was wrong).

\- If you can stick to programming, do it. Just be sure to find fun in it while sticking to it, if not it's okay to drop it.

\- Rush through university in 3 years (bachelor and master) in business informatics and call it a day. Do keep an active social life though and do the honours program as well. If you can't help yourself, do an academic gap year with very varied courses after your master.

\- For your master, you may want to consider going to another country. If you want to work in the USA, then try to see if you can get a cheapish US master that will allow you to quality for the H1B visa.

\- During this time, learn coding on your own, enough resources available by now.

\- If you have issues with being social, I wrote a guide. It's attached. You'll be fine.

\- If you feel addicted to video games, understand it's social contact that you're after. So simply get more of a social life.

\- By doing this: your life will be nothing like mine. You'll encounter your own set of issues which shows how gritty life really is. You'll simply have to deal with it. Also, life could be far grittier so count your blessings!

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing. I'd like to read your guide about being social. Did you mean to add a link?

<comment><USER19> Is there really a guide? It's all "social skills". Or whatever who am I talk?

<comment><USER17> Let's show some things, I did not mean to add a link. It'd become a book. This is by no means comprehensive:

1\. Giving someone a compliment almost always warrants a neutral or better reaction back.

2\. Giving someone a compliment about their personality almost always guarantees the person will believe that said quality is part of them.

3\. Being negative, even what you say is true, is quite likely to invite neutral to negative feedback. I've experienced this one on HN sometimes (this particular sentence is an example of the principle FYI).

4\. Making a joke most of the times has to do with: show A, but then you show how you meant B and B is logically consistent. Unfortunately, it didn't help me directly in generating jokes but it did help me in analyzing them. That allows me to see whether my own jokes are any good.

5\. What someone finds funny says something about their personality, and most likely also about the level of development they are at (I got this from a child psychology book but I believe it to be true for adults as well). If someone makes a lot of jokes about rockets, then that person probably likes to think about rockets. If a person jokes about how prime numbers aren't actually prime, because the only prime number is zero (just made that one up, ha!) then such person likes to think about math and language. If someone makes racist jokes, I immediately try to distance myself from them.

6\. BODY LANGUAGE EXISTS!!! When I learned about this (age of 16) my mind was blown. It took a while to understand what was meant by "language" and it was very hard to find a good perspective on interpreting it, but I did eventually. I think my own intuition was the best perspective, because body language is all about context and books -- in most cases -- are way too literal about the "language" part. Some books, however, gave some good examples of how context can change (e.g. you also need to take into account what someone says and my meditation experience taught me you also need to take into account to what extent people are conscious about their body language, attention to it changes its meaning).

7\. People like more good looking people. However, there is an interaction effect, because people also like their favorite archetypes. So my suggestion is: become the best good looking archetype that you want to be. I'm currently not following this advice, but my candidate list is: the intellectual, the hipster, the musician and the consultant. These archetypes are all part of my personality.

8\. People who exercise well, sleep well and eat well have better social skills than people who don't. Except that there is an interesting thing that happens when people are slightly sleep deprived (this has been studied, don't have a source), which is also my experience. In certain conditions/situations people have better social skills when slightly sleep deprived, their inhibition is also lower but they're sharper than someone with alcohol.

9\. Alcohol sucks, don't use it for social skills. I've experimented a lot with this actually. Yes, you lose inhibition but in my particular case my common sense drops more rapidly than my lack of inhibition and anxiety is making up for it.

10\. With some people rationality doesn't help. If it doesn't, then it is my believe they are open to an emotional perspective. For these people, you need to sway them by emotions and feelings. Being ultra positive always works here, even what you say isn't true. Since these people don't care about rationality when they have this perspective, they are turning a blind eye towards truth in that moment. Don't fight it, level with them and just tell them that they are amazing people and if they aren't doing anything crazy, it's all fine. If they are, just give them a small hint of where to go, nothing too big since the emotional perspective cares about feelings and if you overload with information, that always feels bad.

11\. I have another guide on how to get intimate relationships :P

I could go on. All these things weren't apparent for my 16 year old self. Most of these weren't apparent to my 20 year old self either. Some skills I only learned after the age of 28.

