beat

That's also the importance of consistent patterns. Bluegrass and bop music, both extremely high-speed improvisational forms, have a couple of key things in common. First, time signature... they are strictly 4/4, which makes "chunking" a lot easier. Second, they are built on really common harmonic structures (I/IV/V chords in bluegrass, ii/V/I cycles in bop). Third, they have standard repertoires, and all musicians beyond beginner level are expected to know a lot of standards by heart.

So the complexity of certain parts of the music are tightly constrained, which frees the performers to tackle other forms of complexity (like improvisation) much more aggressively.

You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"

There are also layers of pattern matching, particularly in creative work. Take for example bluegrass guitar improvisation, something I've been working at intensely lately. In order to play a single note, there are several pattern matches going on at once. First, there's the original song melody and harmonic structure. The notes of the improvisation need to reflect that base - the distance the improvisation extends from the melody/harmony without breaking it is an emotional quality. And this is a moving target! That melody goes by FAST... bluegrass is often played at tempos exceeding 200bpm.

So on one level, I'm following the melody/harmony. On another level, I'm inventing (or remembering?) substitutions that can work over that melody and harmony. On another level, I'm thinking about the overall flow of the improvisation, and how to achieve my artistic goals, express the feelings and ideas I have at the moment. On yet another level, I'm being purely technical - like making my hand slightly roll to play a downstroke on the E string followed by an upstroke on the B string without accidentally hitting the E string twice. On another level, I'm listening to the other musicians, with whom I'm generating a shared tempo, and who are also improvising, generating new ideas I can respond to while playing.

That's expertise. Being able to work on all this patterns simultaneously, some being totally orthogonal to others (like "roll my hand" vs "play a sixth instead of a fifth to imply relative minor").

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley.

Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?

Basically, I have one provider, except for emergency care - a large local network. It's fine for me, because my family doctor and both the specialists I need regularly for chronic conditions are in that network.

For my condition that requires regular surgeries (like 3x/year), there are two levels of surgery - one local anesthetic, one general anesthetic. The first time I got the general one done, the bill to my insurance was $35k. This time, with the new insurance, the bill was $19k. So I think the PPO relationship is making a huge difference in how the internal billing works.

At a higher level, the full hospital general anesthetic surgery in January on new insurance cost me less out of pocket than the much less complex local anesthetic surgery cost me in December, on previous insurance.

Eh. I'm watching it pretty closely, and I don't hear them talking in detail about how difficult it is.

I went through a billing/process dispute with a provider last year after a change in their process led to a 30x increase in out-of-pocket costs for necessary treatment. It ended with them flatly lying to me that the changes were for my "safety". When I first dealt with all the new process, I asked my doctor why they were doing it, and he said "I think they just want to charge more money".

I'm on a PPO right now, new to me this year, and it's great. I have a chronic condition that requires surgery about three times a year, so I'm used to just maxing out my costs. There are two levels of the surgery, and the higher level is full general anesthesia, with all that entails.

In practice, it was less expensive out of pocket for the intensive surgery (a bit over $1000) than it was two months ago for the low-intensity local anesthesia surgery ($1300), even though the initial bill was over twice as high.

At any rate, because of my chronic condition, I'm very sensitive to costs. I'll take the good insurance, thank you!

Yes! Perverse incentives are what is making it like this. And the incentives cross boundaries - relationships between providers, insurers, regulators, legislators, and consumers. There's no single guilty party that we can blame and fix. (Since insurance companies are such a target for blame, I've started to say blaming insurance is like yelling at the cashier.)

I prefer to look at per capita cost, especially when comparing with other nations. It's appalling that we pay twice as much as anyone else, and that almost everyone has better care than we do in terms of outcome.

This is where I think political leaders (Democrat or Republican) could do really well. It's not just making sure people are covered. It's the existential dread of dealing with opaque, unpredictable, and incomprehensible bureaucracy that can make life-and-death decisions or drop financially crippling bills in your lap, even if you have good insurance. The American health care system isn't just bad for the poor. It's bad for everyone. We just can't deal with it, because we are exposed directly to unnecessary complexity.

