shioyama

This a thousand times.

> And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things?

As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.

So true and so sad.

Sorry, I disagree with the reference to academia: the median quality of academic conference talks is abismal in my experience. Sure they are more technical, but they are also that much less engaging, and target a much more narrow audience. No experimenting with styles and flows, just cookie-cutter formats with lots of text and plenty of citations.

Programmer conferences may have a more open format and obviously that invites some low quality talks, but it also leaves the door open to really amazing, totally experimental formats and topics. I'm thinking of stuff like Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript" [1], which would never fly at an academic conference in my experience (or at least would not be appreciated), but was immensely influential in programming circles.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

"Consumers seem to believe that products cannot become more sustainable without becoming more expensive."

This unfortunately prevalent belief is extremely destructive. If people believe it must cost money to be environmentally friendly, then they will not be motivated to look for profit from actions that have a net positive impact on the environment. And that means the entire motivation to make money, which drives business and most of the economy, is largely absent from the range of serious problems we label as "environmental".

Luckily some people (like the ones in this article) see through this myth to find profit from this collective blind spot.

I wasn't the only author on those gems, the others are (mostly) still active. Not sure how orphaned gems are handled, though.

> I think a primary issue with code is that the kind of people who like to explain it tend to think it has something to do with engineering, or an expression of a deeply objective scientific method. It seems to me that it has far more resemblance to a cargo-cult like set of cultural trends, riven with changing fashions, competing tribes and decisions based on hunches with no real evidence about anything at all. It is this of course that makes programming interesting and possible to poke fun at and celebrate in equal measure - and it seems you get further by teaching it based on this reality.

I actually ended up going further and removing me as author from gems I don't actually maintain anymore, which brings down my exposure considerably. It's actually not as easy as it could be to remove yourself as an author from a gem (have to do it via command line).

Yes it does, and I do this with my gems, but it's not widely used and I'm sure virtually none of the users of the gems I author probably take advantage of it.

https://guides.rubygems.org/security/

> However, this method of securing gems is not widely used. It requires a number of manual steps on the part of the developer, and there is no well-established chain of trust for gem signing keys. Discussion of new signing models such as X509 and OpenPGP is going on in the rubygems-trust wiki, the RubyGems-Developers list and in IRC. The goal is to improve (or replace) the signing system so that it is easy for authors and transparent for users.

I'm an author of gems with a total of more than 4 million downloads. I just setup 2fa now after seeing this.

I'm Canadian, I used "North America" because I wanted to include Canada. Not in reference to "arrests" but in reference to attitudes about giving children freedom, which are very similar in my experience.

> Country or region is just too broad a brush to stereotype, even in Japan Sapporo is very different from Tokyo.

I agree about stereotyping. But seriously: even Sapporo (which as a rare relatively new Japanese city has similarities to modern western cities) is much more similar to Tokyo than it is to, say, any North American city.

My point is not about whether laws are what where, but that attitudes are in line with those laws (and are what gave rise to them).

Read other comments in response to the post, and you see many other people referencing experiences similar to what I'm talking about.

I'm not trying to say Japan doesn't have problems (it does). Just that on this specific point, Western countries are heading in a very bad direction IMHO.

This is one regulation in one state. Do you think that even impacts things like dirty diapers, one of the items that was strewn over the news? Of course not.

If you're thinking people are paying ~ $1,200/container to ship plastics to Malaysia without anyone paying on the other end, it would have to be pretty darn hard to throw stuff out in the U.S. And clearly it's not.

The stuff in the news is fraud, the same as if you ordered something from Amazon, paid for it, and you didn't get what you paid for.

Sorry, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I live in Japan, so I'm speaking from direct daily experience with a local school system (not international school).

But I completely disagree with your statements about "Asia", as if all countries are the same. Let's at least be specific about which countries you're talking about, and what direct experience you have with those countries.

I make no claims beyond my local context, and North America (with which I have contact through family/friends).

Thanks, and to respond to another sibling comment: this may be rare in statistical terms, but it is more than real enough to motivate a very clear pattern of behaviour among parents (not allowing kids to roam freely, etc)

I speak from experience having had people (including family) be shocked at how free our kids are here in Japan versus the experience in North America. Whether the media are making things worse (probably) is besides the point: you can get arrested for this as a parent. That's completely absurd and would not even be understood (let alone accepted) in many other countries, including Japan.

This is a common response, but I reject it. The over-protection in the U.S. goes way beyond actually protecting kids from violent crime. It's rooted in some kind of pathological paranoia. Even with its low crime rate, I think it could hit Japan in exactly the same way.

> My close friends kids in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing spend most of their time in extra tutoring or music or painting or dance classes or something else where they have to excel.

Of course this happens, but let me return to my point: it's perfectly normal to see a 5-year-old in the park on their own (here in Japan). In the U.S., the parent would be arrested.