<comment><USER19> >11\. I have another guide on how to get intimate relationships :P

Hey man I need the part 2 for this. Just got out of a rejection (I always thought she was into me but it was all in my head).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People can try giving similar advise to their younger nephews, nieces, etc and see the effect. The effect would be about the same of any advise given to their younger selves. Younger selves are excellent at ignoring advise from older ones.

<comment><USER21> Yup, and advices are rarely intemporal. Some things work better in certain contexts than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find it odd that they didn't have more folks in the same category as myself. I would want to warn myself about the circumstances of the deaths of some people I knew. A phrase such as "Make sure he doesn't get on that bus" seems a little more important in my eyes. I suppose the warning about horrible events would have more effect, but if limited to personal experiences it would seem saving folks in your orbit would be more popular. Maybe its a sign of how much safer the world has become.

<comment><USER23> It might have to do primarily with how the question is asked. If you say "what information about the future would you impart to your past self if given the chance", then that opens it up to broadly changing future events. But "what advice would you give yourself" presents it more as what would you say to benefit yourself the most.

It's also possible that those that have had people close to them die in easily preventable ways may think of it differently. Having someone important to you die in a car crash is different than having them die of old age or of cancer or some genetic disorder, which are broadly either unchangeable, unknowable of what causes it for sure, or both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Buy more MSFT, a lot more.

<comment><USER25> And hold onto after it crashed around 1999 until Balmer left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The one piece of advice a professor might have been able to give their class in the 60's or 70's, but I could never say now: Have more sex.

<comment><USER27> Why couldn't you say it now?

I had the idea young people are having less sex than the generations before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd mostly want to tell my younger self to invest everything I had in bitcoin.

<comment><USER29> and dont keep it in mount gox...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If I had followed the advice I'd have to give my past self to avoid unnecessary pain and hardship, I wouldn't be where I am today, and I wouldn't have met my wife.

I'll take all the pain and suffering it took to get to where I am. It made me who I am, and affected who I met, and who I kept, and how strong my relationships are.

I wouldn't trade that for anything.

<comment><USER31> That's why I would tell myself to umm... lean in. I believed my love should be constantly high and less of a fight. I never believed relationships can survive lows. I thought study and programming should be effortless, so I was hard on myself when I was not smooth like an olympic gymnast. I could have excercised harder through some aches, hangovers, insomnia etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Buy Microsoft at the IPO." :-)

Seriously: be nicer to people. Everyone around you just as insecure and unsure of themselves as your are. You don't need to show you're better or cleverer than everyone else. Just smile, be friendly, and chill. And offer to help out with the grunt work more often.

</comment><comment><USER33> "However scary it may seem, switch to emacs, evil mode is good enough."

"There's this thing called lisp, you should check it out."

Amusingly my younger self did actually get this advice (thanks Randall [0]), but I did not know what to do with it at the time, other than to file it away for exploration in the future. Only over a decade later when I finally had enough context could I actually take action on that advice.

This is one of the reasons why I find general advice to be useless in many cases. "You should do X" or "You should not do X" are practically useless, and often the person already knows that they should or should not do something, but they have no idea how to get from where they are to that imagined future. If all you can give is advice, the best you can do is try to give advice about the very next step so that someone can actually act on it. "Check out lisp" should be, "go install this package, and read this book," or "here's a professor you should take a course from." When I have gotten advice in the form of "take a course from this person," it has always proved to be invaluable because the first step was stupidly simple, and the rest of the journey had a guide who had walk that way before.

0\. [https://xkcd.com/224/](https://xkcd.com/224/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Raise your hand if you thought the first paragraph was going to end in this somewhat more humorous way:

 _The question is an old favourite – if you could travel back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self? Yet despite the popularity of this thought experiment, no one has actually done it._

</comment><comment><USER35> My advice would be to try new things, engage and embrace them. I've found im not the type of person that can do the same thing over and over for years, even if it's something im supposedly good at. Finding the courage to make that change has been the pivotal point.

</comment><comment><USER36> Tricky, I would say it's not worth it to gamble with winner takes it all type of things. You'll never notice that you made it and actually will probably fail.