But the fact that the people with money and good insurance are suffering from the system as well as the poor seems to be lost on Democrats, and the Republicans are just paralyzed by the whole idea of fixing health care. It's a massive political failure for both parties.

Just as an aside, I'd like to give a hand to the HN community for all the great answers on this thread. Very enjoyable read!

Ugh. I've been using Linux since the .9 kernels/SLS distro days (1995 or so), and I've been producing albums for 13-14 years and recording longer than that, and I wouldn't even consider doing real music production in Linux. It is absolutely not worth the bullshit and the spoons. I want to be recording music, not putzing around with device drivers or scrounging for plugins that don't completely suck.

I mostly use Reaper on a Mac, and pay a monthly subscription for Plugin Alliance plugins. It's well worth the money, because it works, sounds great, and is straightforward to use. Given a choice between spending two hours improving the eq/compression/reverb of a mix and two hours trying to figure out why no sound is coming out, I know which one I prefer.

Complicated things are the product of a system of simple things. To do complex things well, you need to be able to do the simple things without consciously thinking about them. Expertise is what happens when a large mass of related things become easy so you don't think about them, so you can think about complex things made from the easy things.

For software, it's often about decomposing problems vs infrastructure to work on them. There's a great xkcd about that. Someone asks for an app that can take photos and tell if they're in a national park (easy)... but also tell if the photo is of a bird (incredibly hard). Lack of expertise is why people don't understand this. They don't recognize that they are two entirely separate problems, jumbled together as if they were one problem.

An area of expertise for me is playing guitar. Now, melodies are for the most part made of scales and arpeggios. So playing scales/arpeggios efficiently can be isolated from "music". And they're tied intensely to physical technique. So for instance, playing two notes per string is physically much different from playing three notes per string. By isolating scales and arpeggios into small chunks and practicing them independently, we can then easily integrate those chunks to form streams of melody, without having to do conscious thinking, because when playing music, conscious thinking is the enemy. It destroys rhythmic flow. But with a collection of instinct-level arpeggios and scales in my hands, I can just play, with my mind focused on emotions, ideas, and musical shapes, rather than which finger needs to land on which string to hit which note.

Programming is a lot like that. Once you've learned effective data structures, control flow, conditional behavior, etc, you shouldn't have to think about it much while you're coding, so you can focus on the problem, not the act of writing code. Or as I like to say, "That's not programming, that's just typing". And then you learn things like unit testing and TDD so you can free yourself even more from the line-level anxieties of the code.

My middle school years were pretty miserable due to family drama stuff. I'm only in touch with two friends from that era (via FB). I contrast this to my kids, who went to a really great charter school from grades 7-12. Their core social groups are still made of their junior high and high school friends - my daughter (age 25) was just an attendant for one of those friends' weddings, and another one of their jr high friends was also an attendant. For someone in their mid-20s to have a whole social network of friends they've known half their life amazes me.

Thanks for reminding me to reset my iPhone to black and white!

Something I say constantly, especially to others trying to make a decision to act, is "What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?" The thing is, you probably can't even imagine the worst thing that can possibly happen from any given decision. But by saying it out loud, you try, at least briefly. And in doing so, you often realize that "the worst thing that could possibly happen" really isn't all that bad.

I wanna ask this person on a date. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen? They say no and I feel embarrassed. It's a lot easier to do scary things if you actually think about the consequences of failure, rather than letting animal fear control you.

This, I learned from the Stoics.

This sounds... expensive.

Every time I read about miracle energy sources, I want to see the cost model. Cost is everything.

If you're using it for budget management, YNAB is much, much better than Mint.

That was rather easier a century ago, when most people were on foot or on horses.

Fixing old, broken process is an interesting intellectual challenge in itself.

"The physical config was accidentally overwritten and there are no backups".

Welcome to legacy.

