FrankyHollywood

Indeed, the 'perfect path' in life is not perfect. Life has so many paths, everything is a trade off. Spent more time with your kids? You loose time with friends etc. Whatever you do or choose in life, it means you can't do all the other stuff.

There were interesting comments about 'having regrets' previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33118584

Not read it yet, but the title suggests a "Love, Death & Robots" scenario :D

I also thought this is misleading, I can still read the 30 year old txt files I have in backup (copied from old floppy disks).

As long as data is not stored in some obfuscated proprietary format you will get along just fine. Either software is available, or the format is known and you can write a decoder.

What if the format is unknown? Well, try reading old Egyptian, this problem is not new...

Can neural network tensors be seen as an encoding?

If I copy source code and save it in an UTF-8 text file it is subjected to licensing. Now if the same information is represented in a neural network all of a sudden this 'trained data' is intelligence.

It's a complex representation of the data, and some data may be a bit scrambled, but still in a way it's also an encoding of source data which should be treated as having an origin and an author.

A little late to the party, but my biggest regret is not making choices earlier in life. Always had many interests. In high school I did many extra extracurricular activities, I was programming at a local software company, I played piano in a band, I took guitar lessons because wanted to be a rock guitarist, started 3 studies in university, etc etc. It caused a lot of stress, and I never was really good at any of these.

Everyone always says you have to think about your what you want to do in life, but equally important is what not to spend time on. You can't have it all. If you want everything you end up with nothing.

Although I'm doing fine at the moment I see old friend having advanced further in their careers, due to focus, less stress and becoming really good at something. I kind of regret not giving my life direction in the past, choosing something and go for it.

oh wow, it's a bit off-topic, but I'm on a desktop now and the mobile view of Wikipedia looks so much better, never realized!

> Automation is coming

This has been said over and over. In the 1980's people worried automation would leave lots of people unemployed. And long before in 1931 Keynes [1] predicted we should now be living in a world of abundance. He said our the biggest concern would be how to spend all this free time.

Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries.

Every step you automate opens up new possibilities and more employees are needed. I work as a software engineer now for around 15 years. Never have my software reduced costs, because as soon as my software automates something people want more.

Although I'm skeptical, we could really facing a turning point, Keynes made his predictions for 2030, so we'll see :)

[1] Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931)

I always loved adventure games, with Grim Fandango (1998) being one of my favourites.

Nowadays Amanita design still makes great adventure and puzzle games, some are point & click. Really enjoyed them, and most are without text so my non-English speaking kids also love them https://www.amanita-design.net/

exactly my experience, a reasonable deadline defines the design and scoping, and makes you give right expectations to a customer.

I left 2 jobs because of rigid scrum, couldn't handle the insane discussions.

"how many complexity points do you estimate?"

"euh, what was our velocity?"

"no, you can't think in hours, give me complexity POINTS!"

"I dunno, probably 2 to 3 weeks of work, to many unknowns"

"unknowns? we refined this story, there are no unknowns!"

"ok, 3 weeks = x points"

"no, you can't say 3 weeks, we have 2 week sprints. You should split the story in 2, where each story is a well defined functional component which we can show in next demo"....

"but, it is 1 thing, you can't split and have it working for next demo..."

mind torture... so I left

Nowadays I have a very experienced team. We do daily standups (without a scrumboard, just real conversation), we define deadlines, can be a week, can be 2 months. Demo's only when needed, kind of the way I used to work before rise of scrum :)

I just finished 'Hackers & Painters' by PG, it's a really nice holiday read. The tone is light, but he gets you thinking about the world.

The book is from 2004 so the chapter about 'the modern web' was not very ground breaking anymore, it did gave me a nostalgic smile :)

Ah never knew meat contains vitamin c, seems to be mostly in the liver.

Well it's an interesting experiment going on meat and see how the body responds.

So no vitamine c intake? Wouldn't recommend it on the long term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

The question is often 'how long does it take to implement'. Engineers know if it is more or less clear what the functional requirements.

In practice, workdays are constantly interrupted by meetings. An 8 hr workday is effectively 2-4hrs product building. Than there are unforseen deployment problems, some requirements change, solve merge conflicts, perform code reviews, frameworks need vulnerability updates, etc.

An experienced PM knows this and should not use implementation time as project duration.

The book would be an anthropological study. Having worked as a freelancer for more than 15 years, seen many companies from startups to large finance I see these patterns over and over again, it's like human nature.

Totally unrelated companies have these exact same flaws. Clueless middle management driven by money and ego making these destructive decisions. At the same time, a group of engineers at a startup without much management can go rogue and burn millions on fancy tech and frameworks without making anything useful.

