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stevesimmons commented on Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity   nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/Anon84
mothballed · 14 days ago
An issue for kids nowadays is being outside unattended is basically illegal (for instance IL / Chicago, minimum age unattended is 14). Therefore they might get more activity in the country on a bigger acreage alongside an unwalkable road, than they would in the city in a walkable area, unlike an adult.

As soon as you get near people, if there is a enough, a Karen will rat the kid out as soon as they touch public property and maybe before it. They are only safe from CPS tyrants when they are out of sight.

stevesimmons · 14 days ago
I can't comprehend an environment where kids aged 14 can't be independent. From age 5, I walked 20 minutes to and from school every day.

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stevesimmons commented on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself   skeptrune.com/posts/doing... · Posted by u/skeptrune
worthless-trash · a month ago
Ive lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense.

In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles".

Pick the units you want.

stevesimmons · a month ago
That's in the mobile app. In the web browser, there's no such setting. Or at least, none that I can find.
stevesimmons commented on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself   skeptrune.com/posts/doing... · Posted by u/skeptrune
stevesimmons · a month ago
If Google Maps would like to hire me so the km/miles switch can remember I only ever want to see distances in km, my contact details are in my HN profile.

I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users...

stevesimmons commented on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it   cesarsotovalero.net/blog/... · Posted by u/cesarsotovalero
tgv · 2 months ago
Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly.

PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.

stevesimmons · 2 months ago
> I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly.

Python had web servers from 2000, including Jim Fulton's Zope (really a full framework for a content management system) and in 2002 Remi Delon's CherryPy.

Both were useful for their day, well supported by web hosting companies, and certainly very lightweight compared to commercial Java systems that typically needed beefy Sun Solaris servers.

stevesimmons commented on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it   cesarsotovalero.net/blog/... · Posted by u/cesarsotovalero
pyman · 2 months ago
From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004.

Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already using, like Hadoop, right around the time big data and ML were starting to take off.

Also, between 2005 and 2006, two important things happened: Ruby on Rails came out and inspired Django, which was starting to gain popularity, and web developers were getting tired of Perl's messy syntax. That's how Python quickly became a solid choice not just for server-side scripts, but for building proper web apps. In the meantime, another language that could be embedded directly into HTML was storming the web: PHP. Its syntax was similar to JavaScript, it was easy to pick up, lowered the barrier to entry for software development, worked straight out of the box, and didn't require thousands of print statements to get things done.

The 3 Ps made history. According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. The new generation of devs is more pragmatic. These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job.

stevesimmons · 2 months ago
The key factor imo was Travis Oliphant merging the competing numeric and numarray libraries into numpy in 2005. That quickly became the foundation of Python as the key environment for open source numeric processing.

It brought across a ton of users from R and Matlab.

Pandas, Matplotlib and ScikitLearn then consolidated Python's place as the platform of choice for both academic and commercial ML.

stevesimmons commented on Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/fzliu
safety1st · 2 months ago
Without writing a book about it I'll just say that I think the most important thing is people shouldn't look at this info and conclude that their body's going to fall apart no matter what.

I'm in my mid 40s and in the best shape of my life, lots of energy, aches and pains from my late 30s have all disappeared, to get there it took diet and exercise changes that were surprisingly modest. For me it was mostly weights, a little bit of cardio, and cutting back on my worst episodes of caloric excess.

I have friends who didn't do any diet and exercise interventions, and are starting to look like hell and complain about the "inevitable" consequences of aging.

And then there are those jacked dudes in their 70s who are hitting the gym 5 times a week, I can only aspire to be as healthy as them at their age.

Use it (with proper care and feeding) or lose it.

stevesimmons · 2 months ago
Agree. There's lots you can do to slow the affects of aging. Most of us just don't try.

I'm 55 and found - much to my surprise - that 12 months of carefully progressively and intense running training has improved me from a slow plodder (jogging 5km a couple of times a week) to on track for a 3 hour marathon later this year. Along the way, I'm back to the weight I had in my early 20s, but now also am a lot faster and with way more endurance.

Of course, at 55, I now need to be more careful now about not getting injured. Which means being disciplined about stretching, strength training and recovery. Things I never needed to worry about when I was younger.

So absolutely:

> Use it (with proper care and feeding) or lose it.

stevesimmons commented on Framework Laptop 12 review   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/moelf
paxys · 2 months ago
You can't upgrade the hard drive or RAM on modern laptops either.
stevesimmons · 2 months ago
You can upgrade SSD on most laptops other that Mac.

My Dell XPS13 came with a 1TB SSD, which recently was replaced with a 4TB one...

stevesimmons commented on How much energy does it take to think?   quantamagazine.org/how-mu... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
mellow_observer · 3 months ago
Since the brain is optimized for low energy environments, and we have now reached a high energy availability era, it makes you wonder if there's a way to get around the mental fatigue problem somehow. Fatigue is incredibly intellectually debilitating and if we could find a way to be fully on all of the time if we so wish, that should come with a great increase in quality of life.

Now available energy is almost certainly not the only reason we have fatigue, so maybe there's other barriers to overcome, but I'm shocked at how little attention this topic gets. In hackernews spirit, if someone could sell a real cure for mental fatigue, you'd change the world

stevesimmons · 3 months ago
At the risk of asking a dumb question, what really is mental fatigue and do all people experience it the same way?

On one hand, I understand -- and feel very directly -- physical fatigue, and the metabolic limitations if I try to say run slowly versus push hard up to my lactate threshold. I am currently training for a marathon, and know to train by following progressively heavier loads of long distance runs, interval training, stretches and rest periods to develop my speed and endurance.

But mental fatigue really just isn't a phenomenon that I personally relate to. I know some people say they can perhaps work 4-6 focused hours in a work day, and that's it. Whereas my brain seems to be able to work at essentially the same intensity for as long as I want it to, up to 18 hours a day, and then I need a bit of sleep to recover. So I don't quite comprehend mental fatigue, or what a cure for it would be. I don't even know how I would increase my ability to avoid mental fatigue other than minimising distractions (like HN!) and just keep thinking more for longer.

How do other people here experience mental fatigue (or not)?

stevesimmons commented on Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster   allenpike.com/2025/figma-... · Posted by u/tobr
esafak · 3 months ago
Yes, why not? Those who missed the real thing can watch it sped up and skip parts, saving time.
stevesimmons · 3 months ago
Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?

It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.

u/stevesimmons

KarmaCake day2497July 2, 2014
About
Chief Data Officer and co-founder at financial data aggregation platform Sikoia (https://sikoia.com).

Contact details on LinkedIn or mail@stevesimmons.com.

Previously did military research; was a management consultant; ran marketing, profitability, credit risk, and operations for credit card companies; built trading systems and ML platforms for investment banks.

BE/BSc in Math/Stats/Physics/ElecEng; PhD in Elec Eng, MBA.

World champion programmer, a long time ago (ICPC, 1992), together with Andrew and Craig. Python programmer since 2000. Find my PyData and PyCon UK talks at PyVideo.org.

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