So for a situation like this, there are several things that you need to think about. First and foremost... what is the impact when (not if) this process finally stops? This isn't just for technical people. You need a business impact assessment. You need the users involved. They're your lever for fighting the inevitable fear-based political hurdles. Is it an annoyance? Or does the company go out of business? The potential severity of the impact matters a great deal. If it's putting the entire business at risk, you should be able to get support from the highest levels of management to do whatever is necessary.

Second... how do you recover? There are a variety of ways off the top of my head. The most obvious would be to reconstruct the physical config. The "obvious to others" that is probably a stupid idea is rewriting the application. Let's ignore the stupid one and start dealing with reconstructing the configuration.

Do you have the source code for the system? If so, you can probably reconstruct the configuration architecture from reading source, at least. It may suck, but it's something.

Is there a test environment with its own running copy of the app? If so, it will have its own configuration, which will make reconstruction much easier, as then you differ only by values and don't have to figure out what the fields are.

Now, what kind of data is in the configuration that makes it difficult? Resource locations? Authentication credentials? Something else? If it's connecting to external systems, you can look at logs, packet-sniff, etc, to at least figure out where it's going. Credentials can be reset for a new version - a painful one-way trip, but it can work. Do you own any external systems, or are they outside your control?

Now, all systems have inputs and outputs. What is the output of this? Is it going to a database? If so, are you backing up that data? Make sure any locally stored data is getting backed up!

If there isn't a duplicate test system, what would need to be done to create one? Are there licensing restrictions? Specialized hardware/OS? Are you building from source code? Do you have the source? Do whatever it takes to create a parallel system that you can test configuration on, make it run elsewhere.

I can just go on and on with this, but the important thing is to be able to duplicate as much as possible before you try to replace. And find out what the cost is - that buys you authority.

That's a good idea! Passive boundaries are better than active boundaries, for sure.

Do you have any evidence for this? Can you point to any nuclear plant in the US (or anywhere else) that closed prematurely due to new regulations? I bet you can't.

As for South Korea... I'll just quote Wikipedia here.

"In 2012 South Korea had plans for significant expansion of its nuclear power industry, and to increase nuclear's share of generation to 60% by 2035.[2] Eleven more reactors were scheduled to come online in the period 2012 to 2021, adding 13.8 GWe in total.[3] However, in 2013 the government submitted a reduced draft plan to parliament for nuclear output of up to 29% of generation capacity by 2035, following several scandals related to falsification of safety documentation.[1] This new plan still involved increasing 2035 nuclear capacity by 7 GWe, to 43 GWe.[4] Responding to widespread public concerns after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, the high earthquake risk in South Korea, and the nuclear scandals, the new government of President Moon Jae-in elected in 2017 decided to gradually phase out nuclear power. The three reactors currently under construction will be completed, but the government has decided these will be the last built, and as the existing plants close at a 40 years end-of-life they will be replaced with other modes of generation."

And how would you prevent this? The flip side of nuclear's stability at high loads over long term is that the economics are all built around running at high load. If they lose major customers to cheaper competition, they can no longer operate profitably.

Renewables are already far cheaper than coal. That's what's driving their growth. The biggest limit on renewable growth right now is available capital.

Renewables are definitely a factor at this point, and a growing one. Nuclear is not... new nuclear production is basically at a standstill, because it's far too expensive. Cost is what's killing coal, and it's killing traditional nuclear as well.

I think we're already seeing about as rapid a change as available capital can support. Transition has a great deal of up-front cost, even if it's a money-saver in the long run.

Yes, it's incorrect. The long-term cost of nuclear is about the same as coal. That's why we're seeing nuclear plants closing years ahead of schedule, just like coal. Gas, onshore wind, and the latest solar all cost about half as much.

This comment will undoubtedly trigger rebuttals about fusion, thorium, and other technologies that do not actually exist at production scale and will not exist for at least another decade. Solar and wind (and for better or worse, fracked gas) are here NOW.

I think population growth also factors in. Population is leveling off. In the past century, the global population has quadrupled, so there are four times as many people to invent things in raw numbers alone. But global population will increase no more than 50% in the next century, which means we aren't creating a lot more inventors than we are now.