zenithd

When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.

Actually, the problem is the opposite. Their muscles get too strong too quickly and then they blow a pulley because their tendons aren't strong enough for the forces that their muscles are easily capable of producing. This happens in adults too, but AFAICT it's more common in kids and adolescents (but perhaps that's because most adults who get into the sport later don't ever climb as hard). Growth plate injuries are less common but devastating.

Avoiding these sorts of injuries is probably the biggest reason why training or a team is worth the $.

It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing.

The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.)

In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem).

> I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...

Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees":

Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference.

"let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them.

"Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below.

Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.

These discussions sometimes go off the rail because it's a bunch of STEM folks critiquing the humanities, so I'll share a STEM example that gets the point across. A too-clever friend of mine got marks off in our Analysis course because he presented a constructive proof of a theorem on a test, and that was not the proof technique that the test was designed to interrogate.

Superficially his answer was "correct". But then, as his professor pointed out, on an even deeper level it really was incorrect, because our write-ups of proofs are really high-level descriptions of formal derivations, and the student was describing a proof a different axiomatic system than the one assumed by the question, so, to be totally correct, he would have had to embed the proof that his proof in constructive analysis mapped over into normal analysis. Which would have been quite a bit of work that the student, at the time, was unable to do (and probably no one could do in an exam setting).

But, again, the real point is that this part of the debate is pedantic because what my clever "friend" really didn't understand was WHY the question was being asked. The answer is supposed to demonstrate a certain piece of knowledge in a certain context; it's an exam answer in a closed curriculum, not a Treatise.

Besides, you are ALWAYS writing into a audience and context; if you want to write to a "pure" audience, you may do so, but consider saving it for Sunday morning prayers.

Which, since that friend isn't paid to write analysis proofs these days, were perhaps important lessons ;)

This is actually exactly analogous; many people don't realize that the status quo of "multiple denominations" have ancestral ties to bimetallic currencies of the sort covered in this article.

It would have been difficult for Henry III to de facto outlaw smelting of gold coins because the scale of the gold penny's distribution was much smaller (making attribution of a smelting operation much harder), and because the ability to surveil this sort of activity was severely limited by geography.

But melting down US pennies is de jure illegal (nb: only since 2007 [1]) and the number of pennies you'd need to smelt down in order to justify the effort would probably make the sourcing operation noticeable to authorities.

[1] https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20061214-united-s...

1. A byte is pretty damn concrete. The Java byte implementation [1] uses almost exclusively single-letter names (b,s) or names that are so generic that they might as well be single-letter names (e.g., anotherByte instead of b). When more meaningful names are used, it's because they are public type names (String, int), which is, again, pretty damn concrete.

2. The next level of abstraction is Generics. Here, even Java -- a language whose verbosity is a long-standing joke -- starts using single-letter variable names for both types and values [2].

3. Finally, we dive into things that abstract over generics [3] and start seeing weird sigils in addition to single-letter names. (What does Predicate<? super E> mean?!)

And, again, this is a strong-manned example, since Java is famously verbose and I'm choosing some of the most-used and therefore most verbosely documented .java files in the world.

Notice, btw, that natural language documentation increases as the verbosity of names decreases. This is the same in math, where those symbols are small pieces of 20+ page papers full of english prose explaining the meaning of the symbols.

And, again most mathematics is dealing with things at least one level of abstraction higher than anything you find in a standard library. Sometimes several levels of abstraction.

[1] Byte.java

[2] Dequeue.java

[3] Collection.java

If yo read code in standard libraries, you'll see a lot of either single-letter variables or extremely generic variable names.

Most mathematics is dealing with things at least one level of abstraction higher than a standard library.

In most programs outside of things like standard libraries, a variable usually stands for something concrete and specific. A customer. An order. A specific type of element in a UI. Etc.

In theory papers, a variable usually stands in for something generic and general. An arbitrary program. An arbitrary finite set. Etc. Sometimes even an arbitrary program in a programming language that is not defined in particular but only in general (e.g., "any language with parametric polymorphism", "any language with a specific sort of binding structure between things in these two syntactic categories", etc.).

Again, standard libraries already start using more generic variable names, and most theory papers are dealing with an abstraction level higher than standard libraries.

There's no way in hell I'm ever giving that sort of banking access to an employer, let alone an educational institution. For starters, I share a bank account with my wife and her earnings are none of their god damn business.

(This is a really fantastic resource; I'll probably use it as the basis of course once I get around to semi-retiring and taking a teaching job. Thanks, OP!)

Calculus and linear algebra are a tad older than that.

> isn't relevant today as determined by the community itself?

Which community? NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR/et al.? That's only a subset of the AI community.

Also, I'm not really sure that "pure ML/DL" is even a particularly in-demand field of research expertise right now; we've been absolutely saturated with supply for at least junior phd students in that subfield for close to an academic generation by now... whereas there is now a genuine drought of folks who speak "both languages" in AI. I think these days you really need a second field in order to not be in a horrendously bleak over-saturated labor market. E.g., systems and ML? God, please yes. "Symbolic AI" tradition and ML/DL? Yup, lots going on there right now. But pure NeurIPS et al. style work? You've gotta the best in a very, very, very, very crowded room.