On the other hand I would not have much respect for young person who would actually follow this advice.

</comment><comment><USER37> Here's my contribution after listening to "how to change your mind" by Pollen.

Keep your mind open, but live in the moment. Embrace those around you who embrace you-and go after Pamela.

</comment><comment><USER38> It would be interesting to see how these advices change or remain the same across cultures.

</comment><comment> a0-prw The advice I'd give to my 18 year old self is funnily enough something I knew at the time: Kill yourself now, it's all downhill from here. 52 yrs old now and the slope is getting steeper lol

<comment><USER39> I know a number of folks who remarried and found happiness, and even had kids (!) after 50-55. Life isn't over until you decide. Engage with the world, try new things for a time and see what sticks.

<comment> a0-prw I have kids who are successful and seem happy. I sincerely regret ever single sacrifice I made to get them there. I wish I could have my life again so I could fuck it up even better :|

<comment><USER40> I hope you don't tell them that. Hearing my parents say that would change me forever.

<comment><USER5> "I'll tell you an anecdote that played a role in my life. I was about twenty- two and one day I was in a terrible state. We were living in Sibiu, a city in the provinces where I spent my whole youth, and where my father was the priest of the city. That day only my mother and I were home.... All of a sudden I had a fantastic fit of despair, I threw myself on the sofa and said "I can't take it anymore." And my mother said this: "If I had known, I would have had an abortion." That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn't hurt me, not at all. But later I said, "That was very important. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Because, in effect, it's all without substance."

\- Emil Cioran, Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris With Uncommon Writers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> gotta love paywalled academic papers.

<comment><USER42> [https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00224545.2019.1609401](https://sci- hub.se/10.1080/00224545.2019.1609401)</comment></comment>


Inferno - a distributed operating system by Rob Pike et al - <AUTHOR> http://www.vitanuova.com/index.html Available as Free Software or with conventional commercial licence Runs as a full OS or an application Full development toolkit included
Advanced networking capabilities
Safe, concurrent programming environment
Architecture independent virtual machine <comment><AUTHOR> Available as Free Software or with conventional commercial licence

Runs as a full OS or an application

Full development toolkit included

Advanced networking capabilities

Safe, concurrent programming environment

Architecture independent virtual machine</comment>


Sun hopes to cash in on Java install base with new app store - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/sun-hopes-to-cash-in-on-java-install-base-with-new-app-store.ars <comment><USER2> Because that's why there haven't been more regular computer users installing desktop apps written in Java: there was no single convenient place to get them!

Seriously, most regular computer users don't care what language or technology was used to make the app they're using, as long as it works well (which includes performance) and is intuitive, even for desktop apps.

I know pg said users do care about this for desktop apps, but they only care when the app does not look and behave in a way that is consistent with other native apps on the platform. If you break the user's expectations, they'll complain, even if your app was written with the same language as the OS.</comment>


Stateless, fault-tolerant scheduling using randomness - <AUTHOR> http://tech.backtype.com/stateless-scheduling-through-randomness

<comment><USER2> Of course, you could also randomly generate a time, then sleep for that long. This gives you significantly more control (you can easily specify "wait at least an hour" or "wait at most 48 hours") and is less resource-intensive. (Of course, "wait at least an hour" is not a good idea if your program crashes all the time.)

Still, nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> ??? Why not just set it to run at say 1am? Stateless, simple. Or did I miss something?

      def deleting_thread():
        while True:
          # 10 minutes
          time.sleep(10 * 60)
          # pseudocode
          if 01:00 <= time() and time() < 01:10:
              deleteFromSolrAndOptimize()

And no I'm not creating an account to tell this guy so on his blog.

</comment><comment><USER4> While this is an interesting hack it seems like a very strange approach to the problem at hand.

If you don't care how often your function runs then why not just rely on the system clock and maintain a "lastrun"-variable?

