At least the article warns you upfront of the sort of mathematical sophistication required to get some of the explanations. The Author is a financial engineering sort, so their big thing is SDEs and assumes (for some of the explanations) that you bring that sort of intuition with you. If the Author was a signal processing type, they might use Kalman filter analogies, or pure statisticians would cite autocorrelation.
Don’t try to catch all the mathematical Pikachus in the paper, just choose the insights that resonate with you. Thankfully, there isn’t a pop quiz lurking at the end.
In honor of the Bay Area roots of HN, “believe it if you need it, if you don't, just pass it on”. I liked the paper even when skipping the SDE material.
Suggesting the specific bookmark subfolder that a website URL should be saved to, as a default presented (that could be ignored/overridden easily). I’m in content consumption mode on my iPad, and I have 200+ subfolders that I save bookmarks to, depending on the topic, content, etc. Spinning through to the right bookmark subfolder on iOS takes time, and software (dare I say AI) to guess which subfolder to save the bookmark, even if it’s right only 50% of the time, would make my cruising the Internet much more efficient.
According to the online Cambridge dictionary, the second entry under “grabby” is “wanting to or designed to attract attention”. But you know how those Cambridge types are…
I’ve become less impressed with AI performing well on standardized tests. I’m not tracking AI daily so this might be a known insight, but nearly the entire space of a given discipline’s standardized test questions is enumerable by today’s computers, or very close. That’s my guess. These standardized test questions are generally of a very structured format, even Math Olympiad. “Why that’s still billions and billions of possible questions” thinks the average person. And everyone on this forum knows that this is easily manageable with today’s technology.
So the computer can train on almost all possible standardized test questions, effectively memorizing their answers in a very compressed format with a very interesting adaptive compression algorithm. So for a AI, standardized tests are open book exams. But those questions are designed to challenge human students in closed book exams under human time constraints. So, who cares?
A meta level comment for dang, I’m upvoting every comment that is being gang-downvoted…independent of the position. This topic, with roots going back millennia, deserves to have all opinions captured and presented, if nothing more than as a snapshot/wave collapse of where the opposing sides sat in 2025.
No platform that simply sides with the majority is a good place for reasoning about a conflict that pits 0.2% of the world’s population against 25%, and that includes UN resolutions.
I think you trivialize the benefit of avoiding early-life-damaging activities like alcohol (one in six to one in ten drinkers become problem drinkers, destroying lives, drunk driving), drugs (visit an NA meeting or walk down certain streets in San Francisco), and early unwanted pregnancies (smashing dreams or leading to the morally challenging road of abortion).
The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.
Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.
Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.
And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.
I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.
> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented
The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.
Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.
When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.
> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.
> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.
Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.
Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.
> Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship.
Since when? Many kids grew up learning these things from interacting with other kids, or via the school of hard knocks.
I doubt it’s even 80% of the population that learned primarily from observing their parents.
Total abstinence is the kindest, simplest, easiest to implement and most logical approach to mitigating the suffering from alcohol abuse by the problem drinker. There is no valid reason for any other end state than total sobriety for the problem drinker. Nobody needs an alcoholic drink, and risking collapse/relapse and its impact on friends, family and society for one is being a damn fool.
This article reads like it was written by (what in the parlance is known as) an enabler. Or by a spokesperson for the alcohol industry…2/3 of their revenue comes from problem drinkers…1/3 of their revenue comes from the excessive drinking of those problem drinkers. You can imagine why anything other than abstinence is a good idea for the industry.
California wildfires are relevant for HN. Information/disinformation about said fires are relevant for HN. Political responses on said information/disinformation are one step beyond relevance for HN mission IMHO. Looks like the start of political rant festivals that HN avoids for good reason.
“Some initial sparks” is a gross under-characterization by the original author. “Almost all of the millions and millions of burning embers as flying ignition sources, one the three necessary elements of the fire triad” is more accurate to my ears. Without the wildfires providing the ignition, those millions of ignition sources for urban fires simply aren’t there, until an urban conflagration starts creating them for themselves.
But there is no major urban conflagration without these initial embers from wildfires…except in certain exceptional scenarios (of which the LA fires and most others cited by the author are not one). Firebombing, coordinated arson, industrial accident…. Which is why almost all urban areas in the US without a wildfire risk have had no urban conflagrations in, say, the last 100 years. Seems to me suppressing the fire triad element of sources of ignition by clearing shrubs and trees is much more economical and less disruptive than multidecade urban redevelopment.
On a going forward basis, more thought could be given to newer fire-aware building, if it doesn’t take the bureaucratically clogged housing approval process in CA into full blockage. (What’s the chance of that?)
This article sounds either like a grift or AI or both.
It meanders as an article, it does repeatedly return to the core message:
This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention.
No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing.
This aligns with the post urban fire recommendations in Canberra, Australia some years back - hardened homes, clean gutters, fewer easily ignited shrubs close to flammable buildings, etc.
Wildfires will happen, embers will rain from the sky .. how prepared is your home to be ignition resistant when that happens?
Don’t try to catch all the mathematical Pikachus in the paper, just choose the insights that resonate with you. Thankfully, there isn’t a pop quiz lurking at the end.
In honor of the Bay Area roots of HN, “believe it if you need it, if you don't, just pass it on”. I liked the paper even when skipping the SDE material.
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