"In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%."
Society has been built for couples. With the major societal changes in the last 2 decades, we had an explosion of single people wanting to live alone, and the infrastructure is simply not prepared for it.
My parents were born poor (poor in a way you simply have no idea in the US) and were able to afford to buy a house (after a lot of work) because they were two working for a common goal.
It's a very complex problem. Most discussion around it is: look at what the investment funds are doing to housing, but, in reality, almost no new houses are being built (I'm speaking about my country here, but I suspect it's similar in a lot of places), and people aren't getting/staying married enough time to buy a house and build a family (which will also cause major problems down the line due to rapidly declining birthrates).
Software engineering is held back by having to get as much mindshare and reach the lowest denominator to have as many contributors or developers possible, so a niche language which might have been very productive to get the ball rolling, is cast aside once the project reaches maturity, and I would argue never for the best.
Two examples off the top of my head are Reddit and SICP abandoning their Lisp roots because it's hard for new engineers (of average quality) to get into.
Imagine if in mathematics there was a culture of avoiding abstraction and domain specific symbols because the average undergrad might have a hard time understanding them. Good luck exploring quantum mechanics with polynomials equations as your ceiling of complexity.
In fact, it might a cultural problem at large: give people a chance to learn, and most are able to. But we are afraid of people needing to become familiar with it, that we strive to dumb everything down. Much of the UX focus of the 20 years has been on targeting the beginners, forgetting the fact that beginners eventually become power users and need force multipliers, not rounded-off scissors.
(Sorry, Saturday morning philosophical rant after a week of thinking about the future of computing)
1. Ideas That Created The Future[1]. It's a collection of fiftyish classic CS papers, with some commentary.
2. Wikipedia's list[2].
3. Test of Time awards[3]. These are papers that have been around for a while and people still think are important.
4. Best paper awards[4]. Less useful than ToT as not every best paper is actually that good or important, and sometimes the award committees can't see past names or brands for novel research.
5. Survey Journals[5]. Students often get their research started with a literature review and some go the extra step to collect dozens of papers into a summary paper. I subscribe to the RSS feed for that one, and usually one or two are interesting enough to read.
6. Citation mining -- As you read all these, consider their citation list as potential new reading material, or if an old paper leaves you wanting more, use Google Scholar to find a papers that cited what you just read.
If you have EU passport (blue card not enough, really have to have a EU PASSPORT, like a Polish or German one) then Switzerland is easy to move to because it takes part in the "free movement of people" - if you want, send CV to the email in my handle and i hook you up with fitting firms.
The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said?
The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for.
Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side.
The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.
It'll depend on where you live and what your goals are. If you have free-time to tinker and enjoy that kind of thing, you can build something very fast and reliable and prevent e-waste by building your own storage server with used parts on the cheap.
If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.
For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.
The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.
I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.
I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.
Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.
All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.
I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.
This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.
The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.
All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.
Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.
You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.
eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.
"Long before Facebook's and Google's founders were born, and before Microsoft and Apple were founded. Before Xerox PARC. Before the Web. AOL. Bulletin boards and CompuServe. Before the Internet. Long before MOOCs (massively open online courses). Before pretty much everything we take for granted today, there was the PLATO system: home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers. PLATO is where flat-panel gas plasma displays come from, and was one of the first systems with touch panels built-in to the screen. Countless other innovations." [1]
The book 'The Friendly Orange Glow' by Brian Dear details all about it. He says it's "a book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system."
> Knuth is making backwards incompatible changes to fix bugs in something he wrote 54 years ago (TAOCP volume 1, 1968)!
And mine:
Apart from the care Knuth takes, what's remarkable is that he has basically put out a permanent invitation to a DDoS on his time and attention—everyone in the world is invited to contact him about every word he has ever written—and somehow still continues to produce new material.
From Wilf's toast/roast of Knuth (https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/dek.pdf):
“[…]your letter will be placed on a stack that already has 5,379 letters that reached him before yours did,[…] while he completes his latest additions to 47 new manuscripts and 311 revisions of already existing books.”
Not a very deep CS-y one, but still one of my favourite data structures: Promise Maps.
It only works in languages where promises/futures/tasks are a first-class citizen. Eg JavaScript.
When caching the result of an expensive computation or a network call, don't actually cache the result, but cache the promise that awaits the result. Ie don't make a
Map<Key, Result>
but a
Map<Key, Promise<Result>>
This way, if a new, uncached key gets requested twice in rapid succession, ie faster than the computation takes, you avoid computing/fetching the same value twice. This trick works because:
- promises hold on to their result value indefinitely (until they're GC'ed)
- you can await (or .then()) an existing promise as many times as you want
- awaiting an already-resolved promise is a very low-overhead operation.
In other words, the promise acts as a mutex around the computation, and the resulting code is understandable even by people unfamiliar with mutexes, locks and so on.
You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.
[Extras]
- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)
- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)
- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans)
I'm impressed more by the comments than the article itself. Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.
A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and opened his book. It was like if you showed your programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.
This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.
I'm endlessly amused that the Richard Nixon years gave us OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and NIOSH - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act (proposed by the Nixon Administration, passed by Ford), the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, and the excellent Clean Air Act amendments/extension of 1970.
Interesting read. This post seems to be written by Adam Gordon Bell who is also the host of the excellect CoRecursive podcast. Recently featured at HN in The Untold Story of SQLite [0].
Society has been built for couples. With the major societal changes in the last 2 decades, we had an explosion of single people wanting to live alone, and the infrastructure is simply not prepared for it.
My parents were born poor (poor in a way you simply have no idea in the US) and were able to afford to buy a house (after a lot of work) because they were two working for a common goal.
It's a very complex problem. Most discussion around it is: look at what the investment funds are doing to housing, but, in reality, almost no new houses are being built (I'm speaking about my country here, but I suspect it's similar in a lot of places), and people aren't getting/staying married enough time to buy a house and build a family (which will also cause major problems down the line due to rapidly declining birthrates).