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xxxtentachyon

351 karma · joined August 22, 2019

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xxxtentachyon··on What are third places? How do I find one?
That’s where I’m at. I wish my (hypothetical; future) kids could have the same church experience and community as I had, but I don’t know how I’d pull that without personally being a believer.
xxxtentachyon··on What are third places? How do I find one?
Oh dang this is a good take. I live on a city block that has no fewer than 300 people, but we have at least three options for third places depending on your criteria. If we had just one in reasonable travel distance, and people couldn’t self-select, perhaps we’d be more neighborly
xxxtentachyon··on What are third places? How do I find one?
When people talk about third spaces, they usually mean a place you can casually show up to at 6pm (with or without family members), take a seat, and maybe chat with some familiar faces. As someone who grew up going to church, I feel like my church was neither my parents’ third place nor my own! It was simply a place we went to on Wednesdays and Sundays to worship our God. We would hang out afterwards, but that was limited to 0.2857 of our free afternoons/evenings.

I think the article gets it right in that the collapse of American third places goes beyond just church attendance. Ideal third places are things like guild halls, bars, parks; places where you can show up and no one asks why you’re there or what you did today. The leveling and inclusive aspect is key: you need to be able to bring anyone who might otherwise need a third place, and they must be greeted as just another conversation member.

This is how high school Super Smash Brothers days were at Blaine’s house: unlocked door, say hi

xxxtentachyon··on So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
If that's your use case, here's another game changer (one line bashrc change to make bash_history changes immediately, rather than upon shell exit, e.g. when you end your tmux session): https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberi...
xxxtentachyon··on U.S. mortgage interest rates jump to 6.52%, highest since mid-2008
I’ve got ten years until mine starts adjusting, fingers crossed!
xxxtentachyon··on The beginning of the Monte Carlo method (1987) [pdf]
Black-Scholes uses the heat equation, is that what you’re thinking of?
xxxtentachyon··on Reading fast, reading well, and reading widely (2020)
I don’t subvocalize and haven’t for many years, but when I did (and more so now), the speed-limiting factor was never the time it took to read the word, but to comprehend what’s on the page in the sense of understanding it. You can probably get away with 200+ pages per hour if you’re not reading for comprehension, but it’s hard to imagine getting anything out of a difficult text at that speed.
xxxtentachyon··on Spain will introduce free train travel
You could, however, functionally live on the transit system if it were free (or cheap enough, or fares unenforced), as we see in New York or Philadelphia. Granted, that’s a problem of enforcement and other social ills as much as it is one of a cheap system.
xxxtentachyon··on 3D-Printed Homes for Sale in Austin
That’s astounding. Are there similar figures available for other recent huge builders (e.g. China, both road infrastructure and dams etc)
xxxtentachyon··on 3D-Printed Homes for Sale in Austin
Most mortgages still get packaged and sold in the form of ABS or to Fannie and Freddie. I think you’d end up with an inability to package them unless you could convince the feds and asset managers that they can consistently survive the lifetime of the mortgage.
xxxtentachyon··on Inbound container volumes to the US are reverting to pre-pandemic levels
Tax policy also acts much more slowly for individuals. Beyond that, I don’t think this is US-specific issue. Are there any countries at the moment trying to address near-term inflation via fiscal policy?
xxxtentachyon··on Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
Can you say more about not being allowed on the internet? Why and how you think it affected you?

It’s hard for me to fathom someone at age 12 in 2015 with a somewhat cosmopolitan background (playing games, using an RPi), not being allowed on the internet, period.

xxxtentachyon··on Algorithms for Decision Making [pdf]
He was one of my favorite professors (had him for CS238/AA238)! I still remember some of his project assignments fondly. I got a SISL shirt for being in the top three of the leaderboard on one of them. Inspired me to interview at Lincoln Labs (which I did not land, probably for the best :P)
xxxtentachyon··on 100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers
The school is in a pretty dense area, less than 10 miles from NYC. If the cause were something that wasn’t unique to the building (such as proximity to a nuclear plant), I’d expect many thousands of affected
xxxtentachyon··on Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
Any recommendations for good podcasts in that vein?
xxxtentachyon··on FinRL: The first open-source project for financial reinforcement learning
Yes, my phrasing was poor. I meant to say “any reform that does not go as far as same-day would be bad”
xxxtentachyon··on FinRL: The first open-source project for financial reinforcement learning
You can settle as quickly as you want if you’re engaged directly with your counterparty. But yes, T+2 is wildly outdated and will likely move to T+1 in the next few years. Longer term, anything less than same-day settlement both wastes capital (of BDs who need to post collateral while their customers’ trades wait to settle) and risks contagion (since each additional day of settlement gives a party more time to go bankrupt) IMO
xxxtentachyon··on NYC allows citizens to report idling vehicles in exchange for a cut of the fines
Yes it’s definitely less than ideal that New York was built without alleys or some other means to store large amounts of household trash besides the sidewalk, but I disagree (at least with the severity) with the rest of this comment.

