Honestly that’s the reason I stayed in backend work. Frontend seemed to be too much like the English language- more exceptions than rules, only changing nearly constantly.
I’m grateful to those who have the patience and skill for it.
Does anyone know how these averages are calculated? Is it a straight average of the temperature of each square mile of the entire globe, or are there weights for regions or terrain types?
A grid is overlayed over the Earth and a temperature is calculated for each cell. Over the continental US and Europe most of the numbers are determined using weather stations but where sensor data is unavailable, like most of the oceans, a temperature is calculated indirectly using satellite data and a bunch of other sources.
The grids for the northern and southern hemisphere are averaged separately and then combined with a weight to eliminate bias towards the northern hemisphere (since most of the weather stations are concentrated in the northern half of the planet).
There are lots of different models for this calculation and different agencies use ones tailored to their needs and data quality.
I've worked in tech for 20+ years and I have 4 young kids. We allow our teenager use of a locked down smartphone, with a clearly explained zero expectation of privacy. We don't allow any social media on the phone itself. YouTube and other sites can be used under supervision for agreed on lengths of time.
Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
It is a LOT of work. But so far, it has paid off. The more responsible the usage, the more freedom we give. When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
As a young adult who was recently a teenager, I can't help but feel concerned about the potential dangers of having no expectation of privacy from our parents, especially when it comes to reading through our text messages.
While I understand the intention behind it, this practice can easily lead to conflicts and strained relationships.
Teenagers are at a stage in their lives where they are trying to establish their independence and develop a sense of self. By invading their privacy, parents risk undermining their trust and creating an atmosphere of constant surveillance. This not only hampers the natural process of growing up but also sends a message that their thoughts and personal space are not respected.
Yes this seems trivially true, even just looking back at my own teenage years on the family computer.
I don't think the remedy is more helicopter parenting. It suffices to limit screen time across the board and empower kids with knowledge surrounding the risks of over use.
My partner's mom read her diary at ~11 and then got mad at her for writing about her frustrations with her mom. She then grounded my 18yo nibbling a couple weeks ago for writing the same sort of frustrations on the notes app on their phone (she's the legal guardian). My partner became withdrawn from her mom and kept all of her social life to herself, hidden from her mom.
Yep. This is exactly what happens. I already had a strained relationship with my parents but when they invaded my privacy - I decided to lock it down way harder and cut them out entirely from my life. I'll pickup a phone call from them every few months but that's all they get.
It's a great way to ruin relationships with your kids. Keep at it, HN know-it-alls.
I have vivid memories of my parents barging into my bedroom when I was or was not there to do absolutely anything they wanted. They also opened all of my mail. I haven't talked to them in 15 years.
This is just anecdotal but I remember when I was growing up there were always a few kids in school who had extremely restrictive parents like this (strictly controlled their TV, phone, time with friends, searched their rooms, etc.)
On the surface, it seemed like it was effective and they had model kids. But in every case I can remember it resulted in the kids just becoming much better at finding ways to rebel (in increasingly escalating ways) that the parents couldn't catch, until they got a knock at the door from the police, or their kid was pregnant, or overdosed, etc.
On hacker news, well-adjusted, highly-educated, able to think for myself, found healthy outlets for "rebellion", and I have healthy relationship with my parents that feels more like friendship than dictatorship.
Anecdotally, I got in trouble occasionally as a teenager, but those moments of trouble were considerably less rebellious than friends of mine with helicopter parents.
> Anecdotally, I got in trouble occasionally as a teenager, but those moments of trouble were considerably less rebellious than friends of mine with helicopter parents.
Kids in trouble are often kids developing ambition. I'd wager the disproportional punishments (arrest+record over getting yelled at and shooed off) are what do actual harm.
That'd be me. With adults out of the way, I learned to be self-sufficient and I learned how to navigate complex social situations on my own. In short, I learned how to think. Whatever stuff in my life worked out well - I can trace it all to that.
My 5 kids had always-present parenting (because independent growth became effectively illegal+impossible). Being it's such a counterproductive situation, it required strictness to pull it off.
