dkmn

Typical to focus on the pipeline, the Economist is culturally conditioned not to question the context of the system.

A lot the distribution, efficiency, and particularly the burnout are due to corporatization and over regulation. The "medical" system is a self-licking ice cream cone of non normal demand curves being served by inefficient systems the generate reasons to intermediate money between the end players of patient and doctor.

So typical to focus on the "doctor" as the problem.

We had a much more robust distributed national system before the"smart" people made it "efficient".

In addition to the points he makes, there is less of a complexity barrier to jump with that generation of machine.

Modern OSX/MacOS/iOS is arguably elegant but also complex and hardly something you control... A far cry from the demo'ed C compiler.

I can see a lot of utility in that little rig. And a lot of future proofing.

Yes, this sort of solipsism thrives on the coasts where people are So Very Sure how Very Smart and Very Correct they are. Not that all US coastal people and cultures are like that, far from it, but the level of population and prosperity that breeds the resulting insularity comes along with it.

Seems very entitled to me. I wonder if the author ever considered how people who have lived in a small town feel about someone who insists on showing up, being catered to, and not assimilating?

Realize there is some level of resentment of servicemen as well. I was a dependent in the 80s abroad.

I am also an American and so sensitive to small unfriendlinesses, but I find them no worse in visiting a far city like Chicago than in most countries.

Have not been to Germany in a while. It used to feel quite straightforward to me and much friendlier than I expected with a modicum of effort. Perhaps more jaded now in the post internet era but who knows.

Still this feels like the snowflake version of the Ugly American viewpoint.

Observations:

- among many thoughtful comments, a search for "fun" yields mostly comments about functions and expressivity; I think this is a key aspect that isn't as apparent to many experienced people here. The fond recollections of ZX80/81's captures some of that idea, though.

- Scratch is blessedly non-commercial and immensely approachable. It's educational mission is not top-down, but bottom-up.

- The mix of 3GL expressivity with enough constraint to get a person started is great. Kind of reminds me of the generativity I see in kids playing Minecraft.

- The pure old-schoolness of it all keeps you from being mugged in a dark semantic alley by a gang of monad-botherers.

What a positive and uplifting story. Thank you for sharing, and BTW your writing is lucid, clever, and honest. Blessings to you all!

That sounds somewhat resonant. I'd be really curious as to what insights you had or choices you made; considering the same type of switch. Did you ever write anything up on the journey or find any particular resources useful?

I'm just happy that critical discussion around SARS-nCoV-2 and related politics isn't instantly being flagged on Hacker News anymore ;) There is a lot of brainpower and a surprising variety of experience on this list.

^this

Hilarious.

One of the things that had most annoyed me in medicine since 1995,a slavish dedication to what I've come to call "evidence based nihilism". And a lot of the people who are most rigid do not treat patients but get promoted out of useful work.

The space of actual practice is far more complex and some applied science is actually called for.

What's worse, this kind of sanctimonious stringency (large industry/govt funded placebo DB RCT etc) is selectively applied to only certain practices, never to received wisdom or pet projects.

Good points about engaging in this work has changed the ways the author both thinks and feels about the landscape and ecosystem.

We've been learning about permaculture (old school Holzer, Mollison, Hemenway style) and small-scale homesteading for about 8 yrs now. Started from nearly scratch, in terms of practical gardening.

Every bit of work I've done with bees (solitary mason bees) and other permaculture (garden, orchard, efficient irrigation solutions, swaling, synergistic plantings, etc) has been fascinating.

The permaculture philosophy itself is more broadly-applicable than agriculture, in terms of a systems based view, but a lot of the practical instantiations are in ag, heating, irrigation, animal husbandry, etc. There's a lot on offer for many people who would be attracted to HN. E.g. looking at the thermodynamic aspects of siting water tanks, passive solar, masonry stoves, etc (physics and biomed background b4 software). Cost-wise and energetically a lot more scalable than widely existing solutions.

Also improved my perceptive ability and appreciation for natural surroundings and different human landscapes.

Anyhow, I'll get down off my soapbox now, but it's been a surprisingly rich vein of practical innovation and fun.