<comment><USER5> because that would violate his 'stateless' requirement

<comment><USER4> True, I should've had my coffee first.</comment></comment></comment>


Brandis: End-to-end encryption for everyone (web demo) - <AUTHOR> https://brandis.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> For context, George Brandis is Australia's Attorney-General - the chief law officer of the Commonwealth of Australia. He's recently been pushing for laws giving law enforcement ability to circumvent end-to-end encryption:

"Attorney General George Brandis has confirmed that the government won't be asking for flaws in encryption software to allow access by authorities, and instead companies will need to (where possible) decrypt messages as requested - with a warrant."

and

"Last Wednesday I met with the Chief Cryptographer at GCHQ, the Government Communication Headquarters in the United Kingdom, and he assured me that this was feasible. So there are various claims made by experts in the field, but what the Government is proposing to do is to impose upon the companies an obligation conditioned by reasonableness and proportionality."

I'm not sure which "company" he's going to impose an obligation to decrypt messages sent using tools like this (and GPG and … )</comment>


Apple Will Fight 'Right to Repair' Legislation - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation <comment><USER2> I have serious concerns with the new walled gardens of information and access to my own device. Its not just Apple et al., Tesla is fighting this, and disallows access to repair documents. Unfixable cars are not the future, and sure as hell not ecologically sound. But fanboys seem to just say "omg look at the tech" and ignore that it is counterproductive to their stated goals.

</comment><comment><USER3> In an ideal world people would stop buying apple products until they change their stance on this.</comment>


Simplicity Matters – Rich Hickey (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 <comment><USER2> I was at this talk and I disagree with his fundamental statement that simple + simple = simple. I program in Ruby one of the biggest problems beginners make is not creating complex data structures where they are needed. Instead they pass around hashes of hashes of hashes. Why? Hashes are simple, they're easy to understand and work with. Unfortunately this initial simplicity introduces unexpected complexity, things like deep dup and deep merge are now needed. Every part of your system must now know the hash structure you're using and often reproduce logic in many places like dealing with optional keys that may be missing. By not isolating the complexity to one part of the app it must now be shared by the entire app. simple + simple !(always)= simple.

If I had a time machine and could make one change in an open source project it would be to go back and remove the design choice of putting using hashes as internal config objects in Rails. It makes understanding all the possible edge cases almost impossible unless you're really familiar with the project.

The second is the claim of speed that this "simplicity" buys you. I agree that functional programming is extremely fast when it's parallelized and it's extremely easy to make a functional program parallelizable. When we're dealing with sequential tasks, mutating data is much faster than allocating new data structures. I think clojure helps with the speed of allocating new immutable structures by using copy on write strategies behind the scenes.

I think Rich is an extremely smart and very accomplished programmer. I think functional programming is really good at some things, I don't feel like many people talk about the things it's not good at. To me we if we're not embracing and explore all a new concept/language/paradigm strengths and weaknesses, we're not growing by being exposed to that thing.

<comment><USER3> > Unfortunately this initial simplicity introduces unexpected complexity, > things like deep dup and deep merge are now needed.

Not if your data structures are immutable, which is exactly what he is advocating.

<comment><USER2> Excellent point, I honestly hadn't considered that. I've spent more time dealing with functional programming than in actual languages with immutable structures. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think my other point still stands, things like optional keys, or missing or required keys still must be shared throughout the app. Everything that touches that hash needs to know its structure.

<comment><USER4> Having to know the structure of a hash/map/dict is strictly superior to having to know the methods and fields of an object. For any given task the two are equivalent, except that one is easily modified/reused/passed to other callers without creating an extremely brittle class hierarchy you're only going to have to rearchitect when your requirements change. As an IBM researcher looking at Watson waaaay before Watson actually existed: "OOP requires you to treat _all_ extrinsic information as if it were intrinsic to the object itself." This is tantamount to saying you must have a complete and consistent programme design before you write a single line. Which is crazy (and probably the reason UML exists.) But don't take my word for it, think it through, it's the only conclusion you can reach, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The simplicity culture is what drove me to Python, and the Clojure community's simplicity culture is on a whole other level. It's not just the code and syntax that need to be simple. The abstractions in the program need to be simple as well, and Clojure gives you the tools to make simple abstractions easy to build and understand.

Go learn Clojure.

<comment><USER6> > Clojure gives you the tools to make simple abstractions easy to build and > understand.