You're a parent of 5 adult children who all live under the same roof as you? Honestly I don't know whether to congratulate you (my kids all love me so much and all get along) or commiserate (none of my kids are independent).
I was pretty much allowed to do whatever I wanted. Overall, I was punished only once in my teenage years (was told I had to skip a ski trip because I came home very drunk one night, at 15 or 16 yo). All in all I'd say I did pretty good, I'm already FIREd at 42 years old.
I think the approach should highly depend on the kid. I for one was good at academic subjects and also reasonably concerned about my future to put in the work at school (I never ran off with the circus etc.), so hands-off approach worked well with me. It might not work as well with someone completely different.
From my experience, the kids who had very restrictive parents were the least well adjusted by the time they had freedom in college, and they really let loose in a much more extreme way than those who had been afforded more freedom & privacy when they were younger.
> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
> IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
There are also parents who disagree with this ideology and would find this an invasion of their child's privacy. I'd caution against the thinking "we find this valuable and if people don't do it it's because they aren't willing to put as much work in as we do"
The mantra we use with our kids is "We will try and respect your privacy but we aren't bound by it." As I often tell my son, "It's your room but it's my house."
And we make it extra clear that the moment they go online, they have no expectation of privacy. Better they learn that someone's snooping now than be surprised when it's Google/Facebook/NSA.
I think most children find it significantly more invasive for their parents to be snooping through their messages, than to have that information being collected in some government database.
That's a fair point, and I don't mean to insist that my way is the best way. It works for us, it surely won't work for all. But I am certain that with some effort on the part of the parents to be intentional, a good system can be reached. Our system continues to evolve, and with time and additional responsibility/freedom, will evolve eventually to us as parents handing complete control over.
that imposition of a lack of privacy just seems like a sure way to not only make them seek actual privacy elsewhere - moving their communications to other devices, and just doing stuff outside of "surveilled" devices or any devices at all, but to make it so that they won't ever share their actual private matters.
they will have their problems - just, outside of your reach, and they will not talk about them with you. (why? any reason, ranging from 'you don't get to surveil me - i'm going to have my privacy', to 'there's a looming possibility of blowback - I don't want to deal with that (or just, being afraid of that), so i'm just gonna keep my appearances neat (while doing real stuff elsewhere - and keeping that to myself')
I feel pretty strongly based on my own (distant past) experiences as a young person that children need spaces where they have privacy from their parents. I think of the child who for whatever reason doesn't entirely feel like they fit in with their family and the internet is an outlet where they can explore the side of themselves that they don't feel comfortable sharing. When you strip someone's privacy and autonomy, you inhibit their ability to authentically be themselves. Now of course there is a balance and any parent does have the right to set boundaries, but I think it's important to consider the cost. My mother set some
arbitrary boundaries not entirely unlike the ones you've described, but in a different era. While I respect that she was well intentioned, she caused more harm and resentment and, as others have pointed out, probably pushed me towards worse behavior out of her watchful eyes. In other words, she couldn't actually shelter me but she was able to engender resentment and acting out in response to her well-intentioned desire to protect me that ultimately hurt our relationship. I'm not at all saying that that dynamic exists in your family and I'm sure there is lots of nuance that a HN comment can't express, but I have concerns with people blindly applying these types of rules and boundaries on their children.
I know you mean well. But I strongly urge you to reconsider your parenting here.
You should not be going through your teenager's text messages... that is absolutely insane.
My parents were kind of similar and I had a very negative experience growing up as a result. I still remember my mom throwing out all my NiN CDs I had bought after she read the lyrics. And all my DnD material because Satan was controlling my brain through it.
As a parent you should be teaching your child to be independent and learn how to make the right choices themselves. Micro managing every aspect of their lives is the absolute wrong approach.
how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures,
how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
we don't know from the singular fact that they're reading through teenagers text messages how heavy handed that monitoring is. Maybe there's a recurrence of satanic panic, but we don't actually know that. That you had that experience with your parents is awful but it sounds like parents are more likely to be their kids DnD DM than anything else these days.