If you're curious, check out "Gaia's Garden" by Hemenway or one of Bill Mollison's books (former in Portland, so small yards, latter doing more wide-reaching stuff in Australia and developing nations).

Having a bee house (for mason bees) has worked very well for us. Harvesting the cocoons in fall helps prevent concentration and spread of parasites, so I find the split-and-drilled layered wooden blocks work very well and pay for themselves over time.

I've heard some same the solid drilled wood, though cost-effective, can make the problem worse (they call them "bee tombs" though I suspect it's a bit hyperbolic).

Agree with stinos about coarse bird mesh and using non-treated wood, but it hasn't been a problem for us.

I heartily encourage this! Moreover, consider mason bees or leafcutter bees. Solitary bees are easier to raise (very easy, in fact), some species are 80x as effective in pollination as honey bees, they are very very docile, many may also be native to where you live (which I don't mean as a doctrinal requirement, but it suggests suitability as well as providing some good opportunities to study and experiment... we live in the Pacific NW of the US).

We've had mason bees for the last 4-5 yrs, which help with our backyard permaculture orchard/garden. I involved my kids (daughter about 7 at the time, son 10). Both loved it and learned a lot along the way.

Cost to start is low. Time investment also low. Check out Crown Bees (no financial affiliation) or search around for more info.

(disclaimer: we're just starting with leafcutters, but I've heard similarly great things about them)

To the OP: Your write-up (nicely done) is particularly interesting to me in that I'm using this unplanned furlough to work on diving back into Clojure and coincidentally was wanting to set up some static personal sites. Thanks for sharing the write-up and sentiments.

May I ask: - Do you use this approach more generally in your work? At first glance, it feels heavyweight for something like a blog (e.g. the intention site), but after perusal I appreciated the clarity of the Clojure code. Just curious if you've been doing this a lot and whether you find it efficient in the longer-term. - Do you have any opinions regarding the more "framework like" static generation tools for Clojure (misaki, etc)?

Thank you! A very welcome thread. It's been very interesting to watch children during this current period of restriction... to see both their internal robustness (in some ways improved, I think, by the lack of constant ephemeral stimulation) and also how they respond to the cultural memes and currents.

E.g. as the author notes: "I think the most important thing that emerges is the influence that adults try to have on children. Even nowadays, in a subtler way, adults try to mold children and make them adapt to the society they live in."

Thanks for sharing the nice write-up! It's a bit more in-depth than the "hello world" tutorials out there, and mixing in a few dev tools and workflow hints is a nice touch. I'm still learning Clojure (dipped in and out over the last few years), and found a few gems that weren't covered elsewhere.

Visually- and organizationally well-done, too! The slang for JAR ("Jean-Michel") was a hilarious touch to include...

On related notes:

- (ref. some of the comments and your "next steps" list) Another resource for newcomers is Clojure Koans (https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans). It's very easy to use these to learn and refresh, even a few minutes at a time. During the recent stay-at-home period, I've actually had my kids (12 and 15) do these exercises, and even used it as an opportunity to start teaching them about git, so they can share their work with me in segments.

- (for anyone hankering to write something) I think one thing that is still not well-served for relative newcomers is doing webapps. The examples I found talking about Ring and Compojure were either dated in terms of dependencies or were a bit obscure in that there were both new concepts and syntax introduced at the same time, without a lot of explanation ("it's all in the docs" is not as helpful when you're new to the language, the idioms, and the frameworks all at once).

That is an interesting point (framing as a strawman). Something was bugging me in the article, though I think I agree with many of the points made, and your comment recalled it to mind.

Both fundamental and practical education matter in most realms.

Practical example: medicine (modern allopathic "western" medicine, i.e. the job of a physician, something I know and can comment about relative to both basic science and software). The author implies that time is "wasted" in basic science, when students could simply be more involved with patients. Leaving the value of patient contact aside (most schools do involve students early these days to provide context and motivation), one of the whole points is to provide a multi-level framework for better incorporating later knowledge. This allows a person to adjudicate new findings and therapies, guide their patient and practice, figure out novel situations of atypical presentations (often due to overlapping processes or red herrings).

