ideonexus

I followed the recent championship matches on chess24.com and was blown away at how compelling and engaging computers have made the game. There was a chessboard on the screen with the current board state and a computer analysis on the side estimating which player had the advantage and by how much. While waiting for players to move, I was able to test out my own ideas on the board of which moves I thought were best and see what the computer thought of them (every move I made pretty much threw the game to the opponent).

After losing to Deep Blue, Kasparov came up with the concept of "Advanced Chess," where players team up with a chess program of their choice to augment their play. At the time, a chess program with a computer coach was still superior to a chess program alone. That didn't last long, but I think Kasparov was on to something and I would love to see students paired up with open-source chess programs for tournaments that blend chess-playing proficiency with computer-programming.

Could anyone recommend an open-source software for cataloging generic objects that allows setting up these columns of categorization dynamically? I've been looking for such a software, preferably web-based, that could be used to catalog and categorize anything with some configuration.

Edit: Not just for file-browsing, but for adding any kind of list.

This. My website traffic picks back up in September as well. So does the vehicle traffic on my commute.

Fifteen years ago, I suffered from impostor syndrome. It made me defensive whenever someone criticized me because I thought that they were exposing my ignorance--exposing me as an impostor. I would bristle when other developers would say, "Wait? You don't know about [thing]?" Why didn't I know about [thing]???

After 25 years of coding I know enough about the field to know that no one knows it all. When someone is surprised that I don't know something, I smile to myself that they think the entire scope of software development is something anyone could know in its entirety (but I keep this to myself). When someone is defensive about their code or what they know, I now assume they are suffering from impostor syndrome and try to emphasize my own human failings in hopes they will accept their own.

The best defense against impostor syndrome is humility. Part of being humble is being self-effacing with my peers. I love to tell my coworkers every boneheaded mistake I make. I've seen this work wonders for their confidence to know the lead developer regularly misses key requirements, has to go back and completely refactor his poorly-coded solutions, or releases stupefying bugs into production. Software is hard. It's important to always remember that and have sympathy for everyone we work with.

My favorite motto (borrowed from multiple sources) is, "I reserve the right to be smarter today than I was yesterday."

Edit: Grammar.

I had a lot of success with code.org's Hour of Code. First with my five-year-old, and then two classes of elementary school-aged children. It's extremely visual, introduces kids to actual code syntax, and lets the kids choose what theme most interests them. We went with Star Wars, but there are lots of other options.

Every kid will get it at a different pace. So don't stress it and just enjoy the one-on-one time. The most insightful advice I ever read was, "Even if they don't get it, you have still spent quality time with your kid."

This is a fantastic idea. An arduino and renting time on printers in your neighborhood with 3DHubs is brilliant (our family is a hub and there are dozens of others in our local network). The possibilities are endless, the skills are directly transferable, and the communities are awesome. Lots of free projects are available online. Makerspaces are everywhere now so you can go hang out with other enthusiasts and talk your passion. Share your creations online to get lots of positive comments from all the 3D printing enthusiasts. This is the best way to go.

This is such difficult but important advice. I've been sitting in nearly a year of unproductive meetings for a project that goes nowhere because of one middle-manager's abrasive personality and an upper-manager's inaction on the behavior. This problematic manager comes to every meeting ready to shoot down every single proposal in the most dismissive and belittling manner possible.

The problem is, as the author notes, the longer you let the behavior go, the harder it is to correct it. When I worked at the Coast Guard, we had an abrasive personality who simply shot down everyone else's ideas. Management's solution was to establish a rule that you could not criticize a proposal without offering a solution. Suddenly that abrasive individual started looking really silly blinking dumbly when they were asked, "So you've identified a problem. What's the solution?"

This is the flip-side benefit to living in Right-to-Work states. On the one hand, it's nearly impossible to unionize, but working as a contractor in Virginia, I had an agency try exercise the non-compete against me when I tried to take a job directly with their client. That client happened to be the Society for Human Resource Management. Their management laughed at the attempt and had a lawyer send the agency a letter explaining that Virginia was a Right-to-Work state and the non-compete was unenforceable.

In North Carolina, another Right-to-Work state, my government contractor tried to exercise the non-compete I had with them to prevent other companies from competing for the contract. My co-worker had us all sign up with his lawyer, who defended us breaking the non-compete as unenforceable in NC. The contractor didn't bother taking the case to court and was only using the non-compete to bully employees who didn't know better.

I've been hearing about lobbyists working to make non-competes enforceable in Right-to-Work states, and I'm not surprised. The point of the laws was to defend corporations against unions. I imagine the fact that it protects individuals against companies is undesirable to the powers that be.

This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result.

A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.

Neil Postman wrote, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” As a humanist, I don't have invisible gods or an afterlife to comfort me into apathy about the human condition. If I want the world to be a better place, I have to make it so and having children is an important dimension to that.