Every generation of parents seems to have some moral panic. It's a way for those people to feel like they're in control (because losing control is scary and uncomfortable). But, well, news flash, teenagers are all about rebelling against their parents and it's perfectly natural for parents to lose most, if not all, control of their teenagers.
So do you leash your kids and monitor every single one of their actions? Do you really think that is the solution? Parents have tried this for millennia and it never works. Some go completely overboard and shelter their kids, who have mental breakdowns when they enter the real world. I've seen it happen first hand with home-schooled/overly protected friends.
You throw out an extreme anecdote. Remember the war on drugs? It was the same thing. Oh, your kids are gonna do crack at their friends house if you are not careful. Drugs are everywhere and kids are melting their brains. Yes, extreme things can happen to anyone, you can get hit by a car and die, that doesn't mean you ban your kids from crossing a road.
How do you teach them the right choice? Well, this is the art of parenting, and is hard. There are many approaches here. My approach is to treat my teens with respect, have frank conversations with them, and set some clear boundaries and expectations (you must do your schoolwork).
I also try to set myself as a role model for them by living my life to the same morale standards I'd want them to. I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink lots, I don't go on random hookups (all things which I see common in men my age). I work hard but also try to remember to have fun and laugh.
It's worked so far. They are confident and happy and will confide in me things they are struggling with. I know they will do things that I wouldn't be happy with and will be unaware of, but that is the risk inherent in life and they will learn from it. All I can do is try to set them up for success best I can, and impart my limited wisdom.
> how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures, how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
> how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures, how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
General rules, like:
-Assume everything you send can at some point become available to everyone, forever.
-Anyone saying "don't tell your parents" is definitely up to no good and should not be trusted.
-On the internet anyone can convincingly pose as anyone.
etc.
Also children usually converse with their peers, so you'll be going through messages of quite a lot of other people's children. Do you have the consent of all the people involved, including their parents?
> -Assume everything you send can at some point become available to everyone, forever.
Forever is a hard concept to grasp for a kid - I was doing stupid things in my 20s that could have had forever consequences. Much worse than something available online forever. I was lucky and had none, but this argument wouldn't work on me
I can understand being this careful with young children's usage of a device but giving teenagers zero privacy (to the extent of going through their personal messages) seems wild to me.
Maybe it's how you raise a generation that understands you shouldn't post a single thing online that you don't want the whole world to know about. Prior generations have entirely failed to understand that, certainly (cf. Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment—which, go figure, we know about because he sent it as an instant message)
Ha, yeah, reinforces the idea that if you don't have crazy-good opsec you better not post anything online—including in places as relatively-safe as IRC or direct messages—that you don't want in the newspaper, with your name next to it.
I still cringe at the immature garbage we did in college over telnet and unsecured NIS/Ethernet Unix boxes not questioning whether anyone was recording packet traces for posterity. Luckily disk space was super expensive back then. :-)
> but giving teenagers zero privacy (to the extent of going through their personal messages) seems wild to me.
Why? Teenagers are kids too, or have we forgotten that? They are actually worse than kids in some respect, still immature but with changing body and new hormones.
It may seem weird to them at this time, but hopefully they’ll appreciate when they grow older - or even if not, at least one did what they could.
teens won't just 'want' privacy, they will get it, one way or another. and if it means excluding other people (like parents) from their communication loops, then so be it. thinking that 'you can let them know that you read their little messages, and that takes care of some things', or 'sure, they may want privacy, but what will they really do?'(literally anything incl. getting a burner phone lol), is just unrealistic. it creates more problems than it solves - well, if ending up with teens who won't talk to you about their actual private matters (and problems) and just keep that to themselves while putting up appearances, is even a problem for you. like, sure, they won't ever talk about their problems with you - but in a way, that means they have no problems (as it appears to you). so "problem solved".
the realistic expectation, is that they will talk about some things and do some things, and you will not be part of those things (just by the nature of things, and whichever way it is, whether you're trying to surveil their chats or not, or just letting people have their own privacy), and all you can do is just hope that when something happens, they will be more inclined to talk to you and ask you for help, than not. setting it up in a way like 'i'm scanning your communications - and if something happens, it's gonna become a thing to deal with' - is not gonna help with that. it's setting up for it to be like 'i'm gonna try to avoid having anything out that could be seen by parents and become a thing'. not even 'avoiding getting into trouble' - but just 'avoiding writing about that trouble, or talking about that trouble with you'.