I understand if you don't want to take the time, but I would love it if you could you give an example of an abstraction that you can build in Closure that you would consider "easy to understand", yet which couldn't be built just with, say, anonymous functions, structs, arrays, and simple loops?

<comment><USER7> I think it comes down to expressing your intent in terms of that intent rather than confining it to imperative constructs. Pretty much any work on collections of items is generally simpler and more in line with the semantics of your intentions when working with Clojure or other functional languages or structures, especially when parallel code is involved.

I'd say a specific example would be pmap. It's very difficult to parallelize code as simply as pmap does without functional programming constructs.

<comment><USER6> Hm. I'm looking at the implementation[1] of pmap.... I don't fully understand the implementation (can anyone point me to something that explains what rets is? Googling "clojure rets" doesn't return anything useful) but it appears to just be looping through the list and parcelling work out to multiple processors. That seems like something simple enough to do in any language with threads and function references, no?

I'll dig in some more though. Thanks for the reference.

[1] [https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/clj/cloju...](https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/clj/clojure/core.clj#L6709)

<comment><USER7> To me it comes down to what my intent with the code is.

I could write a few simple routines in Go that certain get the job done without much code, but when I read the code I have to perform more mental translation from how the code is written to what my intent was.

In contrast, pmap or other constructs such as PLINQ get the same work done with less code that expresses my intent more clearly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While simplicity may matter, I believe Clojure to be a poor example of it -- it's a lot of functions all thrown together in basically one namespace, with poor error handling, and a tendancy to throw a 50 line traceback with a lot of random symbols in it.

Clojure macros are the antithesis of simple, and the need to indent a scope for every new variable actually fights against TDD in my experience.

I recently wrote a good chunk of a RESTful SQL-backed application in Python in two days that took a team of 3 people in Clojure over 2 months to just get to the basic level of library support one would expect from things like sqlalchemy and flask.

Clojure isn't simple -- it's basically a step up from assembler in how little it provides.

Simplicity is having all the power tools and being able to put them together and be instantly productive, and to support programming in multiple paradigms.

While it's not the norm, I sometimes feel many FP purists spend so much time debating purity and giving basic concepts complex names - when they could be using something else and getting much more done.

Side effects aren't the devil and are sometimes neccessary to get real work done. Bad code can be written in anything, and it just takes experience.

I'd much rather see a language focus on readability, maintaince, and rapid prototyping than side effects.

Functional programming concepts have benefits - I love list comprehensions and functools.partial in python is pretty neat, but when you can also have a decent object system, and embrace imperative when steps are truly imperative, you can get a whole lot more done.

<comment><USER9> It's unfortunate that you got downvoted, because while people may not agree with this there is definitely something to this.

My approaches to Clojure have been seriously hampered by the fact that some of the abstractions above those that are "simple" are remarkably complex, and that the tools that surround the ecosystem are still pretty frail.

Macro bugs are certainly something that have scared me away for a while.

<comment> j-pb Macros are for extending the language, I have never in 2 years of professional clojure dev, used a single macro in problem domain code. I've written a few libraries that are supposed to extend the language, but I've only used them rarely there too, maybe under a dozen times.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but when there's bugs in the caller of macros I have to figure out what exactly is going on, and that's where the rubber meets the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "talk-transcripts : Rich Hickey "

\- Inside Transducers (11/2014)

\- Transducers (09/2014)

\- Implementation details of core.async Channels (06/2014)

\- Design, Composition and Performance (11/2013)

\- Clojure core.async Channels (09/2013)

\- The Language of the System (11/2012)

\- The Value of Values (07/2012)

\- Reducers (06/2012)

\- Simple Made Easy (9/2011)

\- Hammock Driven Development (10/2010)

\- Are we there yet? (09/2009)

[https://github.com/matthiasn/talk- transcripts/tree/master/Hi...](https://github.com/matthiasn/talk- transcripts/tree/master/Hickey_Rich)

</comment><comment><USER11> I love Rich Hickey and I will watch any talk he ever gives. I believe I have seen them all at current.

