arandr0x

I've left 3 teams over this, and as a manager would encourage my people to try other teams if they feel ours isn't a growth direction.

Sometimes jobs change on you too. One position used to be for you, and now they need someone different. You should almost never strive to become that someone different.

So, I grew up drawing, writing, doing acting/improv, and work as a programmer (but mostly have worked on R&D teams). do you want to trade convergent/divergent thinking tips? My programming colleagues are always telling me how to streamline code, remove unused bits, make better class names... and I'm all... but I keep inventing algorithms is that not enough?

Anyway totally willing to be part of a imaginative/practical HNers coaching group!

does he still play the violin for fun? Being able to play at all is rare enough that that alone is worthwhile if it entertains him&his family. Nobody needs to be Nobel prizewinner or anything, and plenty of people become Nobel prizewinners that you'd never have thought anything of when they were < 18.

Have you met other people in this situation in real life (either who skipped grades or who could have and didn't) and what did you think of them?

Also how did this affect your expectations of your own children?

I'm not sure if your advice is for kids good at math who want to eventually do something else, or kids that actually want to be mathematicians? I always thought being a mathematician was something special in that there is ample historical evidence of very young prodigies in that field who made big contributions.

Or are you saying top tier schools for math are so much better, that aspiring mathematicians should wait if at all possible to go to a top tier school? What if he's admitted at a top tier school at 9?

1. being successful and famous are not the same thing

2. being famous at an early age is probably correlated with wanting to be as far away from the public eye as possible as an adult, if any other options are there.

But also, I was in one of those articles (a long time ago and am now an Old in internet time), so AMA, I guess.

I also agree that people running their mouths of on how bad teens are without considering that they are essentially chattel and being told every day of their life they are not to make any decision that matters to their physical and mental well-being -- straight up until they're 18 and then they better get every decision right -- is insane. Judgment is not something you can learn in school.

There is a French psychologist called Françoise Dolto who agrees with you, she even write a book about it. She says a great deal of the problems with adolescents today (where today is in the past century, this is not a recent book) is that they are not needed. So, exactly like adults who are not needed and left to their own devices, they develop para-social hierarchies, and/or turn to crime and develop mood problems.

Your teen can probably balance a checkbook and pay bills. Teens also eventually come to a point where they're really interested in driving and, in America, you can use that to make them run errands, take younger siblings to school, and so on. Even a scooter works fine for a lot of that.

Also, to use an example from my real life, as a teen I just... stayed with the other women and talked about their lives and offered emotional support, helped smooth over relationships, that sort of thing. Yeah I wouldn't have been able to negotiate someone's salary or something but most teens can tell Aunt Marie that Aunt Alice wants her coffee machine back while eliding the "and thinks you're ungrateful and live in a hovel" part. And I helped them with math too.

I think there's a number of creatives who have sub-clinical manifestations for ADHD or bipolar and don't really qualify for meds but still would benefit from schedule adjustments, and I don't think they necessarily should need a diagnosis for that. It should not arouse suspicions in people's coworkers that Bob, who is otherwise kind, dependable and competent, works an odd schedule.

(OTOH, there are other explanations for the weird schedule. Substance issues, unusual home life, etc. I think people generally should be tolerant of weirdness, but ready to hear about the seemingly brilliant people's awful struggles.)

Tell the other employees that they aren't privy to their coworker's personal situation and that you are at liberty to allow any employee to not show up a few days a week, if you believe doing so is essential to their physical or mental health, if it's not hurting the bottom line, and if it's not a quid-pro-quo situation.

If the other employees want more time off, the correct solution is not to ask them to pull all nighters but just ask why. Usually extra time off can be accomodated with occasional work from home or allowing shifted start times. Or, possibly, your employees didn't even want the two days off a week -- maybe they were just feeling left behind and unappreciated that you just loved that coworker so much, and they came to perceive his odd working hours as a status symbol and reward.

IDK if this is a "mental" health issue, but my caffeine consumption is not helping my problems but I don't feel like myself on "slow days".

