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wallflower

59,027 karma · joined January 15, 2008

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wallflower··on The Myth of 10,000 hours
For those who don’t know already, the “10,000 hours” to attain expert-level mastery in any field or endeavor is false. The study that Malcolm Gladwell cites by Anders Ericsson only applied to violin performance, which is a narrow field that has measurable and quantifiable performance levels and hundreds of years of teaching history.

I repeat this comment almost every time because 10k is both discouraging for the beginner and sometimes falsely encouraging for the “expert” who may have put in a lot of hours but in reality has been repeating mistakes and not really improving.

wallflower··on 5G Mobile Networks: A Systems Approach
I heard the real reason we need 5G is to sell more new phones. Thinner and bigger and better cameras isn’t enough anymore. However, mobile phones running 5G radios will deplete their battery far more rapidly than LTE, right? And that is assuming the 5G phone user is in a major metropolitan area where there is sufficient coverage to begin with.
wallflower··on What men eat and drink may affect their babies’ health
> Similarly ... How much exercise and what kinds?

An anecdote. I have a friend who used to walk everywhere in the city. They were always overweight but healthy. Flash forward to several years later. They are in the thick of a PhD program. The last couple years they have gained considerable weight. Lots of inactivity (sitting in a room all day) coupled with lack of sleep and not the best eating habits. And I recently learned that they have trouble walking, say, a parking lot distance. And their knees will start to hurt on a scale of 6 on a 10 scale if they do too much walking.

Too little exercise if accompanied by other less healthy life actions (sleep deprivation, less healthy diet) can rob you of one thing you might take for granted: mobility or the ability to walk across a long parking lot without strain.

There is no one size fits all recipe for how much physical activity. Your health is ultimately your responsibility.

wallflower··on Ask HN: Advice for my first day as a developer tomorrow
Listen. Talk very little. Good luck!
wallflower··on Ask HN: Has your HN karma score helped you in any way?
While I no longer post as frequently as I did in the past, I like to think of my karma score as X other people thought that a story I shared or, to a much lesser degree, a comment that I wrote had a tiny unit of value or interest to them.

I lurked for many, many months before I started contributing, and I encourage all of you out there to share what you like and what you know.

I’d also be lying if I said secretly knowing my karma score was high when the topic of HN came up didn’t cause me to smile mentally. Even if if the topic revolved around how “HN is toxic, brogrammers” etc because I felt that these people can’t see beyond their own biases to see the real community that dang and scbt actively take no small part in taking care of.

Being a tiny part of the HN community is something I am thankful and grateful for. I wrote about it earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509717

wallflower··on AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering
Thanks for the civil response, it has been a long week.

My take on it is that for some companies using hosted Elastic (not AWS’ horror) is more probable if their business is not maintaining large clusters in house. This is along the lines of having a live-in nanny more than an occasional housekeeper. It is a luxury, and one in which having an Elastic nanny (PaaS/DBaaS) might make business sense.

wallflower··on AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering
You clearly have never dealt with an Elasticsearch cluster that has entered the “red” state. It’s not just about cost, it is about not having to wrangle and lasso a big cluster.
wallflower··on I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media
In an interview, Evan Spiegel described Facebook with the single best succinct description in my opinion: “Facebook is a market for attention.”

HN can be too, and I like to think that I am asynchronously contributing stuff that may lay off the typical radar of the Venn diagram of typical HN readers.

wallflower··on I Can Eat Glass
Linguee (https://linguee.com) does a pretty good job of translating idioms from and to different languages. It is not perfect, of course. No pasa nada.

I’ve lately found in my Spanish learning that I can “see” idioms without knowing their meaning by using subtitles in Spanish with Spanish audio. They usually come up as sequences of words that make no sense to me.

wallflower··on Ask HN: How Should Airbnb Respond to Trespassing?
What an unpleasant host experience!

What level of vetting does your friend do with accepting guest reservations? Do they communicate with the guest before allowing a reservation? Or was it a “reserve now at this price” deal? The more experienced Airbnb hosts usually check a guest’s subjective “rating” (via previous host’s comments) and their rental history.

wallflower··on Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies
In the “Move fast, break things” realm, there was a 2013 tragedy in which two mechanics lost their lives atop one of those massive wind turbines when it caught fire. Their legacy is that it led to better safety standards.

http://www.windaction.org/posts/38949-dual-deaths-in-wind-tu...

wallflower··on I would never send my kids to school (2017)
If you found this interesting, you may find John Taylor Gatto’s “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher” fascinating. He is mentioned in the linked book, of course.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17619435

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727

wallflower··on The Use of Mercury by the First Emperor of China (2015)
Slightly OT. In Barcelona, Spain there is a work of art called the Calder Mercury Fountain.

It is absolutely mesmerizing. It reminds me of when I broke a thermometer as a kid and the poison control center instructed my parents to use magnets to clean it up. I still remember the shimmering beauty.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q35_zuffGqk

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/calder-mercury-fountain

wallflower··on Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water
> If we take the 10000 hour rule as an example it takes 5 years of continuous effort.

