octobus2021

My 14 year old son went further in the Turing Complete, where the game shows you how to "invent" Assembly language, and he completed couple challenges after that (like writing Assembly program to make a robot controlled by the computer you built in the game solve a randomly generated maze).

FYI the author started publishing updates again; looks like he took 2 years to rebuild the game from the ground up and instead of launching it as "Turing Complete 2" he chose to simply publish it as breaking update, and is now continuing with updates to add features.

I have no comment about this particular product, its features or its author, you can read other comments if you want.

I advise the readers to check out not only Nand2Tetris but also Turing Complete game on Steam (and hopefully back on GOG at some point). The author came back to it and started posting updates a few months ago after almost 2 year silence. He rebuilt the engine with a huge performance boost and is now adding more and more features.

Not affiliated with him in any way, just think the game is great and his dedication to it deserves respect.

I would replace "perceived" with "significant" but yeah, pretty much.

I absolutely love this and will try as many as possible very soon. I think "intelligent search" (asking LLM questions to search on the Web by communicating, preferably by voice) is one of the few solid use cases for LLM. I hate the idea of having this happen in the cloud with someone having my data, so doing this locally with my local LLM would be ideal.

Be careful with venturing into the world of Chinese watches, it's addictive. They're like between $50 and $200, depending on the brand (they have more and less expensive brands now, they've been at it for years and years), with very reasonable quality, often using Japanese movements (eg Seiko), and resembling famous designs ("homages"). To the point that it's almost impossible to tell if you're wearing $25,000 Rolex or $40 "Olevs", unless you look at it from arm's length. I have like 8 now, all looking and working great, and keep checking AE sales for new ones. Someone please stop me...

Just an FYI this type of watch design is usually referred to as "field watch". It originated in watches that were designed and made specifically for soldiers during WW2 in UK and US. Hamilton is known for making modern versions of these, with the appropriate price tag (slightly under $1,000). Many other companies have these, Timex being the most budget-friendly, but any self-respecting brand has field watch designs (Seiko, Citizen, Casio, Rolex, Orient, etc etc). You can go quartz or mechanical, your pick.

As for everyday watch, nothing really beats budget digital watch, like the cheap ones Casio has been making for generations. F91W is literally (not figuratively) 5 to 6 cups of coffee, and it will outlive you. Not to mention that you can pick up a clone on AliExpress under a dollar and it will work just as well.

Edit: spelling

I had no idea Mensa did this, I will give this a try. I'm not sure he's up to all of these, but we'll try and see.

If I just let him do what he wants he just plays on iPads or computers in the library (iPads have bunch of games installed, computers do not have games but you can obviously play Web-based stuff etc). He doesn't care much about books unfortunately. It's my job as a parent to make sure he does read something (I'm trying to find something he likes and something that's more of a long form as opposed to a comic). I do realize that the more I pressure him the less he likes it but I'm doing my best to find balance.

As for choice of books, both Dan Pilkey and Dan Gutman are considered controversial authors and a lot of parents feel uneasy about their kids reading their books. Check parents' reviews on goodreads or any other site, you'll find plenty of negative reviews, it's not just me.

This might work if your kid is a self-starter and really driven to improve himself/herself. Otherwise I highly recommend an extracurricular math program; there are many different ones depending on which area you are in. I know of Kumon and Mathnasium, there's probably bunch of other ones too.

They maintain their own curriculum, often somewhat in sync with school program, but ahead of it. They also help kids participate in various math competitions, including Math Kangaroo, AMC 8/10, etc.

Just make sure to carefully evaluate the program in advance, talk to the teachers and the parents. They are typically NOT cheap, but if you want your kids to get good at "maths" (R) it'll be worth it.

My 8yo partially dislikes Geronimo Stilton books because they're "too old" (they started in 2000s and are now mostly done publishing the new ones). The books you mentioned were from mid-20th century :)

I disagree with "much slower" but I do agree that it's different. It's not about having tired eyes (what do you use to watch videos?), it's about shortening attention span (you get bored and want to switch to something else). Long attention span is good, short attention span is bad. This is why reading books (long form) is better than reading Twitter or Instagram (short form). And this is why getting kids to continue to read is important.

