sealaska

We're on a forum called "Hacker News". Would you consider hackers to fit better into the conformist or non-conformist category?

Do you think kids should have recess? If so, for what purpose?

Or, what do you think of Montessori education?

Do you, or will you, allow your children to participate in extracurricular activities? Or is eating every dinner together less of an absolute priority as you claim? Your comment makes it sound like you may have some.

I ask because most of the dinners I missed growing up were due to sports.

American. 28. Grew up going to an inner city school with a bit of a class divide. Thinking about it now, the upper class families were more likely to eat dinner together; but I knew very many classmates that did not.

Neptune's Apprentice is a memoir by Marie DeSantis, who was one the first woman to break into the commercial fishing industry in California in the 1960's.

I'm biased because I work in commercial fishing myself, but this was a very good read.

I really like this essay [0] by cryptographer Moxie, specifically this section about starting a new career:

"...simply observe the older people working there.

They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.

Look at the real people, and you’ll see the honest future for yourself."

I also think money is really nice, but should not be a means unto itself.

I used to bartend in a wealthy area. Lots of folks on this little town would get tipsy and start talking about how much money they have.

One of my barometers for life is to have things I'm more passionate to talk about than wealth accumulation when I'm tipsy in a bar.

[0] https://moxie.org/2013/01/07/career-advice.html

It sounds to me like you're purposely upplaying the dangers of people who live outside, many of whom have substance abuse issues.

I'll refrain from guessing how enlightened you are.

It's an absurd system. How about we stop encouraging kids to go to college unless they have a plan on how to manage the incurred debt?

The price is increasing because people are willing to pay since they recognize how much it will add to their earning potential.

I assumed prices for colleges were increasing because of the availability of cheap debt. I know plenty of people who went to college, taking out large amounts of debt, and not seeming to directly consider their earning potential post-graduation.

Reproducible builds? [0]

[0] https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

I find this off-the-wall article is worth reading from Moxie.

"Do whatever — but make it uncomfortable (like leaving prison!) and make it count."

https://moxie.org/2013/01/07/career-advice.html

I think the problem with heavy bikes isn't only the weight itself. It's the fact that heavy bikes typically have much cheaper components / manufacturing overall.

Consider that adding 5 pounds to stationary components, like the frame, is adding < 5% to the amount of work being done by the rider, depending on the rider's weight.

I took his comments on bike weight as him saying that it isn't really worth worrying about an extra pound or two.

What do you think of E2E encryption in apps like Signal? Does the same logic apply?

It depends on the kind of crime. Some crime is easier with cash.

For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.

Well, paper money is also used for crime. In fact, illegal uses of paper currency are so common, U.S. authorities commonly seize cash from civilians deemed to be carrying too much of it!

In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".

/s

No argument from me there! But when the forecast completely misses in SE Alaska, or one forecast model displayed in Windy is way different than others, I naturally get curious as to what happened, so have been more interested in the nuts and bolts than is probably practical.

I'm more comfortable on the water knowing terms like ECMFW, myself!

That makes a lot of sense. I sail in SE Alaska.

You'd be surprised how many people make their living on the water up here, but their understanding of forecasting seems to amount to "download windy app"!

Anyways, the word ensemble is new vocabulary for me when it comes to forecasting - things are making more sense knowing what an ensemble is.

Huh, fascinating stuff. Do you have any recommended resources for anyone looking to learn more about "paper-and-pencil" forecasting or marine weather forecasting in general?

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like you have a much better grasp of these things than I do.

So, when clients like windy forecast "10 knots east gusting to 20" for ECMWF, do you know if those numbers are directly copied and pasted from the ECMWF model, or do clients take the probabilistic forecast model and make some sort of average prediction that they display?

I'm very interested in how clients like windy go from a probibilistic forecast model to a singular hard number. Unless this is something built-in to ECMWF itself.

Are you using a different weather app or website that is more accurate?

My understanding is that windy primarily just shows data from different forecast models, so isn't your issue really with the third-party models, not with Windy's weather client?

When you say Windy can get it wrong, isn't it really the underlying forecast models that are wrong?

It's unclear to me if Windy is doing much more than creating a great presentation of existing data. Their website does list an open ML role, though..

I wonder how much rolling your own weather forecast is tantamount to rolling your own crypto??

They have a premium subscription with higher-granularity forecasts. [0]

[0] https://community.windy.com/topic/11552/we-are-launching-win...

Windy is fantastic.

But, I'm curious if there are any apps or weather models that give probability distributions? Telling me that it is going to blow 10 mph is useful, but telling me, for example, that there is a 60% chance that there will be a 10 mph wind and a 40% chance that the wind will blow at 15 mph seems more in line with how I would naively assume weather forecasting works.

Right now, the ECMWF [0] model in Windy shows 6 mph winds gusting to 30 mph for my area (SE Alaska, with lots of mountains and fiords, so a area that is gusty and hard to predict by nature). It almost feels like they're throwing their hands up in the air and admitting that they have no idea what the wind will actually do today. Which, is fine, if that's the case.

I just wish consumer weather forecasts did a better job communicating probabilities and uncertainties instead of spitting out a single value.

[0] https://www.ecmwf.int/

I quit tech about a year ago, sailed up the inside passage to SE Alaska in a little 30' sailboat, and ended up working at a dive bar similar to what this author describes for 8 months over the winter.

I met a ton of incredible people, and had a lot of fun, but also burned out. Never having bartended before, there were some surprises:

- No food in most of the bars in town, other than bags of chips. This made it hard to slow people down.

- No inventory control. Bottles weren't weighed or measured in any way. Any employee could, in theory, steal alcohol with absolutely no way for the bar to know (there were no cameras in the building, either). As a consequence, bartenders would pour quite heavy at times, especially for the regular day-drinking crowd (with tacit approval from the owner).

There is a huge dynamic where the money is so good (my take-home was normally in the range of 40-50/hour during the slow season for my Friday night shift), and most bartenders that I met didn't have any other options to earn that kind of money, so would keep bartending despite the burnout. The golden handcuffs are real.