Here's what drives me nuts about this one, though - it gets passed around a lot where I work, and people say how strongly they agree with him. There are real, concrete things he claims are not simple here! Things like for loops. And these people I'm talking about, they say they love this talk and then they say they love for loops. Really! I don't get it.

<comment> vezzy-fnord It's one thing to recognize simplicity versus ease of use, it's a wholly different thing to apply it. Ease of use is what is most trivially observable by an end user. Actually understanding the nature of the problem domain and properly evaluating architectures beyond making sweeping inferences from what the interface looks like, that is significantly more difficult. Despite all the lip service that gets payed towards simplicity, most people do not want it and it will be met by derision and scorn if the simple solution imposes a higher learning curve or does not make policy and integration decisions for the user. Especially considering the culture of coding bootcamps, DevOps, "get shit done" and "move fast and break things" by and large promotes an anti- intellectualism that is in stark opposition to deeply evaluating problem domains so you can come up with simple solutions.

<comment><USER11> Right, and so what you get is people saying something is "simple" when what they really mean is that they like it. Which is of course not Hickey's fault, it just irks me for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Carl Sassenrath is another programming language designer who as long been a proponent for _simplicity_.

Some links:

* _Definition of Simple_ (2011) - [http://www.rebol.com/article/0509.html](http://www.rebol.com/article/0509.html)

* _Fight Software Complexity Pollution_ (2010) - [http://www.rebol.com/article/0497.html](http://www.rebol.com/article/0497.html)

* _Contemplating Simplicity_ (2005) - [http://www.rebol.com/article/0127.html](http://www.rebol.com/article/0127.html)</comment>


A tilt of the head facilitates social engagement - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-tilt-social-engagement.html <comment><USER2> Hence the 'MacTilt' [1]:

 _The lateral movement of the head to an angle of 45° to the vertical by a palliative care nurse specialist. It is intended to convey sympathy and understanding. (Mac from Macmillan nurse — a specialist palliative care nurse — and tilt.)_

[1] [https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1295#sec-12](https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1295#sec-12)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The upper-eye bias is much weaker at a 90-degree rotation. "Ninety degrees > is too weird," said Davidenko

No kidding! I'm trying to imagine someone talking to me with their head tilted completely to one side.

<comment><USER4> I would be rather surprised if someone could tilt their head 90-degrees even briefly, let alone hold a conversation like that. I think for most people anything over 45 degrees starts to feel very uncomfortable.

<comment><USER5> Uh....are you overweight, by chance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the title seems to exaggerate the following paragraph:

> Perhaps more importantly for people with autism, Davidenko found that the > tilt leads people to look more at the eyes, perhaps because it makes them > more approachable and less threatening. "Across species, direct eye contact > can be threatening," he said. "When the head is tilted, we look at the upper > eye more than either or both eyes when the head is upright. I think this > finding could be used therapeutically."

Hope it's correct. Would be interesting to know if the effect persists when the viewer tilts their head, not just the viewed.

<comment><USER7> > Would be interesting to know if the effect persists when the viewer tilts > their head, not just the viewed.

I just had to think of the equivalent of two people trying to make way for each other on the street, and stepping to each side at the same time. Two people wanting to put each other at ease in the same instant, both wiggling their heads from one side to the other for a bit, then laughing politely and settling on tilting their heads to different sides from one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe this is also why a straight stiff neck and a head with very little movement conveys unquestionable authority.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe this is why dogs do it -- they figure out that it makes their human want to pet. feed, or play with them more. Animals are superb at reading cues from humans and adjusting their behavior accordingly.

<comment><USER10> > Canids tilt their heads to determine the vertical placement of a sound—how > far up/down it is.

Human ears are shaped to cause frequency cutoffs that let us do vertical spatialization more easily without tilting our heads.

<comment><USER11> Smarter Every Day explains this here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oai7HUqncAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oai7HUqncAA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The tilting of the head notably exposes the neck, which is the most vulnerable part of the body. As I recall from The Definitive Book of Body Language, this demonstrates trust and reduces tension for better social engagement (and is an especially attractive signal from a woman).

<comment><USER13> > exposes the neck, which is the most vulnerable part of the body.