The only successful projects I have seen is with a capable senior engineer in the team, who can listen and understand what a tradeoff is. If this senior is trusted by both the team and the manger the team can be effective.

I'd say it is mostly about expectations. There are various kinds of challenges in life. If you approach them with an unrealistic mindset you get disappointed.

Some things are easy and you just do it. Then there are the more challenging topics. These can't be overseen from the start, so you just start working on it and hope you reach what you desire in the future. Finally some things are just impossible.

Both at work and in personal life it can help a lot to see this distinction.

> "The best test of when I'm about ready to solve a problem is whether or not I can think about it sensibly while swimming"

My personal variant is "when I don't have problems to solve while I'm cycling it's time to look for a new job" :)

Not completely agree, I work at a company who makes money with semantic web consulting. It is really powerful technology, which we use to index and unify customer data, but also for dynamic React front-end generation.

I was a bit hesitant to start working at this company, because of the many negative notes here on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+the+semantic+web)

This contrasts with what I experience, we have a growing customer base, both in healthcare and finance. Just do a LinkedIn job search with a keywords like 'sparql' or 'semantic', you'll see many jobs.

I do think one should not bring it all to adhd being a physiological deficiency of the brain.

For me personally it is also about being above average smart. I'm intensely bored by a lot of people and activities. I lose interest, can't remember a lot, get irritated easily.

After many years I have some good friends, work which suits me, I know how to leasure well, basically I know how to amuse and challenge myself and don't experience lots of the adhs symptoms anymore.

The bible is a collection of many books and resources by various authors. It contains valuable ideas and experience which have survived the centuries. Many religious people however like it to be a 'single black & white truth of the all-mighty invisible ghost who says you are a guilty person'.

For me the bible is the same as any other (old) book where people write about their life experience. A good example is 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius. There is a lot of wisdom in it, and I have read it more than once over the years. It makes you reflect on your own life and decisions you make.

yes, that and go to sleep the moment you get the urge to eat lots of sugars, which usually means your brain needs rest.

Yes fasting has beneficial health effects. A body can can't handle a constant high food intake.

I read a lot of research last years about the subject, try search for 'fat inflammation'.

Fasting and a more plant based diet seem to reduce chronic inflammation.

Drilling is not the problem which stands in the way for using earth warmth.

It is pollution of ground water, risk of earth quakes, transportation of the heat, local cool down and having to drill new wholes.

In Europe we have tried, and tested with wholes up to 1km depth but it is not as ideal as one might think. Otherwise it would have been used on a large scale already.

> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.

I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more than not doing anything at all don't you?

nice story, reminds me of https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/50824/creating-windows-9...

Awesome! Takes me back :)

My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid.

I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is layed out. For example, when I was young I had a lego technic motor, but the wires sometimes got oxidatid or just broke, and I had to fix it. My son has a new lego set, and the motor always works, except when the wireless remote runs out of battery. Same with gaming, it always works, while in the past even getting a game to run could be a challenge on its own. And when he gets stuck in a game he watches a YouTube. No hours of frustration and endless searching and figuring for a solution.

I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.

Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation.

> Evidently, Jan Sloot was a crank. He showed all the signs attributed to cranks. He was paranoid. He felt himself an expert in a field he had no higher education in. He worked alone. He spent decades on one problem any mathematician could have told him was impossible to solve in the first place. He got angry at people who questioned him. He felt misunderstood. He had delusions of grandeur.

This describes very much some of the antivaxers I know :)

I like the incubator example. It is easy to jump to (extreme) conclusions, and not see what's really there.

Reminds me of https://www.logicalfallacies.org/

> In our experience non-ASCII characters are pretty rare in code. Many development teams chose to use English as the primary development language

Is this true for the whole world, or just Europe/US?

a great to hear! I was searching for something with a bite. The hot water has a nice contrast with the cold water, but I still miss something :)

Hope I can find this in Europe. Here we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichorium. It is not very bad, but I don't like it much either, I miss some bitter tones. Now I think about it, I can try experiment with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angostura_bitters

I needed better sleeping and tried various things. In the end I stopped drinking coffee and tea. For me its now just hot or cold water, sometimes a herbal tea, and an occasional beer or orange juice.

First caffeine-free weekend I had terrible headaches, than came weeks of strong urges (I felt I was an addict). In these weeks I just fell asleep on the couch or even at my desk at work. I slept a lot these weeks, during the day, early in the evening, like my body had catching up to do.

Now I'm fine, I sleep like a baby. I feel really good and have strong concentration.

On moments I have a 'coffee urge' I take a little walk outside, for 10-20minutes. My colleagues know by now, I'm the guy who goes out once or twice a day for a little walk...

Try it for a few months!