Otherwise fine. I guess I could use more/better relationships but am working on it. Occasionally there'll be a 8 or 12 hour stretch that is barely tolerable, but I tell myself everything shall pass and then it does, so.

"Why not allow patients to set their own moods to suit their own circumstances and desires?"

Can't most people to some extent do that?

The same is true for me, however, I'm also quite productive early mornings. My "down" time is 2-10pm, so I often feel like it's a shame I have to sleep at all.

Find more exciting stuff to do outside of it. There's something of a percentage of the population that are probably meant to be running on loads of adrenaline all the time, and people are happy to capitalize on their restlessness to make them produce things to sell at work and buy things to feel better outside, like unhappy ever-moving little economic wheels.

I use all the gifts I receive due to never buying myself anything, but this is definitely an issue I can see. I have spent countless Christmases telling family to donate to charities (and provided a list), buy me food (specific foodstuffs) and in one instance organized Christmas and said they could bring booze and desserts and nothing else.

And they kept on with the (bulky, usually mass-produced) gifts.

I don't hate gifts. But I would love a way to share that ritual with people without encouraging consumption. One problem I've had is the alternatives I suggest, like food, some people don't think cost enough money so they don't like giving it. Are there expensive consumables that people would feel higher status giving?

They look beautiful. You know, like art. Is that also of no value?

That said, is art (or having a beautiful environment) worth, in this particular case, filling the oceans with junk and killing people, probably not.

But let's not pretend that fashion is a worthless status-seeking endeavor but playing video games is a window to a new world here.

Not all textiles are made to be worn -- and plenty of those that are are children's clothes that are outgrown.

Public transit systems do have need of programs for control, infrastructure maintenance and so on, as do railroads.

There's (some) work in conservation (meaning ecological habitats and stuff) if you care about biodiversity, but it mostly requires GIS skills.

A lot of "global problems" (like cancer) are also local problems (like different environmental exposures or individual genetic profiles). It's hard even while working at a global problem to have a solution with global impact. This cannot be understated.

There are some decently big problems in mining (where mining certain compounds has become exponentially harder) and the industry does not typically have a lot of software talent already. However, it can be quite difficult to get into depending on your geographical location.

Have you considered working for the government?

I'm a super disorganized introvert but I'm puzzled by this. Do people on HN have actual systems to organize people they meet in lists and take notes about them? Is this like for sales calls or normal people also do this for regular social events? Is everyone else doing this?

I've got to say this: reading fiction that survived the test of time was like having thousands of substitute parents who were better at raising me than my own.

I read 200 books a year (some years) due to reading lightning fast and not driving, but reading books using my algorithm of picking the most appealing at the library is not really more edifying than social media. Like I sometimes pick up graphic novels, weird poetry, handbooks with pictures of mushrooms or whatever.

At this point I'm wondering if this idea that reading books is always more valuable than any other entertainment activity is a kind of cultural brainwashing we're going through to make sure our kids stay literate.

All of those also screw up your sleep something fierce, and so (general you) end up piling hacks on top of hacks to make something kinda sorta work that you understand less than you did the original system.

(Although, PSA, I do understand that the vast majority of people whose sleep is ruined by alcohol or caffeine or both are also too addicted to quit, and this isn't at this point a conscious attempt at "hacking" anything.)

I am currently an adult going to a driving school whose parents don't drive and who lives in a urban center with no parking, AMA.

I also have a full-time job. It is the first time in my life (since I started working FT at 16) that I have been able to do this though.

Not really a "values" argument but isn't it unsafe to use drugs (even alcohol) alone with strangers? I guess for men a bit safer but still?

Same, but I think it's in part because I'm baseline underweight (and have a hard time keeping the weight up), and so it only takes a couple meals of chicken and veggies before my muscles literally eat themselves.