A subway car that’s vacated due to smells, while it happens, is extremely rare, and the average station is just as clean as any I saw in Rome or Paris. There are definitely exceptions to that, and the worst case is worse than what you’d see in the rest of the developed world, but it’s still an exceptional experience to see something or smell something terrible in the subway system.

xxxtentachyon··on Car Models with the Most DUIs
I wish I lived in a country where WRXs were that popular!
xxxtentachyon··on Please, delete all new places since the start of war 23th of February
What do you suggest people do? Get on the phone with their congressperson and have them send in a bomber squadron? As far as immediate impact, reporting this in the hopes that it gets taken down seems about as good as anything feasible at the moment.
xxxtentachyon··on Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?
How are you planning on collecting data? Seems hard to be a detached trial aid when your dog is in pain…
xxxtentachyon··on How do you fix a stroad?
As you say, there are plenty in the Northeastern United States. I think the primary historical factors that separates cohesive, walkable towns in the US from more stereotypical American development are the city having been established and built out prior to the 20th century (so there was some initial plan or development that predates cars), and the community either being wealthy enough or remote enough to avoid the pull of cookie-cutter post-war redevelopment. Of the places I’m familiar with, I’d call out Delaware and Montgomery County, PA, much of the Hudson Valley in New York (Hudson, Beacon, Newburgh, …). Outside of the northeast, there are remote locations (i.e. outside of commuting distance from a major city) in the southwest that have clearly defined and stroad-less cores. I’m thinking specifically of Taos County, NM and much of southwestern CO.

Ithaca is pushing into city territory (I think it has over 80k residents now), and if we’re going to count it, I’d also nominate small southeastern cities such as Savannah, Richmond, and St Augustine.

xxxtentachyon··on Long-term NAEP scores for 13-year-olds drop for first time since testing began
What do you do, if I may ask? The only roles that I'd characterize as you describe are fixed income management and some actuarial roles
xxxtentachyon··on Long-term NAEP scores for 13-year-olds drop for first time since testing began
I wouldn't really expect them to be able to solve a simple ODE with just Calculus BC. It's been about a decade since I took it, but to my memory, it concluded with basic elements of real analysis after getting pretty far along with single variable integral calculus techniques. We never discussed ODEs as such, but some clever students would probably recognize how to solve them on sight without being acquainted with the broader fields of differential equations
xxxtentachyon··on New York Public Library ends all late fees
$15 per minute seems extortionate. Is the pickup window huge or something?
xxxtentachyon··on Private jet rage grows as a record number of fliers strain the system
I’m sure it did, but at that point why not automatically grant it to every citizen who can pass a background check?
xxxtentachyon··on Private jet rage grows as a record number of fliers strain the system
I was surprised by this when I went in for my Precheck appointment soon after the program started. I had made room in my schedule for an hour or so, and was horrified when the entire interview was just a TSA employee taking my picture. I don't really understand what the utility could be beyond revenue and getting ahead of constituent pressure from people rich enough to make some noise about how useless the TSA is.
xxxtentachyon··on Private jet rage grows as a record number of fliers strain the system
As someone who was 12 years old in 2006, it's baffling to me that we came so close to an effective tax on carbon so long ago, and now it's anathema to even bring it up on a national platform. The cap-and-trade system in place in California is the one thing that keeps my hope in that state alive.
xxxtentachyon··on Ok, so you can’t decide
McDonald’s in France is kind of a cut above McDonald’s elsewhere, even neighboring countries and very similar markets. I’ve been to McDonald’s all over Western and Northern Europe, and the McDonald’s on the right bank in Lyon will forever hold a special place in my heart
xxxtentachyon··on 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
Among what populations is it near universal? I grew up in an upper-middle class bedroom community, and I only had to get first aid certified in order to be a lifeguard at a local pool. That was just about a decade ago, and I’d be hard-pressed to do anything other than apply a cold compress and perform the Heinrich maneuver now. My father-in-law was a trained physician overseas but became a pharmaceutical researcher when he came to the US, and the last time he was in a situation where he had to perform CPR, he had no idea what to do. I doubt more than 20% of American adults would be useful in a serious casualty situation.
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