when i was in the 5th grade (give or take a couple years), there was an innovation project where we were to bring in and present to the class an invention.
i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed.
like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en
to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?
> i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are
Because if you independently invented it then it is your own.
The value to the student is not necessarily that the idea is novel to everyone else but that is novel to her. And of course the process of invention and development is something that many people never experience, and is valuable in itself.
I'm willing to look the other way when N=1, and 0..n is a small number of values on an indexed column. As others have pointed out, sometimes it's difficult to merge two queries like `get_item_list()` and `get_items()` located in different parts of the code, especially if they cross service boundaries. It's ugly, but may be a completely tolerable situation as long as timing profiles and usage patterns show that it's not going to blow things up. So there, 1+N => 1+1 which isn't inherently scary.
It's when 1+N turns into 147 queries, one for each line of a table displayed on a web page, that it really chafes.
That, is also a thought terminating cliche. Sure we want to choose what we spend time on, however, we don't know what experiences will meaningfully contribute to our lives. It is only after we have gone through them that we realize which ones were significant. And these vary for everyone.
We are going around in circles. When we are doing something, we won't be able to do a thousand other things we could be doing. Only the future can tell whether that turns out to be great or not, however, how we react to those experiences is under our control.
Millions of people live about the way you have described, doing manual chores (perhaps out of necessity), and may be they are missing out on the joys of commenting on HN or may be I am indeed missing out on something when I eschew some degree of manual work (I have experienced this).
The point is not automating stuff, it is what do you do when you have automated the boring stuff that is matter - do you just scroll your feed ? Not to mention that some amount of boredom is necessary to make us value the interesting aspect of life.
OP is more correct than you realize. Your judgement of how life was is in the past, while what your life is in the now.
umm, its like the hallmark of adulthood to learn that life is a lot about doing things you don't want to do. There's obviously a spectrum. And I don't mean forcibly through coercion. I mean yeah it sucks to wake up early and clean up and get your exercise in and be accountable to your team or take your kid to basketball practice or feed the cat. Or go out your way to pick up that trash someone else threw out, or let someone go ahead of you in traffic even though you were there first or take the stairs because someone is moving in today and needs the elevator more than you or take your dad to dialysis and listen to him mention the same things 5 times, there and back or not just eat anything you want whenever you want.
I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.
You left out washing your clothes in the river, carrying water from the well, butchering a chicken for dinner, walking ten miles uphill both ways and a whole lot of things that you seem to have automated away.
haha you're right! That is the entire nuance of the discussion. There's a line somewhere in there. And it's not as pedantic as it seems. I still do cook my own food. I don't grow it and butcher the meat. But thousands of years of cooking people still cook food. (and not me but people do still grow their own food).
Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?
And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>
The Intercept is not far-left, they are Blob-aligned via Pierre Omidyar.
Reading this meter you linked from AllSides, it appears that the main purpose of that meter is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window using faux-objectivity as a cover.
i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed.
like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en
to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?
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