jorpal's comments

jorpal | 2 years ago | on: Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021)

Authenticity is important. Praising effort because you read it improves outcomes, even if you internally don’t think it’s praiseworthy, would be inauthentic and eventually degrade your relationship in my opinion. However I’ve been amazed by my daughter for multiple reasons simultaneously. I’ve seen her solve a problem and thought to myself “wow she is so clever and persistent”, then mainly focus on one of those aspects when discussing it later.

jorpal | 2 years ago | on: Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language

Yes the go version takes way longer materialize our configs compared at my work compared to sJsonnet (from Databricks). The first time you switch it adds (or removes? I forget) a bunch of newlines at the end of files which is annoying to handle in git but otherwise it’s faster and the same.

jorpal | 3 years ago | on: Flight attendants want to ban lap-babies

No one wants to pay full airfare for an infant:

> Hoffman recognizes the drawbacks of requiring parents to purchase airplane tickets for their youngsters. The main concern is that families will not be able to afford the airfare and will resort to driving, a more perilous mode of transportation.

>“If they travel by car instead, they will actually be putting themselves at a significantly greater risk, because car crashes are so much more common than airplane incidents, whether it’s a crash or turbulence,”

jorpal | 3 years ago | on: The day I discovered that Apple Maps is Kind of Good now

And some people trust it without a second thought. This past New Years there was a huge snow storm in the Tahoe area, many roads were closed, and clueless Bay Area people were following google maps directions around the closures into unmaintained mountain roads in a huge blizzard.

jorpal | 3 years ago | on: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

My wife was using fetus as her first guess throughout most of her pregnancy, in honor of the fetus. Baby is 1 month old now, and the first guess preference has changed. Too bad this word didn’t come earlier, she would have got it first guess!

jorpal | 4 years ago | on: Woman appears cured of HIV after umbilical-cord blood transplant

Thanks for the tip! At our hospital the standard of care is delayed cord clamping, although it sounds like they wait only a few minutes, not 15+ minutes. It used to be done in ~<1 minute, I guess, so a few minutes is called delayed now. Do you have a good reference recommending to wait “long as possible”?

jorpal | 4 years ago | on: Woman appears cured of HIV after umbilical-cord blood transplant

I get that it is very tempting. We all want to do anything that could help our kids. However, there are also an endless number of things people are selling to new parents that prey on that reflex. I truly don’t know the right thing to do here, but the position I mentioned earlier basically follows the recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/140/5/e20172...

This was from 2017 and is basically the same as a reference I found from 2007. Has there been any actual changes in the state of the art since it was published?

jorpal | 4 years ago | on: Woman appears cured of HIV after umbilical-cord blood transplant

I know some people keep the cord blood in a private bank. In my opinion it only makes sense if you have family history of or current relative with a disease that could be treated with it.

Since the hospital we are using (Stanford LPCH) has a research program that will come collect it with no extra steps on our side, it seemed like a good choice.

jorpal | 4 years ago | on: ‘Hard’ skills from PhDs remain relevant beyond academia

The problem is we train way more PhDs than there are tenure track positions available. Most PhDs won’t be lucky enough to get one of those academic positions, and a postdoc is just delaying the inevitable transition to an industrial job. Postdocs are for all-star students with a good academic pedigree and publishing track record who have a good shot at tenure. People who were less then that (such as myself) are often better served starting their career outside academia.

From a pragmatic perspective that is how the calculus worked for me. It’s probably where the stigma arises from as well. Although I wish it weren’t like that, I never thought the purpose of a college/university education should be so limited to ‘job training’ (that’s what trade schools are for). That’s the American perspective, anyways.

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