nineplay

I never understood P vs NP until I say down with AI and just kept asking for clarification after clarification until it finally clicked.

AI, used well, isn't just 'teach me this' its 'teach me this and answer all my dumb questions until I understand it'.

magpie - extracts book recommendations from reddit threads. I had a bunch of saved threads from 'books' and 'suggestmeabook' and 'printsf' etc., and I realized I could pull them down and do a semantic search.

https://github.com/clashleyca/magpie

I was going though a problem I'm having parents - they are aging, decisions need to be made, that sort of stuff. Writing it out, thinking about it, reflecting further - I probably spent at least and hour just typing in my thoughts as they came to me and honestly I often didn't read the AI responses.

All of that got me to realize that the problem wasn't that I wasn't explaining myself well. I kept thinking that if I'd just found the right words they'd change their minds. The process of digging into not just where they are now but who they've always been, how they've always been. I need to accept that and move forward.

I agree, it's the public attitudes that are most disheartening and probably some of the reason young people are less inclined to have children. All over society people are seeing kids as a kind of personal indulgence that shouldn't be allowed to impact other people - whether its a lack of sympathy that parents have higher priorities at work, or looking down on kids who act like kids in public. At the same time parents who let their kids look at screens in public are demonizes, as apparently only kids who are perfectly behaved without distractions should be allowed out.

Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.

> lack of time for parenting

> helicopter parenting

There is a contradiction here which commonly underlies 'problems in modern parenting' discussions and creates a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It is always possible to criticize any parent for being uninvolved or too involved.

I've often wondered why 'soccer mom' became a negative term as though 'supporting your child in healthy outdoor recreational activities' was considered a bad thing. I know it implied a log of other behaviors, but still was anchored in the idea that there is a microscopic line between an involved parent and an over-involved parent.

Then we still assured that two working parents brings neglect - despite the pride many Gen Xers take in being a 'latch key kid' and being sent out until the street lights went dark.

There's no winning, which is perhaps the point.

"Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."

Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.

They will also be paying somewhere around 50k a year soon for heath insurance because contractors don't get benefits. Fun!

I'm currently job hunting and 'no shit'. I had better mental health 6 months ago by any measure. Its a ego destroying process, especially with the market now. I've got my first 'tech' interview coming up and while its nice to have a bite after a few months now I'm cramming from interview sites with an increasing feeling of dread.

We didn't always have bad actors directly injecting rage-bait into our blood streams.

I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:

1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.

2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.

3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.

You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.

It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.

It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.

FTA

> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum

Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.

The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.

> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression

There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.

Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?

> Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious.

Buried in an article about shifts in attitudes towards nudity and porn is the actual cause. As a child of the 70s I've never given nudity in the locker rooms a second thought but now, no thank you. For my daughter? Out of the question.

I'll bring up the third rail. I am, despite all my ultra-liberal blue sensibilities, uncomfortable with individuals with XY chromosomes in my locker room. I can put in a bunch of qualifiers - if they're on hormones, if they're post op, if there's really no physical difference then I'm not concerned but there is no guarantee of course. If I look over at the locker next to me and see a penis, I'm out.

Or whoever was working on it said "Wait, this plane isn't ready yet" and the people in charge said "we've waited long enough, get it on the runway".

If you are talking about voting in the US than you haven't been following all the efforts to manipulate voting in the US. Turns out the party in power has all they tools they need to make sure that the people who don't like them can't vote.

I read an article about a similar WWII woman's service and more than anything these women's jobs were to be warm and friendly to a bunch of young scared solders who far from home and wondering if they'd make it back.

So they'd smile and they'd flirt and they'd charm and they'd dance and maybe the boys would feel less afraid or less homesick and maybe they'd have something to look forward to.

I'd bet just that was enough for some appreciative solders to give her a pin, if only to remember them by.

The majority probably didn't want to secede prior to the civil war. Fortunately for those who did want to secede, a massive proportion of the population didn't have the right to vote.

I'm intrigued by the premise - I have my own large burden of health care costs and my own suspicions about where it is going - but does anyone else find their charts unreadable? I'm trying to parse the first one and I keep trying to put the pieces together. "Health care services" is 60 out of 101bn ... excess profits?

The second one I can hardly start on, "health care services" is a medium circle ( circle size = combined market capitalization ) with the second highest "Aggregate return on invested capital" and in the middle of "median weighted-average cost of capital".

I know its called "the economist" but they usually make their articles readable by people without a econ degree. If I had a suspicious mind ( I do ) I'd think this was deliberate obfuscation.

Also "health care services ... such as hospitals and the system’s true money-makers: insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers and other middlemen taking advantage of its opacity"

That is a lot of different interests bundled together. How can they say insurers are the true money makers when they are not even broken out?

Looking for The Cause of autism and The Cure for autism is exactly as absurd as looking for The Cause of cancer and The Cure for cancer. I think most people understand that there are many causes of cancer and many treatments that cover a range of different use cases.

The whole concept of a cause and cure is really damaging to the autistic community and just flying in the face of any sort of intelligent diagnosis and treatment.

I'd be interested to know why you think that is? So far as I can tell all they've done is sprinkle characters here or there that are or might be gay. I haven't seen any shows criticize wealth inequity or champion UBI.

> This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.

Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.

How do you end housing as an investment?

My ILs have traveled the world and have a home full of things they've purchased and loved. My FIL's parents passed away about 15 years ago. It took my FIL years to go through all that stuff and figure out what to do with it.

They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests.

I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.

When my daughter was in middle school we were discussing some concept she learned in Biology that wasn't precisely wrong but wasn't right in all use cases. I told her that a model didn't have to be true to be useful. She said "that's a good way of thinking about it" and since that is such a rare complement from a teenager I have remembered it ever since.

I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.

My partner has become tiresome about this - even if I was to tell them that I responded to your comment on HN, they'd go "You probably just responded to a bot".

Are bots really infiltrating HN and making constructive non-inflammatory comments? I don't find it at all plausible but "that's just what they want you to think".

Too late to edit but I meant to say town "sluts". Ah well, a lesson to re-read carefully before posting

I think we're going to find that a large number of people who were shamed as "town sluts" were actually abuse victims. Every so often I see nasty comments that 'she got pregnant at 15' or 'she had two kids before finishing high school' with follow-ups blaming poor sex ed. I think people are side stepping the implications, especially if the father is otherwise unknown. Even in my day the girl who got pregnant by the volleyball coach shouldered the bulk of the blame.

Let's not forget it became a business. Gayle Laakmann wrote a book, became a consultant, and I'm sure earned a whole lot of money convincing companies that she'd found the perfect path to hiring great engineers.

I think she had a willing audience because a lot of companies weren't sure they were interviewing the 'right' way. It's always easier to tell your bosses you are following the advice of a top consultant than to try to tell them why you have a better strategy than the FAANGs.

To what end? Companies spend $X on marketing to make $X + $Y. If you force them to reduce $X than assuming they don't come up with creative financial workarounds, you've just made them make less money. What has this accomplished for the betterment of anyone?

> When we do trunk-based development, the WIP we commit gets used, before any actual user sees it, by our whole team.

I think this is where I'm stuck. I rarely work in projects where my team can 'use' the code in any meaningful way. When I wrote code for accountant my team wasn't going to be able to tell if the wash sale calculations went wonky.