(I'm going to assume you meant "interesting to a boy as opposed to a girl". If I'm incorrect my apologies).

I only have boys so do not have personal experience but I read/heard that girls do and will continue to read more than boys at any age, and the gap is getting worse starting around that time (7-8-9). I do think that some books are directed at girls, but I do see a lot of books directed at boys too (though not recently, Hardy Boys was a loooong time ago). It's just boys are less interested regardless. Not really sure what to do about that honestly...

Just as I said, Galaxy Zack series (he must have been 7 at the time though), Time Jumpers (fairly recently, there's only 4 of them and I don't know if the author will write more), Desmond Cole (about ghosts). But that's pretty much all for the last 1+ years... I'm trying some of the "Scooby-Doo" books, not comics but regular chapter books, and he seems to read them at least. I'm going to try more "grown up" books (just picked up Class Dismissed, it's a winner of some prize or whatever), we'll see how it goes.

But it's honestly really frustrating. I'm older (grew up in the 80s) and we read MUCH more, and I think it's important.

Do you know of any resources/discussions I can look up/participate in?

Don't know why this is on HN but anyways.

My youngest will be 9 soon. Finding books for him is pain. I started trying more in the last few weeks, grabbing more or less random things from my local library (beginning chapter books, chapter books). Most of them are series, he liked a few (Galaxy Zack, Time Jumpers, Desmond Cole books), did not like others (Magic Tree House, something called Byte, Code Breakers, and really anything else I gave him). He mostly outgrew Geronimo Stilton books.

They do have book fairs at school and we always go, but we rarely buy anything as it's mostly gifts. We're trying to get book from libraries as opposed to buy them.

They do have an awesome library at school and he spends a few hours per week there and I see that he's taking some books from there, but it's mostly Captain Underpants, Stick Dog, and other comics.

I absolutely DESPISE Dan Pilkey's books (Captain Underpants and Stick Dog) as well as My Weird School (and other Dan Gutman's products), they really dumb things down and basically lead kids away from "regular" (ie long-form) books. I my opinion they can lead to behavior issues in kids, however it's possible that kids simply start reading them during that period when hormones start kicking in.

I have a bunch of books from DK Publishing (coffee table encyclopedias) and leave them an frequented areas of the house, and notice that kids check them up every once in a while, at least that's something. They are designed for people with decreased attention span, if you want to learn about a subject, you read a page or two and you're good.

My older kids stopped reading a lot around that time (~10yo), mostly after reading My Weird School and Captain Underpants and similar crap.

Older kids did go through the entire Lemony Snicket series though (way before NetFlix series came up) so that's something.

My 8yo has an iPad from school (we were forced to get one from school when he did kindergarten remote) but his time is very strictly controlled, and it's only for studying (no games). He does have access to an old XBox but only on weekends and for a limited time. He will not have a smart phone for a long time, that's where we lost our older kids (around 13).

So yeah, it's a major problem...

I guess I'm in the minority but all these "music for programming" mixes make me apathetic and sleepy. Which is great for relaxation, but not so great for working. I need something with the beat, even if it's chill. Dark techno FTW :)

...until one day it hallucinates or has existential crisis and does something funny with "dd" or "fdisk/sfdisk"... :)

> Everything is soldered in these days.

[...insert sound of old timers laughing at newbies who declared T480/T490 overhyped for no reason because "no one care about upgradability anymore"...]

:)

Great to know!

The game is very well made, and as far as I know they delivered everything they promised to their backers (it was on Kickstarter). I bought the game (on PC AND on XBox) and left positive review on Steam. Hopefully they're working on something else that's just as awesome!

Adding my vote for Overload. I'm not sure if it is the same team that built Descent(s) but some of them were involved in level design of the originals. I believe music composers were the same.

I really enjoyed the story too, that was probably the first game I played through to the end, just to find out how the story ends.

I believe the team has long disbanded which is a shame, it is a very _decent_ product (ha!)

