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hothead334 commented on Ocean Warming Study So Distressing, Some Scientists Didn't Want to Talk About It   commondreams.org/news/oce... · Posted by u/Paul-Craft
junon · 2 years ago
I really don't get what is supposed to happen. The folks that can do something about this have no incentive to do so - instead, they're often incentivized to do something against it.

So what's the solution? Me recycling cans and using public transportation and going vegan and ... isn't going to solve this problem. The people who aren't already convinced aren't going to change their habits.

Pardon my french, but are we just completely and collectively fucked? What does a solution, long or short term, look like - realistically, not as per Musk et al?

hothead334 · 2 years ago
The Hacker News consensus is that no one is doing anything. I used to believe this and despair. But that is _just not true_. I've subscribed to the Harvard C Change newsletter and it's really changed my perspective - past issues here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/climateoptimist/

Just one highlight: the current has administration canceled three fossil fuel lease sales in 2022 due to a lack of industry interest In contrast, there are currently 18 active offshore wind leases with 14 new site assessment plans approved, including the scoping of the first wind energy areas in the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of Maine.[0]

I also look at this daily, although it's more focussed on Europe: https://www.positive.news/

It's not all sunshine and roses. But the narrative should be: 'some humans, albeit perhaps the minority, are fighting save this planet, and are winning at least of their battles'. Maybe it will be too little too late. But the narrative is decidedly not 'existential threat to our species and others, and no one gives a shit'.

[0]https://www.americanprogress.org/article/offshore-wind-can-l...

hothead334 commented on CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon   academy.cs.cmu.edu/... · Posted by u/bobbiechen
ghoshbishakh · 3 years ago
Definitely most universities are making their lectures available. For example IITs have this huge collection of all kinds of Engineering courses, https://nptel.ac.in/courses

And now they are expanding to medical sciences too! Imagine becoming a self taught doctor :/ https://dth.ac.in/medical/course.php

But yes, the value of attending a top university is not at all limited to these study materials. It is so much more.

hothead334 · 3 years ago
Fantastic, the fundamentals of electrical engineering is exactly what I've been looking for.
hothead334 commented on Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?    · Posted by u/th33ngineer
actinium226 · 3 years ago
Isaacson's biography of Da Vinci. Beautiful man.

The biography went really deep into his art and pointed out what made it so special. As someone who knows nothing about art, this gave me a wonderful new perspective both on Da Vinci and on art in general.

hothead334 · 3 years ago
You might enjoy Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane if you enjoyed the Isaacson biography. Fantastic writing and a very very interesting man as well as incredible artist.
hothead334 commented on Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?    · Posted by u/th33ngineer
RunSet · 3 years ago
The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.

The Sword in the Stone is probably my favorite Disney movie so I was delighted to discover the movie was based on a book which was even better.

hothead334 · 3 years ago
One of my favourites of all time. The singing Cockney hedgehog is such a gem.
hothead334 commented on Ask HN: Do anyone get anxiety from following Hacker News?    · Posted by u/rammy1234
mike_hearn · 3 years ago
The main trick I use to avoid feeling overwhelmed is for each technology that feels important in some way, do the minimal work required to learn the following questions:

1. What problem is this trying to solve?

2. What are the strengths / weaknesses?

Usually you don't have to go very deep to get a feel for these questions. I figure that if I know these things, then in future if I encounter a problem where tech X is useful I can go learn the details. If I never do, I can at least prioritize within whatever free time/energy I have for additional side learning.

As an example, for quantum computing the problem it's solving is surprisingly hard to identify. Breaking (some) cryptographic algorithms is the classical example, but that's not a problem I plan to try and solve anytime soon. Other use cases tend to be vague - ML is often mentioned but actual players in the AI space don't seem to be investing into QC much. Quick eval result: pass for now until use cases become clearer.

What about ML? Many useful problems that can be solved with that - anything where you can't easily express an algorithm to solve a problem but one may be learnable by example. Strengths: capable of doing things no other technique can do. Weaknesses: requires lots of clean(ish) data, advanced ML may need specialists, training/inference can be expensive, finding ways to actually apply it to business problems is remarkably tricky due to its capacity for random failure and difficulty in coming up with fixes for that, which doesn't fit the needs of most automation projects ... but can be OK if you can predict fast enough to speed up a human who's already in the loop, or if mistakes are cheaply correctable. The exact details of how it works? I enjoy reading about it. There's a good article on the GPT-3 DNN architecture on the HN front page right now actually, but it's just some casual hobby learning. I don't feel stressed if I don't grok all the details right now because it's not necessary to do so.

In other words, focus on knowing the outlines of these topics and learning when/how to apply them, then forget the rest. That doesn't take as much time as you'd expect.

hothead334 · 3 years ago
>> The main trick I use to avoid feeling overwhelmed is for each technology that feels important in some way, do the minimal work required to learn the following questions:

These two simple questions seem like a great approach and one I will take in future, appreciate your sharing it.

hothead334 commented on Ask HN: Do anyone get anxiety from following Hacker News?    · Posted by u/rammy1234
hothead334 · 3 years ago
One thing I try to remember is that HN is a place where a lot of people from the same broad area hang out. There are math Phds here who know nothing about Bash, veteran sys admins who don't know anything about the Node event loop, regular old devs like myself who know nothing about quantum cryptography - but we're all coming over here, posting links and chatting away and tripping over each other's areas of expertise which were literally years in the making.
hothead334 commented on Low-code is not a cure for overworked IT departments   zdnet.com/article/low-cod... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
mathgladiator · 3 years ago
> But maybe I'm just stupid

No, I believe the cloud stuff has evolved in a way that is just strange. I know I'm not stupid, and I look at this stuff with suspicion. This is why I'm going vertical by owning my entire stack (except Amazon S3 because it is awesome...)

hothead334 · 3 years ago
Could replace S3 with a self hosted Minio instance?
hothead334 commented on Ron's house: Minotaur head and lion discovered in rented Birkenhead flat   bbc.com/news/av/entertain... · Posted by u/ZeljkoS
hothead334 · 3 years ago
Just amazing. I wonder how he got that concrete mixed up for the lion's head, how he did all of this without once mentioning it to anyone.
hothead334 commented on Tell HN: I used the same computer since 2007 (with minor upgrades)    · Posted by u/andrecarini
hothead334 · 3 years ago
Very very cool. I'm writing this on a second-hand MacBook that was given to me by the very wealthy family I used to work for- it had stopped working completely and they said I should take it and see if I could get it fixed. I did, and I hope to have it for as long as I possibly can- I could never have afforded one otherwise.
hothead334 commented on The Linux cheat command   opensource.com/article/22... · Posted by u/feross
e40 · 3 years ago
I had a script that worked fine in BASH but errored in Zsh. It had to do with arrays and I don't remember the problem.
hothead334 · 3 years ago
It was probably that in zsh, arrays start at 1.

u/hothead334

KarmaCake day37May 25, 2022View Original