Not everyone has such a combative relationship with their parents as you apparently had.
It it is possible to be firm on dangers, still be understanding and calm, and let them have face-to-face conversations with privacy... even a beer once in a while or whatever else harmless thing that might excite them in other ways. Pick your battles in other words.
talking about privacy is different from imposing reduced privacy on someone. so i'm not sure why you're bringing that up like 'that's the thing that's been talked about all along, and it's not bad' (and it isn't, conversations like that can be good, lest they end with a 'and that's why we're monitoring every word you say in chats on a phone', which is the, not even so much 'bad' part per se, but it's just gonna have 'unintended, lasting consequences'), and throwing that in along with a wrong assumption about my life. that kind of 'well damn, not everybody had it that bad, geez, what are you complaining about' shit also just sounds like victim blaming (or rather, target? though, imposed surveillance can get to the point where it's so overt, saying someone's a 'victim' might not even be a stretch), which is also another important aspect to this topic.
My Parents gave me no privacy when I was a teenager. Guess what I learned? I learned that it was easier to lie and hide who I was than to be honest. I got better at lying and deceiving because it was a necessity. It was easy to get around their rules eventually; after all, I was a child with unlimited time and desperation to live my way. None of the children in my family talk to my parents anymore and most left home before 18.
> It may seem weird to them at this time, but hopefully they’ll appreciate when they grow older
I have been raised differently, and with certain values. It is frustrating but ok to forbid or limit things, and to talk about issues.
But to snoop through one's private messages or similar communication, that's completely disgusting and I would have what? Appreciated? No, never forgiven (works both ways btw, the trust). Especially at teenage age.
I guess I shared voluntarily more with my parents and voiced issues than I would have in such circumstances, can just repeat: dis gus ting.
I'm not going to comment on the specifics of your process. There isn't always a right or wrong to handle this stuff.
Your comment and the parent point to the theme that matters to me most: do you care to understand/show interest in what your kids are doing. Forget about social media - just think about TV. You can park your kid in front of the TV and forget about them, converse with them as they watch, or something in between. Your kids also need quiet/down time as well.
Again, not to say I'm right, but I try not to litigate what is happening so much, and instead I try to just be an active participant in whatever my kids are doing. The counter where you restrict or limit or challenge doesn't always work out better in the end.
I can't help but think it's in significant part survivorship bias.
I mean, I've seen this sort of controlling behaviour carry over for three generations(that I know of) among my relatives - the person to (hopefully - the jury is out on that) break the chain moved countries.
> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
> When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
Can you elaborate on what sorts of things you'd ask about, or what bad patterns are? I'm not a parent but if I were I think I'd have a hard time drawing the line in the right place.
You're either going to have your kids resent you or stunt the maturation of their independence (the whole point of the teenage phase). You think you're doing the right thing but you're going to most likely create hyper dependent young adults.
I disagree, but I have the advantage of knowing the whole story of how they are raised, while you are extrapolating the entire experience from a couple paragraphs about reading text messages with my child.
>> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
Holy crap.
Maybe you’re aware, but things like this are commonly cited reasons by young adults as to why they’ve never again spoken to their parents after they were able to escape them, sometimes even voluntarily becoming homeless to get away.
Personally I would say don’t set arbitrary limits. I knew of a blind guy who played a computer game very well because it had such a rich and responsive soundscape.
Blind guy here (<5 degree visual field) the app is fantastic. I get a little emotional when I consider how many people volunteer. In a sighted world it makes a huge difference.
I shudder when I look at the amount of pods / resources we use. Not only is it slow, but since the GIL makes python effectively single threaded, you end up instead with loads of separate processes / workers in many contexts, multiplying your need for RAM. And since you can't easily just spin up some background threads, you often end up with loads of different entrypoints also complicating the deployment.