We've limited ourselves to two because my wife and I are both full-time software developers and we can't handle "being outnumbered" as we like to joke, but raising two boys is a remarkable experience. I've experienced many kinds of love in my life, love for family, romantic love for my wife, but this new kind of love for our children is so powerful and pure. It's so precious, drives me to be a better person for them, and I am so grateful to experience it.

Thank you for sharing this research. As someone who abstains from drinking and is very health-conscious, I've been conflicted about all the research supposedly showing health benefits of moderate drinking. The evidence just seemed too intuitive. This gives me something to explore.

Maybe it was the tone of your comment that got you downvoted, but there's an important point here. Fish farming is a crucial tool in preserving our oceans. We can't keep taking fish from the open seas; we need to set up dedicated farms to grow what we need.

Thank you for this comment. I remember being a procrastinator and distracted without the internet in college. I share your ability to focus on planes. I find coffee shops help my focus as well.

It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process.

It's encouraging to know the world will be monitoring this as it happens. Often forgotten about American history is how badly we had to destroy our own environment before we took action to make things better. Much of our country was turned into barren wasteland as all the trees were cut down for industry, and it took FDR deploying a literal army of tree-planters to bring the forests back. I think we are watching the same history repeat in China now as they deploy tree-planters along their growing deserts.

So we'll watch this new environmental front. We'll read stories about companies breaking the rules and listen to pundits decry government regulations that protect snails over jobs. Hopefully we'll strike a balance and survive long enough to make asteroid-mining profitable and maybe take all of this off-world where such environmental conflicts don't exist.

You are normal. Over the years I have learned that the internet makes us all distracted and that it's a problem many of my peers are wrestling with today. I was in a meeting just this week where our new product line manager started joking about how easy it was in a moment of distraction to open a news site with the intention of just spending a minute there and end up losing half an hour of productivity. I told him I had to watch myself or a moment of distraction to check twitter while an app compiled would lose me half an hour in the endless scroll. Everyone else in the meeting was nodding their heads, and we all had a good laugh about it.

The important thing is that you are aware of it and you are fighting it. The best thing you can do is simply keep fighting it. I had seen many people on HN recommend the Pomodoro Technique, where you work in 20 minute sprints with five minute breaks. I got an app to keep a timer on my phone and it makes focusing much easier, especially when I know I only need to focus for 20 minutes. At the end of the day I can see how many sprints I accomplished and feel better about myself.

Other things I find help me is to have points in the day where I unplug completely. When I get home from work, I leave my cellphone on a stand by the door and only check it once or twice for support calls so I can focus on my kids. Complimenting this is mindfulness meditation, where I practice thinking about nothing while I jog in the morning. Having dedicated time where I just focus on focusing without all the other noise really helps me focus in the busier points of my day.

Like I said, the most important thing is that you are aware of it and fighting it. There are slow weeks at work where I lapse back into the endless scroll, but I see it happening and can make a conscious effort to course-correct. Remember that you are normal, keep trying things to find what works, and share what you find with all the other distracted people who also don't know how normal they are.

Others on HN have recommended this before and I finally went ahead and froze my credit reports with the credit agencies. I haven't missed it in the last six-months. If I ever need a car load or credit card, I can temporarily unfreeze with specific agencies to grant access to the creditor. Here's the numbers:

Equifax — 1-800-349-9960

Experian — 1-888-397-3742

TransUnion — 1-888-909-8872

Innovis — 1-800-540-2505

A lawyer friend of mine who specializes in identity theft told me this was too extreme a way to go and that I should sign up for Credit Karma. But isn't that just opening up yet another access point to thieves? Plus, I feel that freezing my credit denies these reporting agencies the value of data.

Overall, I think this is great article, but I have two quibbles:

1. Start a business if you want to get rich: you can also start a business if you want to lose a lot of money. I lost nearly $100k that would have otherwise gone into my retirement trying to start a business. Most businesses fail. So think starting a business should be seen as a high-risk investment.

2. You can't get rich on a salary: My wife and I have never made six-figure salaries. We are in our mid-40s and we will be breaking $1 million in retirement savings this year if the economy stays stable. We did this by maxing out our 401k contributions since our 20s.

Becoming a millionaire is a lot of hard work, but if the recommendations in this article are too extreme I've always appreciated Elizabeth Warren's advice of 50/30/20: 50% of spending on necessities, 30% on fun, and 20% on savings. Using this a guide, I've been able to tell when I need to downsize my spending and I've been able to spend on fun without feeling guilty.

Reminds me of something I overheard an older artist say when dealing with a difficult customer who didn't want to pay the asking price for one of her paintings. When the customer demanded, "Well how long did it take you to paint it?" The artist replied, "My whole life."

I agree that it depends on the games... and on the kids. I was dismayed early on when I bought my boys a used Wii and they just couldn't get it. We all got frustrated and lost interest.

Then I hit success with a used Xbox 360 and playing Lego games cooperatively--where the adult is the helper and coach making it more fun. My boys also love the Kinect and really got into dance and adventure games. So the trick seems to be to try out lots of things and see what groks.