It is state dependent, yes, but in all the states I looked at 16 you get restricted driver's license. You can drive without an adult but you cannot have more than one passenger, cannot drive at night, cannot use your phone, etc etc. In many states this still requires road test.

The "adult" driver's license can be acquired at 18.

Most of what they need to know includes knowing road signs and road markings, right of way, going through intersections, following traffic lights, speed limits, keeping safe distance, and even recognizing aggressive and impaired drivers to stay away from. None of that they will learn on the race track.

You can definitely push the car to the limit and see what happens when you go over in a _somewhat_ controlled environment (laws of physics still apply at the race track and you can still crash). Or you can teach them that a good driver is not the one who drives fast but the one who arrives alive.

The actual drivers license (the one you can get at 18yo) does require road test in most states. The learner's permit that one can get at 14yo does not require road test, but when you apply for full driver's license at 18yo you will have to take it.

Been taking certifications exams (Microsoft, then AWS) since early 2000s. Certification centers (eg Prometric) have cameras everywhere, and personnel watches you while you're taking the test, they make you put all your belongings into a locker, including watches. Workstations are locked down to the point that they can only run proprietary testing software.

I honestly prefer it to doing it remotely at home, where you have to show them your entire room (in the beginning and whenever they ask), install their software that wants full control to everything, and it still doesn't work half the time. One time I tried it told me bandwidth is insufficient - well, normally it's sufficient to have 2 or 3 Rokus stream in HD.

I don't know why you need an article to explain that. Sh@tton of people in IT were let go in the last 1.5-2 years, so every job posting gets a huge number of responses, including from people who are not a good match and in some cases will not even qualify but they apply anyway because they're desperate. So it became incredibly difficult to find qualified people among those hundreds and hundreds of applicants.

How is this not more wasteful than running a native app? You have to run a Web server IN ADDITION to the app. And your client-side is rendered in the browser which, again, is IN ADDITION to the app. Where the native app is just... the app.

Sure, many people seem to be running their Web apps on the local Web servers because Web development is all they know, I'm just pointing out how it's less efficient that native apps.

So Qt on C++ _is_ an option for desktop apps then :)

In the same boat. I did use GnuCash for business as well, in my opinion that's its primary use case. I just found Eqnomize and will give it a spin, however it's not open source (?). Other than that... Seriously considering dusting off my old tools and starting something myself :)

I just find the idea of building a local application using Web tools very... counterintuitive. Just such a waste of resources. Isn't Electron one of the heavier frameworks? Think of all the resources used on your local machine just for one application and one user.

If you plan on sharing this data with other users, then sure, it makes perfect sense, you can't share stuff from desktop app (without standing up API or smth). But if it's some personal stuff, like finances, personal notes, etc etc why move it out to the open?

I tried Mint awhile ago and it offered seamless integration with most of the financial institutions I deal with. Like I can get all my CC transactions data, checking accounts, savings accounts, 401K and (almost) everything else. Wonderful. I just need to provide all credentials to Mint so that it can authenticate with these institutions.

My cell phone provider has been hacked 3 times in the last 5 years, with at least one time stuff like SSN numbers and physical addresses got taken. If anything remotely similar to that happens at the SaaS that has my credentials, that's not just my credit card and bad loans, that's my life savings that can disappear. That's just... a non-starter for me.

But I'm old and I guess younger folks don't care that much about life savings. To each their own :)

If it's installed on a local Web server it's designed to be able to serve multiple users. If there's only one user how is it not a waste of resources?

HTML and CSS are most definitely NOT better for the UI comparing to the native desktop apps. HTML was designed for cross-reference documents and people spent decades enriching it with CSS/JS/whatever to get some resemblance of acceptable UI. Not even mentioning all the resources required to run all the frameworks that the modern Web UI is running on.

If you want to be able to check your finances on the phone you have to put it on a 3rd party server along with your data. Might as well go with SaaS like Mint. I don't.

You do lose some cross-platform capabilities when you do desktop apps, that is true, but there are some toolsets available (eg Qt).

So I guess it comes down to what people are used to work with, which is Web-first.