This sounds entirely made up. Especially for that portion of the population with external genitalia

<comment><USER14> Is it not likewise considered an indication of trust to expose the genitalia to someone?

<comment><USER15> I prefer to start with a handshake.

<comment><USER16> Indeed - genitalia exposure typically comes much later in the trust building procession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh just be yourself, people are going to figure out the real you sooner or later.

<comment><USER18> Your real self can completely defeat your goals. Look how many people struggle with success in dating, for example. In such a position, you'll realize that you're the constant in all the failures and you owe it to yourself to evolve.</comment></comment>


Wooden combination lock - <AUTHOR> https://woodgears.ca/combolock/index.html <comment><USER2> Hi, it's Matthias here (I built the lock). Got any questions for me?

<comment><USER3> Very fun. Is there any reason the basic design can't extend to more than 3 numbers?

<comment><USER2> You could go to more numbers. Though it gets awkward to dial, and cumulative precision become an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's truly a hacker... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBmnQN78aZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBmnQN78aZU)

<comment><USER5> Can we please have scaffold jousting and racing now?

<comment><USER6> I think you are looking for this: [http://burningman.org](http://burningman.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All these rotating pieces reminded me of Sussman's talk on watches [http://video.mit.edu/watch/an-electrical-engineering-view- of...](http://video.mit.edu/watch/an-electrical-engineering-view-of-a- mechanical-watch-9035/)

<comment><USER8> Just happened to be waiting for a Elgin 883 movement to finish drying from a clean/rinse cycle. Killing time on HN, and I happen to run across this referral to a video.

Watch repair can be fun, and it really doesn't cost a lot to get into on a hobby level. There's lots of books on watch repair, and most are out of copyright. The debate of mechanical watches comes up every so often. That Bulova watch he takes the Balance Wheel out of will literally last a life time with proper care.

In the video, he mentions he doesn't know how the Bulova Accutron 360 gear is manufactured(you need to inspect it with a 30X scope). I have always been curious about this topic. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate the info. I know about watch lathes, and hand turning. I don't know how the factories mass produce these gears, what machines they use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an awesome educational tool: the large size makes it really easy to see and understand how combination locks work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome. How long does it take to achieve skills of this calibre in woodwork?

<comment><USER11> Matthias is fantastic at engineering things and then building them out of wood, but I consider it very different than true woodworking. To me, the level of craft of someone like Sam Maloof is on an entirely different level.

<comment><USER12> Although Matthias does have metal tools, they're just items he hasn't gotten round to wood-ifying yet.

The man is truly unique among wood-workers. If he were given the task of building a suspension bridge, he'd make the damn cables out of wood if he could. (And he'd probably succeed at it, too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm skeptical of a security mechanism that can be defeated with a match and some lighter fluid.

However, as an art piece this is impressive.

<comment><USER14> The point of a lock is twofold (in most cases* ). First, to discourage casual/opportunistic access. Second, to make unauthorised access evident. I believe this lock meets those criteria, albeit at a minimal level - but it's purpose is to educate, rather than to directly secure.

* In specialised cases the expectation is that the lock will also take a finite amount of time to get through, which may exceed that of the door, allowing for a response to alarms, for example. In other cases a lock may be designed such that the contents would be destroyed by any action which would defeat the lock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to diminish Matthias' amazing abilities, but only to highlight the challenges that go into making anything out of wood: plywood, isn't really wood per se. If you built things out of wood you'd have to worry about grain direction, because cross-grain strength in wood is very low. This adds a whole another level of complexity to the engineering process.

<comment><USER2> Most things I make aren't made of plywood. Yes, you have to be aware of poor crossgrain strength (varies with species) as well as seasonal shrinkage and expansion from humidity changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fantastic! The whole site is great. My kids have been pestering me to let them do stuff like this and I didn't really know where to start.

Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER17> I try to visit his site every Friday. I like his no nonsense videos.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really interesting! What got you into woodworking?

<comment><USER2> Always had access to my dad's wood shop. Wood is fast and easy to work with - unlike metal.

<comment><USER19> And wood smells better.

(I don't dislike oiled metal, but for me there's something about waxed wood that's really on the nose ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very cool!</comment>