I can't eat an entire pizza in one sitting and a single big meal usually means I won't eat for the next 18 hours, so what I usually do is have small portions of fatty/caloric food. A single cheeseburger or pizza slice. Half a cookie. Ice cream, but the smallest serving. Those feel much better than a pound of chicken, and as an added bonus, I'm not feeling nauseous at the end of the meal.

> But just in that one sentence I would learn like 1000% more about biology than I currently know.

I mean, no you wouldn't. DND1 is a protein name and googling it won't tell you exactly what it does, because it may be involved in several pathways. There is probably a gene dnd1 (note the lowercase) that will muddle up your search results . Destabilizing mRNAs can happen a bunch of ways and knowing the others won't help you with that one, also the vast majority of biologists don't care about mRNA being destabilized one way or the other. Biology is a ton of details, and by learning too much too early about the details you miss the big picture. Just sign up for a class if you're at this level.

> You need them to communicate their research and get to the point.

Arguably the problem with the sentence you quoted is it gets too much to the point. It is very precise and obviously of use to anyone is interested in mRNA decay. It does not tell you what most HN readers want to know, which is why they should care about mRNA decay.

(And if they want to know that, they should read review articles.)

There is a problem with opaque biology papers, but in my experience, the main problem in those cases are the data (impossible to find) and the figures (tables filled with bad statistics and low-res western blot pics). I understand all the jargon in the sentence you quoted, but none of the implications; and I understand that this means I haven't learned anything by reading it at all (though I do have a grad degree in biology).

Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you and you'll develop decent pattern matching.

Read the conclusion before the "Results" section. In fact, read the "results" section last.

Read review papers, they are way less bad. In addition they tend to comment on the source papers clearly enough that you can use them as a reading guide. Same goes for theses, but only if they're any good, so review papers work better. Pick a good review journal (impact factor is a decent proxy).

Email the author of a paper if you have a specific question (on the methods, what a result means, why they chose to put some data in supplementary and some in the paper, etc). Usually it works and they don't actually write emails in academese. Always write to the corresponding author not necessarily the PI.

If you want to write papers and not merely read them, reading them is the first step so do the above first, and then loosely parrot what you've seen in the wild with some technical term mad libs thrown in.

It may not seduce employers, per se, but I'd rather read a technical blogs about what should be done vs how to do it, and I think big picture is more important that stuff that can be figured out as is, and I don't think I'm the only one. So there's definitely an audience even if it may not have a checkbook open.

The author of the original article is lamenting that "show don't tell" is making people reluctant to write about the personal traumas of their life, and instead have to write "action-packed" scenes. There are like three action-packed scenes in Trainspotting and they're all well within the lived experience of the average first worlder. It's "boring life stuff" in the sense of being about on the other extreme from a Michael Bay movie. Sometimes people don't talk in precise terms about art they consume.

I was using it as an example of a novel about life that has nothing action-y happening and where many scenes don't directly advance the plot, but remains both a page turner and not particularly preachy.

Well yeah "show don't tell" is terrible memoir advice, but memoir isn't fiction, and memoirs about abuse, your own thoughts, or crying a lot are terminally boring (but important). "Show don't tell" is how to write entertaining fiction, which is not to say that you can't write dry non-fiction about weighty subjects. That said, this:

> When I was taking a sculpture class in college, I sewed a

> kind of wall hanging about secrets I had to keep. I wrote

> things on pieces of paper and tucked them into bumps and

> layers in the fabric. I sewed pockets shut.

is showing.

This is not to discourage those authors whose favorite subject is themselves and their feelings. As an avid reader of fiction, however, if you really must write about your inner feelings, I would suggest making it magical realism or using plot devices where your inner thoughts influence real events, and not subjecting the reader to two hundred pages of your thoughts. Make it a therapy session or a deposition if you must. Or gimmicks. _Trainspotting_ is boring life stuff and the dude going on about how life sucks without heroin, but it's written in a Scottish accent, so it's interesting. (And to be clear it also has plenty of showing. A lot of the scenes of the family life of his friends, etc are pretty indicative of their social environment without going "we were all poor and disenfranchised".)