astalwick

If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.

No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.

What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.

It was possible in other countries.

My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.

Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.

We've decided to solve that problem by consuming very nearly the entire residential power consumption of Canada, a country of 38 million people.

We've done this with a network that can process 400k transactions per day (at $20/transaction in fees), as compared to visa, which does 150 million per day.

Surely, we can do better?

Bitcoin currently consumes roughly the energy used to power one quarter of CANADA.

I'm optimistic that there is a better way to store a ledger as you describe. Perhaps a database?

You don't know how hard it is, as a parent, to make the call to medicate your six year old child.

Here are some of the things that went through my own mind:

- Maybe he'll outgrow it (he's fairly severe ADHD, but we went through a long process of hoping that it was just a maturity-level thing)

- Paper after article after paper sent by well-meaning family members about how ADHD is over-diagnosed. Doubt.

- Side-effects (obviously, first thing every parent thinks about)? How severe will they be in my child?

- Ritalin + suicide [0].

- If we medicate him at six, _will he ever learn the tools to manage ADHD without meds_? He'll potentially spend his entire childhood on meds.

- If we don't medicate him, and he's consistently labelled a 'problem child' in his class, how will that affect his self-esteem as he grows up? How will it affect his feelings about school and work?

- If we don't medicate him, and he struggles and falls behind his classmates in his schoolwork (which, even in Grade 1, he was - significantly), are we holding him back? He's a super smart kid, he just can't focus.

- If we medicate him, and it doesn't work (we have to try multiple meds), how will it affect his self-esteem to be constantly visiting psychiatrists, pediatricians, etc. A thing I've noticed: doctors have zero problems talking overly-candidly in front of my kid about his failings, as though he's not there.

- We were literally told by a doctor that once you get on the medication train, 99% of parents don't get off until at least mid-high school. Am I comfortable with that?

After that long thought process (and so much more), we put him on medication. We're going very slowly in ramping up the dosage, but he's already caught up to his classmates in school, and he seems happier. I don't know if we've done the right thing, but I do know: it's not as clear-cut right/wrong as you make it out to be.

[0] http://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc...

It's not about removing human agency. It's about nudging the aggregate views of a whole population, ever so slightly. Determine what works, reinforce that, repeat algorithmically.

He's making the point that Facebook has the ability to apply machine-learning-like reinforcement algorithms to whole populations.

You or I, individually, still have agency. Large populations have inertia - they're slow to move - but I'm not sure they have real defense against this kind of manipulation. I guess the real defense here is a diversity of sources (but we all know people who get all of their news from [fox | cnn | facebook | whatever]).

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360

He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet.

Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole.

However, don't forget that when a baby is left unsupervised and is submerged in a pool for 15 minutes, it's called neglect.

Whoa there, slow down.

Kids are quick. One moment, your three kids are happily watching Finding Dory on the tv, while you're making dinner. The next, only two are: the third has quietly wandered off.

Unless you know the particulars, be very careful about tossing around words like 'neglect'.

We removed the youtube app from our iPad, because our 4 year old was starting to get too deep into these.

There's a lot of great stuff on Youtube for kids (genuinely, whole-heartedly, terrific stuff; I was amazed), but there's also a lot of very, very weird and sexualized and violent content. Targeted at young children. And unfortunately, the 'recommended' sidebar is a little bit too eager in sending kids down those paths.

I see some comments comparing it to 'video games ruining society' and 'violent cartoons'. No, it is not at all the same thing. I have no problem handing the ipad to my son and allowing him to select a show on Netflix. Youtube crossed my 'wtf creepy' threshold a few too many times.

You may be right.

However, the Volt is basically just a hybrid with a bigger battery. By 2011, hybrids were pretty common, so being nervous about the tech wasn't as much of an issue. That's the point I'm trying to make: for most people, $30k is a pretty big investment. New tech is a risk, and awards like COTY go a long way to overcoming consumer resistance to that risk.

It's possible, though, that Tesla has done enough to prove out electric cars. Tesla won COTY as well.

This is a big deal.

Car of the year, when you're talking about normal internal combustion cars, doesn't really matter that much. When you start talking about new (and, for $30000, scary) tech like electrics and hybrids 10-12 years ago, it makes a big impact on purchasing decisions.

I bought my 2005 Prius largely based on the car of the year recommendation on the 2004 Prius (among other research, sure). That recommendation helped validate that I wasn't buying an experiment - people who know cars thought this was a great buy.

I'm so not surprised by the comments here, so far.

The core points here are good ones:

- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.

- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.

You'd be surprised. This is in Canada, not sure about the US.

Deaths per 100,000 people (drowning), Canada, 2006-2010:

0-4: 1.1

5-12: 0.6

13-17: 0.9

18-24: 2.2

24-34: 1.6

34-49: 1.4

50-64: 1.7

65+: 1.6

I don't have the source handy, but I'll try to dig it up.

Edit: Source - http://www.lifesavingsociety.com/media/157475/2013-cdndrowni...

The problem with against-the-flow is that it's unexpected to cars that are making a right turn.

The other day, I was coming out of an alley, turning right on to a one way street. I'm turning right, so I expect all road traffic to be coming from my left. That's the direction I'm focused on in making my right turn.

Now, I always check to the right, but I never really expect to see anything. When I did actually see a cyclist zinging up from my right, it kind of gave me an adrenaline jolt. He was never in any danger, my car was fully stopped and never moved: but it was so unexpected to see him there, that i kind of went "oh god, I almost ran him over".

Point is: if safety is your concern, then probably the safest thing you can do is to follow the same laws cars do. Be where a driver expects to see another car.

I actually do. I'm arguing a lot in this thread, but I stopped watching game of thrones around season three. I maybe pirate a movie every 8 or 10 weeks or something? I have young kids and a startup job. :) And I have Netflix (Canadian version, no vpn, so like 1/4 the content as in the US) for when I have some free time. But frankly I do prefer books (again, audible.com is the best)

That said, content distribution is completely broken outside the US, so I'm going to shed exactly one tiny crocodile tear for HBO when I do decide to get back into game of thrones. And I sure as hell won't be paying for it, unless they give me some sane options.

Yeah, I totally get that.

And there's definitely a part of me that is biased to "free is better than not-free," so for sure, that's a part of my decision-making process. But unless the content companies actively work to make it difficult for me to consume their content, I try very hard to inhibit that "i can get it for free" mentality.. Precisely because I do know how hard it can be for artists.

Anyway, thanks for the apology (and sorry for getting a bit defensive there). Cheers.

And one last thing: It is actually quite insulting to be reduced down to 'free is better than having to shell out money'.

No, it's not. I buy books (audible.com is amazing), I buy music, I buy software - all of which are just as easy to pirate.

I go to shows, I buy prints of photographsy that I like, I support artists. I am fully aware of how hard it is as an artist (my wife is an illustrator).

So, please don't reduce me down to "cheap bastard just doesn't want to pay". It's insulting and untrue.

I'm not trying to help HBO at all. Seriously, not. Couldn't care less about HBO. And you're right, I don't want to pay for it, not when it's priced like that and the distribution mechanisms in Canada are so broken.

But look: all of these American companies look at Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and go "you know what, we're just going to focus on the US." <Sorry, that content is not available in your region>.

That's so amazingly frustrating. So, yes, I honestly do hope that HBO sees the international piracy numbers and sorts out its sketchy content deals with Bell Media and launches HBO Go in Canada. Until the TV/Movie industry gets its act together, I'll pirate. (Since music is available to stream in Canada, I don't pirate music. Simple as that.)

As for my job: a) my personal opinion has nothing to do with my company, but b) I'm pretty comfortable with how Wavo empowers musicians and artists. We're a small company, so the fully-realized vision is still a ways off, but fundamentally the goal of Wavo is to help artists. There are no contradictions here.

It's not oppression, you're right. It's way, way smaller than that. My little act of 'defiance' is way smaller than it would be if it were exactly oppression, too.

I'm pirating content. I'm watching something that I want to watch, and at the same time, I'm hoping that my small increment of the 'pirated_copies_of_got' metric causes someone at HBO to go and sort out the way they distribute content outside of the US.

Literally no one else is harmed - because, no, I'm not going to pay the prices they've set. It's just nowhere near worth it. I'll go read a book instead.

Btw, hacking someone else's account is considerably more 'wrong', in my opinion: you're breaching someone's personal info and preventing them from using their account.

Laws aren't all equal. Stealing a car is zero-sum: if I take your car, you no longer have a car, which is a very, very expensive toy.

If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for every single person in the world except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).

Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly different because I contribute to a metric that content producers do pay attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.

They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll fix it for everyone.

(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).

Btw, you're being unfairly downvoted. Sorry.

You've decided that, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to pirate content. (Or, perhaps more generally, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to break the law)

That's cool, and that's a fair position.

I disagree. There are plenty of reasons, big and small, to choose not to follow the rules. The more pressure on Hollywood to provide reasonable options, in my opinion, the better.