Anyone who has taught introductory CS courses at an average public college/university (so, not a huge R1 state flagship) can tell you that getting into programming is not easy. Plenty of students who I would describe as "smart enough" have an incredibly hard time learning how to program.

The bar is a lot higher than most people here seem to believe.

Either the experts are presenting an incredibly reasonable and almost certainly true description of precipitating causes, or else NOAA, FAA, and everyone who collects their real-time datastreams are all in on a vast conspiracy to falsify data.

That includes cancelled flights, which I had a lot of because I used to do at least weekly hops between two east coast cities (surprisingly staffing issues were almost as common as weather, but usually it was a combo -- eg weather causing delays in pilots arriving and then once the pilot arrives the weather is bad enough we can't take off.)

Always a survey, even if cancelled, 100% of the time.

Aside from the union: because Southwest employs 8,500 pilots and they're not exactly all on linkedin or something.

That's not a walkout. That's one dude calling in.

> One pilot can delay a whole airline if they only have a couple planes.

LOL what are you saying? 1,800 flights were cancelled. Was that one guy flying like 200 planes simultaneously? The John Galt of pilots, no doubt.

> The other strange thing about the weather claim is it only affected SW for some reason.

See my comment on the other thread.

And not just the FAA. That's real-time data that thousands or perhaps millions of people download and keep local copies of for at least sliding windows of time. So every single private company and individual who downloaded and stored that data in the hours leading up to the disruption would have to also go back and modify their local copies. Thousands, maybe millions, of people.

To believe weather and airspace closures didn't play a major role you have to believe that those closures didn't happen or that Southwest is not truthful about where its planes were. But either of those means either completely disregarding objective evidence or believing in a MASSIVE conspiracy to modify that data. A conspiracy involving literally millions of people. Almost all of whom have literally no incentive to lie and would have had to take an active role in deleting historical data and replacing it with fabricated data. Just... what?!

Also, this observation cuts both ways: why only and exactly southwest's pilots and for only one day?

Yeah complex systems running on a razor's edge NEVER fail! NOAA and all the other weather forecast/data providers are all in on the conspiracy! /s

But seriously, I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my original comment. Thanks.

um... the post you're replying to says:

>> Or else one dude flew a flag and also there was a massive scheduling failure and the two are unrelated.

and also

>> Either there's a vast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc.

So...

1. I'm not just trusting the CEO.

2. I never claimed the picture is doctored (because even if it's not... who cares? What is that evidence of? One person. I don't need to check the veracity of the picture because it doesn't prove anything substantive... it's an anecdote, and a poor one at that.)

Try again.

Because that's how labor strikes work...

Jesus, dude. Think.

So... so what? The explanation from Southwest's CEO makes sense and matches up against a ton of publicly available data.

On the other hand there's evidence of at least one pissed off pilot (who, none-the-less, showed up to work?)

But, again, all that other data still exists.

So. Either there's a vast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc. Or else one dude flew a flag and also there was a massive scheduling failure and the two are unrelated.

I genuinely couldn't have asked for a better exemplar of my original post: seeing a ton of verifiable data vs. a single anecdote and choosing to implicitly believe in a vast conspiracy because the anecdote touches one's feels the right way.

So, one possibility is that there's a fast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, Miami airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc.

The other possibility a few conservative commentators are talking out of their ass.

Sorry... this one just isn't that hard.

Any time a complex system fails, smart folks dig into precipitating and root causes while ideological idiots dream of conspiracy.

I've actually seen this is professional contexts, where idiots blamed a series of hardware failures on employee sabotage. Turns out there was a component with a 1-in-10,000,000[^1] failure rate that was failing almost exactly 1-in-10,000,000 times and the distribution of the failures was clustered by pure accident.

[^1]: Or something like that. It was a decade ago.

My own child will never use a school-issued laptop or school wifi.

Consider yourself as an employer and assume your employees have perceived switching cost C > 0.

Your employee will approach you with bids b_1, ..., b_n all of which are substantially larger than C. So to keep your employee you will need to pay C plus some premium. In fact, not just any premium, but probably something close to max(b_1, ..., b_n).

If you can make good guesses at C and b_1..b_n, then you can retain employees by ensuring you're always giving raises between C and max(b_1, ..., b_n).

And all of that assumes that employees are fungible at any particular price point. They're not; employers also have switching costs. Among two otherwise equivalent employees you'd much prefer the one you already have.

Huh. I would characterize this more like "suburban vs. everything else, with some urban exceptions".

City schools have extreme bifurcations depending on their inputs; Boston Latins and Lane Techs exist but are notable precisely because they're exceptions to the general rule that city school systems aren't great.

Suburban schools are generally OK. Never nearly as good as the local population seems to think, but whatever.

Rural schools are uniformly horrible (but at least not as bad as the bad side of the bifurcated urban schools).

At least, that's my understanding.