While your point about about teenagers having lots of discretionary time to become better at what they choose to pursue is very valid, the 10,000 hour rule is a distortion of the findings of a study on accomplished violinists. It is not broadly applicable. The tradition of violin playing has hundreds of years of teaching and quantifiable and measurable performance indicators. Other fields, not so much.

wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
Congrats! I always regurgitate this article for those who want to become excellent Lead/Senior.

https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...

wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
Congrats! At the very least, you are or could be breaking even or better on the all-access monthly membership at your favorite yoga studio.
wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
Congratulations! As the Spanish saying goes: los idiomas se aprenden en la cuna o en la cama ("languages are learned either in the cradle or in bed"). I can only imagine it has made your relationship stronger.

> The only drawback is that I haven't done anything technology related for a while.

While the vast majority of technology content is in English, consider seeking out to read/listen or even starting a podcast, blog, meetup in Japanese around your technology interests.

wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
+100 for doorway stretches and the wisdom that what hurts in our lower extremities may be because of the start of the chain (shoulders, back). Thanks for sharing this with those who may not have yet come to this important realization.
wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
I quit a few Slacks by removing them from my mobile devices. I never use the Desktop Electron app. None of them were work related, and I was a fairly active participant in all of them. They served as a virtual water cooler for fast-food type human interaction for times when I did not leave the house. Fast-food because it was no real substitute for real social interaction.

I would banter with the best of them. This is something that I still dream of doing well in real life situations like parties but it is easy in a virtual medium for me. I would also share, read way too many, and regurgitate interesting articles that were of interest to the people there and get a dopamine hit if it was liked.

After an initial one week period of really wanting to pop in to see what was “going on” and later to see “what I missed”, I don’t think I miss it. Yes, I may miss some very interesting intellectual and not so intellectual banter and even “under the radar” articles to post here, and I think the trade benefit of less distraction and more focus is well, well worth it.

To generalize, if you say that X is a distraction to you, get X off your phone. It is much, much harder to be sucked in with the mobile web experience than with their mobile apps. For Slack, it was sufficient to remove them as “teams”, and I dislike their pushing of a frictionless (re)team add. I can manage that though, especially since my desire to “pop in” to those water cooler Slacks decreased exponentially.

wallflower··on Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
Sorry for your loss of your grandmother, congrats for your new life directions and realizations.

> spending a lot of time out in the National Parks

If you don’t mind me asking, which are your favorites?

An ex of one of my relatives loves going off on Yosemite hikes like the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne.

wallflower··on Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986
Steinway Lyngdorf

> To demonstrate the veracity of Lyngdorf's "Is it real, or is it Memorex" claim, Birkelund invited the trio to begin performing. After playing for what felt like, at most, 30 seconds, the musicians began to fade out as the volume of a pre-recorded track of the same music was turned up. Although the much too short demo left many in the room a gasp at how remarkably close the live trio and tuned-to-the-room system sounded, Birkelund failed to mention that the Model D system was never silent.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/steinway-lyngdorfs-elega...

wallflower··on New ways to make vertical farming stack up
On a tangent, in case you missed this

https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...

wallflower··on Strike with the Band: The meritocratic failures of classical music
Just in case you didn’t see this (article or the accompanying video) a couple years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/a-tech-pioneer...

wallflower··on Strike with the Band: The meritocratic failures of classical music
You should forward it. Also, being able to play an instrument is a priceless gift. I know a former classmate who worked at a top hedge fund and told me that the thing that gave him the most joy recently was playing in the band to support a friend’s labor of love self-produced musical. Just playing in the band.
wallflower··on Strike with the Band: The meritocratic failures of classical music
Not a fair comparison. Most NBA players will fall short to Lebron James because of his brain.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11067098/lebron-james-gr...

wallflower··on Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year?

This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.

wallflower··on Ask HN: How to leverage my personal wealth to obtain better medical care?
Informally, if you want a good doctor, the best way is to ask a doctor who you know and trust who they think is a good doctor or to refer you to someone who knows. Not all doctors are the best per the law of normal distribution.

If you have not already, consider getting a referral to a concierge doctor from someone in your network.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/business/economy/high-end...

wallflower··on The WeWork IPO
The AWS analogy is flawed because there is a “lock in” to the ecosystem of AWS services outside EC2 once you start using those services. Terraform aside, it is not easy to divest of AWS once you invest in it for your infrastructure.

WeWork, on the other hand, has very little “lock in”. Not much to stop your business from moving out.

wallflower··on WeWTF
Can anyone knowledgeable talk about what happens in a severe business downturn with We? They have most likely setup separate LLCs for each building’s 10-15 yr lease. Do the LLCs isolate We enough so that LLCs can declare bankruptcy and the building owners or banks or creditors don’t go after the mothership We?
wallflower··on Ear Speakers – Research, Design, and Evolution
Wow, very impressive to DIY! It is one thing to do speakers DIY, quite another to make headphones, let alone e-stats.

For those who are interested in entry-level, non-DIY route

Drop (formerly Massdrop) has their variant of the classic Koss ESP/950 electrostatic headphones for around $500. They sold out earlier this year.

https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-x-koss-esp-95x-electrostatic-s...

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