But, that said, how about lets be respectful about it?

I consider piracy to be a form of protest.

I'm happy to pay, as long as the terms are reasonable. (I have a Rdio account that's been active for years now - I can't remember the last time I pirated music... I can't remember the last time I pirated software, either).

However, in Canada, the only way to watch (for example) Game of Thrones is to

a) get a massive cable subscription which includes 1000 channels you don't want and HBO (which itself has 100 programs you don't want to watch and GoT),

b) wait for the episode to show up on itunes and pay $4.50 per episode (whaat?) (and oh, season 5 isn't available yet),

c) pirate.

Is it a huge surprise that a lot of people choose option C? And can you blame them? At a certain point, non-Americans specifically just get fed up with being told "sorry, no, that content isn't available in your region."

To me, the core problem here is that evernote's cloud synced notes are stored locally in some very proprietary cache.

I'm happy to use Evernote and assume that it will fail in some horrible way. When it does, I want to be able to easily get my notes back via file system backups or backblaze restore.

We switched from underscore to lodash several months ago, and haven't regretted it. The fact that lodash follows semver is huge. Underscore has introduced serious breaking changes in minor point-releases more than once, which is completely unacceptable for a utility library.

So, as the rightful owner of the laptop, with proof (serial numbers, receipts, etc), could she not just have walked in, asked to see it, and walked out with it? What are they going to do, call the police? And are the police really going to charge her with theft of her own property?

* edit: typo

I think you're assuming an awful lot based on the fact that you haven't been surveyed by Facebook.

Facebook has 1B+ people. Do you know how trivial it is for them to run surveys? 100K population surveys, if they want? Many hundreds of them, simultaneously?

I have no insight into how facebook manages its surveys, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have some sort of generalized surveying platform built in to facebook that allows product teams to independently survey more or less anything they want.

Oh, so do I (and I'm more often on the receiving end, too). No question, there's a cost to being interrupted. Personally, I have to actively push back against my own displeasure at being interrupted.

At the end of the day, though, the value those interruptions bring to the project make them worthwhile. Problems are avoided before they become problems. Knowledge is transferred without forcing someone to learn it from the ground up themselves. Time is saved (maybe not my time, but project-time).

(Obviously, if you're consistently being interrupted with low-value, easy-to-answer questions, that's a bit different... there comes a point where you say "ok, spend a bit more time, and if you can't get it then I'll work more with you")

I think that's one thing that gets missed in these discussions: software development is different from, say, accounting or administration or whatever.

I get huge value out of being right beside the people that can answer the questions I have, and I know that they get value being near me. Putting walls between people and enforcing no-interruption work inhibits communication and makes it much easier to get blocked.

At our office, I actively encourage every new hire to interrupt me and ask a question when they get stuck. (I actually get kind of annoyed when they don't). Lots of people, especially more junior devs, will sit down at a problem and really get lost for a day trying to figure it all out themselves. I'd way rather be interrupted for a 15 minute explanation of some bit of code than have them lose a day.

Interviews are tough. There's very little time to get a feel for whether a person would be a good fit for an organization - and often, you have to make a judgment: was this comment just off-the-cuff curiosity, or does the fact that the person brought up the open-plan indicate that he or she would have problems with the way that the company works?

In interviews, the open-plan office is non-negotiable. It's not like you're going to convince them in an interview to change their minds and build closed offices. I can imagine a lot of interviewers going "well, if he or she brought it up and has actually studied literature on it, then it's probably something that bothers them, and if it's something that bothers them, we might have a problem down the road... maybe it's better to test the water than to offer full employment."

To be clear, this is a problem with the interview process, not with you (or the person hiring). There's just not enough time to actually understand a person, so interviewers are forced to make guesses and go with their hunches. And because the cost of hiring the wrong person is high, interviewers will often look for any small thing to refuse a hire.

Sure. Lots of factors go into deciding a data store, and you're right that you shouldn't just choose at random.

I disagree with the implication that if you do actually think about it, you'll necessarily land on MySQL or Postgres.

We landed on Mongo, and one of the reasons we did was because we were uncertain about the product direction. We knew we were going to be making massive changes to the schema. We didn't want to (couldn't) spend the time up front the think through the precise implications of every table in the system. In a very real way, we didn't even know what data we were going to be storing!

So, we mostly skipped it. We came up with a simple set of documents, our best guess, and ran with that. We made mistakes (we knew we would), and we corrected them easily. We saved time up front, and really haven't regretted it at all.