Don't try to convince me that those are the same, they clearly are not. Pressure on kids, etc. varies by social strata, city/country, etc. But the degree to which it has been institutionalized, accepted, etc in North America is very different, and I would argue pathological.

No, I mean what I wrote, "as young as 5".

> All of the kids I knew from that area of the world, as young as elementary school, spent every second either studying for school or practicing piano/violin.

Sorry, but "that area of the world" is way too broad. Korea, for example, is quite different from Japan. And in any case, it's dependent on the cross-section of society you're talking about.

Elementary school itself, for example, is not suffocating at all, from my experience. Too much homework, yes, but not to the point that kids have no free time.

But again, my point is not about the amount of work. It's about the freedom to be on their own.

Completely agree, cars are the main thing that worry me as well (in the city).

> Which I think is more of a problem than helicopter parenting in America

Sorry, as a parent in Japan, I beg to disagree. The system here has lots of problems, don't get me wrong - and I really don't like the "juku" (cram-school) model at all. But particularly at younger ages (which in many ways are the most important ones), there is still that fundamental freedom to be on your own with your friends.

Kids age as young as 5 are often out on their own with their friends outside, or walking to school, etc. That's something you would be arrested for in the U.S.

I see the North American situation as much more scary, TBH.

> Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.

Completely agree with your comment, but "sadly last" here is not accurate unless you're talking about North America and maybe Europe.

I live in Japan and it's quite normal, even in a big city like Tokyo, to let kids play on their own until it gets dark. I feel quite lucky to be in a country not yet afflicted by this disease that has hit all of North America and (I hear) Europe as well - a disease of over-protecting kids to the point of suffocation.

People need to call this trend for what it is. They're not doing the next generation any good, and probably lots of harm.

Do you have any source for that claim?

Here's a quote for landfill rates: $40/ton. Do the math yourself, plastics aren't heavy. Much cheaper than sending it in a container across the world. Unless somebody is paying at the other end, of course.

http://riverbend.wm.com/landfill-rates/index.jsp

> you get paid to accept trash shipment

Why would anyone pay someone to accept a trash shipment? Why wouldn't you just dump it at source?

> you get paid to accept trash shipment, you pretend to process it (on paper) and then you simply incinerate or dump trash.

Nowhere in the article does it mention this, what reference do you have for this actually happening?

AFAICT the article doesn't have anything establishing that the plastic being "dumped" is being anything other than imported to be recycled. It's dirty, polluting recycling, but that's beside the point I'm trying to make. There is an economic incentive; the article even mentions how profitable plastic recycling can be.

If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Adam Minter as better source on this stuff. He adopts a strictly economic perspective on the recycling trade which makes way more sense.

https://www.amazon.com/Junkyard-Planet-Travels-Billion-Dolla...

Ok, please explain why in the world businesses in Malaysia would buy garbage just to dump it? That doesn't make ecomonic sense.

In fact (prior to the ban at least) there was a huge industry in China recycling plastics. It's not pretty stuff, but let's not pretend people were buying plastics just to throw them out. Look up the story of We'nan County for example.

From what I've heard the buyers in China have just moved to other places like Malaysia to continue the same business. They are buying plastics to recycle them and make money off that. It's nasty stuff but it is economically motivated.

This is exactly what I was going to point out. Sending something that the buyer didn't ask for is fraud, and should be treated as such. That doesn't mean that all (or even most) such transactions are fraud.

> The present dumping ground of choice is Malaysia.

Use of the term "dumping" makes me seriously question the article's storyline. Plastic garbage is not "dumped" in Malaysia, it is sold to buyers in Malaysia. If you wanted to dump it it would be much cheaper to do so at source.

Ref: https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things...

More: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/jellyfish-and-geometry-figu...

That's an interesting point. A value of '0' is at least better than a negative value.

The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end.

Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.

> It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone.

Sure it is, and that's fine. But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away.

To the point where Western consumers see a vast portion of the economy as intrinsically unviable and in need of support to sustain itself, when in fact (much of the time) it is not.

TBH, when it comes to this topic, I think Westerners would benefit from putting on the Homo economicus hat a lot more often. That's how most of the rest of the world thinks about it.

Exactly. I'm so sick of all these stories framed as how we should all be good sumaritans and recycle. That's not the way to do it!

This stuff has value. It's a business opportunity. If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale.

Different industry, but similar story: https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things... (covered here on HN recently)

I learned Japanese to fluency from zero starting at age 26. I don't know if these qualify as "greatness" but I have read books in Japanese, headed meetings in Japanese, written blog posts in Japanese, presented in Japanese. I even have occasional dreams in Japanese.

I think the "learn early" meme is spread by people who do not have the time/energy to put into late life learning, but who are happier feeling that even if they did, it would be impossible anyway. It's a defeatist attitude, but I suppose it must be comforting. I personally can't stand it though.