At a previous company using the jvm, we used 6x t3.small instances at AWS to handle a much bigger load than what we now have 100+ pods handling in python.
imo Python is going to eventually be nice-looking macros for Rust in the near future and you will barely have to change your code. What's not to like about that?!
Let me help expose the thinking here. Since I was an engineer who worked for Google over a decade and helped launch several health projects while there and wrote one of the docs that ended up convincing the leaders at Google Brain and Research to work on health problems (after the Google Health records debacle), the thinking is relatively straightforward:
Google spent heavily to build infrastructure and hire smart people. A small number of those people work on ads, which, while not "walled-off" from the rest of the company, does operate at arm's distance. A larger number of people work on other projects- many of them cloud, which is Google's other non-insignificant revenue source- doing all sorts of things, from building software and hardware infrastructure to do high performance computing (of many kinds) to optimizing models for growing products like Youtube through watchnext and Play Store through suggestions. Many of those people are ex-scientists who want to help use what they've learned to make life better for people- potentially through better medicines.
At the same time, most companies that work with health are incredibly low-tech, super-inefficient and mainly exist to waste patient's money. They fail to use ML and data engineering to maximize the value of their products, they run inefficient software and hardware, they can't explain why their products work or not.
So it stood to reason- at least in 2007, when I joined- that Google could use its technical prowess and ads $$$ to fund health research with the goal of providing a greater good for the world- while also making some revenue and profit from the products. While making the case for this I was extremely careful to repeatedly explain that Google had a serious reputational risk because people were skeptical that the company could both be a big tech advertiser, and a health research company. I said that we should always be up front and open about any deal we make, because eveyrthing is going to leak anyway and at least by being open you have some control over the narrative. And I also said that this work needed to be carried out ethically and in a way that was unrelated to existing consumer products (ads, search, android, etc).
Well, I was successful and managed to convince Google Research to get into health and Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado have been actively working in that area for some time. The work has had extremely modest success in terms of research output and products, but they're committed to it long-term. Later, as Google finally began to recognize Cloud as a business model, I began to engage with the cloud leadership, but with a slightly different pitch: Google, with its infrastructure, could be a great partner to pharma and EMR enterprises, as a service provider (servers and storage) as well as new ideas for data processing (Flume) and machine learning (this was pre-tensorflow; Sibyl was the system i wanted to sell).
This went on for some time and Google made a few products and published a few papers. Some are great and some are terrible, but I left because I came to the conclusion that Google simply can't provide the same level of innovation or success that Ads and Search had, when working in the health area. There are several reasons for this:
The data sources are not as rich as the web. The web provides copious data to make good Search and Ads systems. The data in health and research is ... terrible. Nobody gave any thought to featurization or any of the other important data engineering/ML engineering you need to be sucessful. A dataset like the one being discussed here is significant because it's homogenous.
Verily was getting going but at the time the focus was on medical devices, not machine learning for health research.
At the same time, Sundar has taken over and his approach... is not very enlightened. He was good at rapid growth in multiple products such as Android and Youtube, which were critical for Google to stay competitive when it looked like Facebook was going to own social. He has little to no understsanding of anything but growing consumer products (and when I say "consumer products", I mean the consumer is the product).
So my conclusion- after all of this- is that Google will ultimately fail to make the impact it could have, both because people don't trust google to handle this sort of data ethically, and because the upper leadership doesn't have the "DNA" (so to speak) to build products and do research in this area. Which is a real shame. But the good part is: there's nothing left inside of Google that makes them special in any way for health research. Everybody who wants to emulate the Google style has all the tools available in external open source repos and cloud systems (that includes TPU v4 which is a huge competitive edge for google).
I have a couple of software patents (way to interrupt running optimised code, way to insert code dynamically into running optimised code) but I list them pretty close to the bottom of my portfolio because some people seriously don't like it and see them as a massive negative.
Or maybe that's what you meant by 'equivalent to a masters degree' lol?
I work in product now and all my peers have masters degrees (minus me) but the patent (while not necessarily useful) seems to have put me on equal footing.
I’m grateful to those who have the patience and skill for it.