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Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#601

Post by pipes »

Not drinking. I only drank at weekends. But pretty much every weekend for 25 + years, this is totally normal from where I'm from.

I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb...

Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol.

And realised I don't want to drink anymore.

It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane.

I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#602

Post by sjmulder »

ipaddr wrote: post #255
sjmulder wrote: post #204

Small city council politics :( there's a lot of resistance against a new temporary housing project for Ukrainian refugees with many legit concerns, and some NIMBY, but also xenophobia and racism. It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, beca…

How does racism play into your situation? Small towns and Ukrainians have one thing in common: they are both white. I would think their race wouldn't be the deciding factor.

It's not about the Ukrainians directly. On the more 'civil' side of this discourse it's mostly claims that this will become a general asylum or registration center (which it won't) and/or that there'll be a lot of crime, often accompanied by sources featuring African people.

This flows directly into the less civil side of the discussion, which ranges from conspiracy theories of EU or WEF-planned repopulation to all out etno-nationalism. Our city has a rich history of voting literal nazis into the council. There's talk of storming the city council and all that.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#603

Post by sjmulder »

Obergruppen wrote: post #273
sjmulder wrote: post #204

Small city council politics :( there's a lot of resistance against a new temporary housing project for Ukrainian refugees with many legit concerns, and some NIMBY, but also xenophobia and racism. It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, beca…

Is there a country closer to their homeland where they can be housed? It is unfortunate they have to be so far from home. Or better yet, can we just push for peace talks so they can stay home?

Ukraine itself houses a great many internal refugees. The EU countries have agreed to each take a fair share of refugees, but Germany, Poland and Czechia carry the good majority right now.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#604

Post by RecycledEle »

I am passionate about AI in education.

Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources.

Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980.

AI can fix most of that.

Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal.

I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#605

Post by polivier »

mzl wrote: post #504
polivier wrote: post #158

Crossword puzzles! They make very interesting combinatorial problems (both for solving and creating grids). I recently had a ton of fun writing a constraint programming model that generates grids, including the automatic placement of black squares (this was the main modeling challenge). This model is useful for creating grids using short word lists (which is the case for e.g. thematic grids).

What model did you end up using? And what system did you do it in? My immediate guess on how to model it would be to create reified constraints for the wordlists of different lengths (the constraints in chapter 22 of https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf ). For each square, use standard logical constraints to check if it is the start of a word (previous square a black one, this square not a black one), and how lo…

The problem mentioned in the Gecode documentation example is different than the one I solve. In their case, they start with a WxH grid with known black square positions, and their model essentially answers the following question: "Given a crossword grid template and word list, does there exist a feasible assignment of words for the template?"

I my case, the black square positions are unknown, so the question instead is: "Given an empty crossword grid and a word list, does there exist a template allowing a feasible assignment of words for the grid?" Your intuition of how I modeled this is mostly correct, I used custom TABLE constraints for the words, that can be triggered on or off depending on the values of boolean variables.

I used CP-SAT to model this, and if you're interested in the technical side of things, I've discussed it in great detail here: https://pedtsr.ca/2023/generating-crossword-grids-using-cons...

It turns out that there are many weird complexities to take into account when the black square positions are unknown.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#606

Post by bjorglo »

nwiswell wrote: post #334
candiddevmike wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powerlifting can be very dangerous. You can really, permanently, mess up your body, specifically your back and neck. What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?

This is a complicated question. First of all, your statement is absolutely accurate. The weights involved can cause injury and can possibly be dangerous or even fatal when not handled correctly. On the other hand, exactly what is meant by "injury" can vary widely, so we have to be precise in our language. Acute, serious injuries typically come about due to poor form, carelessness, failure to use safety mechanisms, or…

I have been into powerlifting since the 90s. I think it is a convenient myth that form prevents injury. "Form" is just something that everyone thinks they do well and everyone else does poorly.

It is ultimately a trade off. I don't know any long term powerlifter who doesn't have a ton of injury.

Ultimately, it isn't a good idea to load your spine with 400lbs+ over long periods of time. There is no mystery what is going to happen here regardless of "form".

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#607

Post by polivier »

saulpw wrote: post #179
polivier wrote: post #158

Crossword puzzles! They make very interesting combinatorial problems (both for solving and creating grids). I recently had a ton of fun writing a constraint programming model that generates grids, including the automatic placement of black squares (this was the main modeling challenge). This model is useful for creating grids using short word lists (which is the case for e.g. thematic grids).

Very nice! Have you seen the talk "How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal"[0]? Or the largest collection of crossword data on the planet[1]? Source: it me. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHfK8EUIzg [1] https://xd.saul.pw

This is fascinating, I had no idea about the gridgate scandal!

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#608

Post by RecycledEle »

RationalDino wrote: post #340
kbf wrote: post #59

Mental health. I recently passed out in public and had to finally admit to myself that I’m severely burnt out. I had ignored the signs and mentally written off the concept of burnout as a bit of a wishy-washy mostly “emotional” concept and not as the very real psychological AND physiological condition that doesn’t just go away if you get a good nights sleep and a day off. It was emotional to actually read up on it an…

Mental health for me as well. That's the point of https://rationaldino.substack.com/ and this pseudonymous account. Separately I have other children who were impacted by COVID and lockdowns and are part of https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g... . That's also been hard. All of this is made more complicated by the fact that I regard psychology as having a lot of pseudoscience in it. Feynman was…

For anyone dealing with mental health things, see https://www.therapistaid.com/

You can work through most of the worksheets online for free, and it helped me understand mental health better than I ever had. I think they charge $9 per month to download PDFs of the worksheets, which is cheaper than therapy with a professional confuser.

I am not affiliated with them, and I do not make money off them. I am a former customer.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#609

Post by lotsofpulp »

hahahacorn wrote: post #571
swah wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do anything to improve on 5ks other than running 5ks? My 5k time is around 35min forever, I run every now and then and recently signed for a public 5k run but I don't see myself improving my pace. (It took years until I could run 30 minutes non-stop and at least I didn't lose this over the years, but I'm slow...)

Yes. I didn’t run 5ks and I didn’t try to run fast. I heard the buzz phrasey “to go faster you have to go slower” for like 2 years and totally disregarded it. I used to run before this latest bug, like a year ago, but I hated it. My only goal was to do a sub 30 minute 5k and I trained for like 8 months with 0 progress and was so dejected I quit. I would show up, run at a 10 min pace for as long as I can, repeat. It f…

I found high intensity interval training helpful in building up strength and speed.

Run a quarter mile at 80% of full speed, then 50%, then 80%, then 50%, etc and play with the percentages and interval lengths to push yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

#610

Post by jefc1111 »

bostonwalker wrote: post #370

Parenting. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare my kid to grow up around the internet, smartphones, and AI. Our technology often takes an indifferent or even cynical view of children, and I can’t understand why there aren’t better tools available (e.g. smartphone designs) that put their developmental needs ahead of the need to exploit them for immediate profit.

I am on this road too, with two children between 5 and 10. My conclusion is pretty much that if I don't want them to do those kinds of activities (social media, youtube, games, endless TV) then I have to put my money where my mouth is and proactively fill their time, either by giving up mine, facilitating time with friends, or by paying someone else (after school activities, lessons etc).

I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.

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