Once a few games clicked with them, they were willing to engage with more advanced games. In one year I went from playing Lego to cooperative Halo and we love it. For balance, we limit what we call "ePlay Time" to an hour a day and make it conditional on good behavior and spending quality time on the board games Daddy prefers to play.

I volunteered for my town Planning Commission last year and have to deal with this all the time now. Residents are constantly ranting on social media accusing us of moving town borders, down-zoning our enemies, holding secret votes, and cutting deals. In reality, the only thing we did last year was approve a swimming pool and do some research on parking.

It's extremely stressful for me as an introvert, but I quietly and patiently explain concepts like due process and open-hearings when I have the opportunity. I stress that everything we do is open to public scrutiny and public comment. I explain that we can't engage on Facebook because it's not an official public forum. I invite people to attend our meetings or read our meeting minutes, but they never do.

Real government is incredibly boring and complicated. Its much more fun to rant and rave about conspiracies on social media.

This technique is extremely powerful in parenting. These are exactly the steps you take to reason with a toddler. Before anything else you have to get them out of their temper ta tantrum and articulating why they are angry. Then you segwey from listening to dialog.

Seconding this. My boys love their tablets and their Xbox, which I play with them and don't discourage (video games have their positives), but our real quality time is playing board games. It's wonderful to watch my four and six-year-old "get it" while interacting with them on a personal level. Earlier this year I discovered thrift stores are a wealth of games and I'll bring home a stack of new ones to try out every couple of weeks for less than $20. We try them out and it's like trying out novel ways of thinking much of the time. I highly recommend this as a way of connecting to your kids.

This is a great article from a young person who is clearly learning by writing. Having good communication skills along with technical skills will make you invaluable in the workforce. We need this kind of popular science writing for computer science. Keep up the great work!

I keep a growing library of little one-page javascript apps for illustrating concepts and educating my two boys. Reviewing my commit history for the year, I was pleased to find I've added nearly 20 apps to it in 2017. I wouldn't have been able to build so many 20 years ago, but there's so much code available out there to copy-paste, programming often feels like playing with building blocks.

http://ideonexus.github.io/Explorable-Explanations/

I am very confused by "Current Tax System You'd save $0" part. This makes no sense and reeks of snakeoil.

Then I looked up who created this calculator, and it's Maximm Lott, a writer for Fox News who's twitter retweets Republican talking points and is bending over backwards to sell this plan:

https://twitter.com/maximlott?lang=en

This propaganda has no business on HN. If you want a tax plan calculator, use the NYT's.

This reminds me of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps from 1933 to 1942, which at one time comprised 300,000 people and planted over 3 billion trees in America to combat the extensive deforestation brought by industry[1]. The town where I live was almost abandoned at one point in the early 1900s because our local sawmill had stripped the surrounding area of all trees for miles. It was the CCC that brought them back.

I think preserving our commons is the most important role of government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

> Search the newspapers for stories

Just want to point out that, while there are plenty of such stories, we can't use newspaper stories to quantify how many men versus how many women are found guilty of pedophilia. When a woman is guilty of pedophilia, it's newsworthy on a national level for being unusual. When a man is found guilty of pedophilia, it's treated like any commonplace murder or burglery.

The same is true for child molestation. Girls being victims of molestation is so commonplace the news barely covers it--and is even less likely to cover it if the victim is a minority, but boys being molested gets much more attention.

It looks like your post got downvoted, and I don't think that was fair. I completely agree with you that there is some very insightful science in this post that didn't convince me to go back to facebook, but did give me insights into how to interact with all social media in a manner conducive to my emotional well-being.

I have to say, I'm surprised by this post and appreciate it. I think the research presented explains a lot of the issues I've had with Facebook over the last few months--when I hit a point where I didn't have anything to say, but kept visiting the site's endless scroll and grew more dissatisfied with it in the process. I even resorted to using StayFocusd to restrict the time I could sink there each day.

I miss the days of the blogosphere. When I would write long, thoughtful well-researched articles instead of throwaway one-liners and photos. I find the experiment mentioned in the article enlightening, where people reviewed their own profile pages versus those of others and the difference in "self-affirmation" this caused. I recently went back and looked over my 10 years of blogging and I got a huge self-worth boost that inspired me to start writing again. Social media gets characterized as narcissistic, but it sounds like maybe we should be paying more attention to ourselves and our accomplishments for our own sense of self-worth.

Isn't this the problem with everything connected to the internet now? Facebook is recording your ex-stalking, your phone is recording every place you're traveling, email servers have your private messages, Google now has your photos, and your ISP knows what porn and political sites the people in your home are viewing.

Yes, the echo and other voice-recognition devices have certainly upped the surveillance ante, but this is not a new problem unique to this technology. We have no privacy whatsoever online in any way, shape, or form. Everyone laughed at all the poor suckers who got caught using Ashley Madison, but imagine the blackmail material these companies we have trusted since the dawn of the WWW could have on their users.