Anyhow, I'm sure others can think of similar examples in fields they know.

Also, perhaps one of the western European folks here can comment, but I seem to recall that trade apprentices in, say, Germany, generally still have a pretty decent core knowledge of math, language, etc from school. I.e. pretty comparable to an "academic track" US high school student, excepting AP courses. True?

Also there is a different psychological dynamic in small groups... The teacher naturally knows and cares more about the student, and the student feels socially accountable (ie. "I want to make (so-and-so) proud." And, in a real sense, the master and apprentices are a team.

And this isn't the "we need more money and teachers" argument I'm making, just that the large-group lecture format only works well for certain stages of learning and types of learners.

My experience in recruiting data scientists is that candidates that have formal degrees in data science generally have little experience outside of school. My assumption is that these degree programs are relatively new.

A friend (also a physicist, though harder-core) who is a now a data scientist opined to me that the current wave of cross-trained data scientists will be replaced by "kids with their new data science degrees from new data science programs". He didn't mean this ill, but simply thought there was a window of time to make a shift.

Your comment implies you are actually seeing relevant benefit from people with more diverse experience. Can you elaborate? Do you mean lots of hands-on data science per se, or simply a broader practical experience?

Edited: for formatting

Use positive-diopter ("reading" glasses). If your eyesight is normal, you might need to get an optometrist to cut you a mild positive prescription, as the lenses sold over-the-counter in US drugstores are generally stronger than a young person would use in this context... But you can try one of the milder ones and see how it fits your working distance.

Such lenses will "push out" the focal distance of your screen, so it is optically closer to infinity. If you already wear negative-diopter glasses, for nearsightedness, you can get a milder negative prescription for close work or check out the new "computer" lenses that are multi-focal and give you different zones for nearer, farther, and in-between.

Your eyes "work" to focus more closely-in, via contraction of the relevant muscles to thicken the lens. So prolonged close-work, such as with a computer, will cause fatigue and eye strain. There is also decent evidence, though it is debated, that prolonged exposure results in a trophic response and acquisition of myopia (nearsightedness). I've seen this empirically multiple times.

Wearing glasses for nearsightedness while you're doing close work is a double-whammy. They make things look even closer. At the minimum, don't wear these glasses if you don't need them at the computer.

Hope this helps!

BTW if you don't entirely trust ergonomic advice from a random dude on the internet, your local optometrist can help. There is a type called (in the US) a "behavioral optometrist"; these folks generally are more focused on optimizing for occupational needs like this, vision therapy etc.

PS. Hey, just realized this is a physics audience! You guys can figure this all out yourselves with the thin lens equation... :)

After grad school I got some very good advice from a mathematician: If you are good at math, don't go where they are good at math.

^This. LOL. IMHO a lot of opportunities arise at the borders between fields. This helped me put my finger on it; physics and its related math are a great basis for interdisciplinary work. Selling that idea to SW-company HR and hiring managers can be hard, in my experience, but startups more often benefit from versatile employees early on. Cool business idea BTW!

Anecdote: One of my most enjoyable SW jobs ever was working for a while as a staff project architect/programmer for a bioinformatics lab at the University of Washington. Great meaningful project, lots of freedom, smart colleagues. BTW I have a physics and life science (medicine) background, but it was partly coincidental, and an interested non-scientist could have done it and learned a lot. FWIW it did not pay exceptionally well, but it was reasonable salary at the time and the environment was really enjoyable and productive. This was a few years ago, but I would imagine given the current labor market there would still be significant need for academic staff SW positions. Good luck and post back if you do make a switch! As this thread indicates, this is a topic of interest to many.

Edited: Re-reading batbomb's reply, I also remembered a friend who is currently a data scientist for a venture-incubator, but was previously at a national lab. Many of the projects he described were very cool, and challenging.

This. Actual value you know, have, or are creating anyway. Many people will happily pay a reasonable fee for such things. Pros: not a gimmick, satisfaction of being an author. Cons: target of opportunity.

What boards or clearinghouses work well for harder-to-define roles? (tech translation, multi-disciplinary, new business development, co-founder-like roles, etc)