So you've followed your tutorial and you've built your little project. And it works! That's great. Congratulations.
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But... now let's think for a moment about what you're doing there. Not the technical bits, but what the user sees.
You have decided that the average male lives to 71-72 and female to around 74. You have then decided that this average should be taken as a hard, fixed limit. And that people will die at that age no matter what.
These two assumptions are somewhat tricky. I mean, the first one is fairly random without a context. For, say, India, this is about right, but for other countries of the world -or as an average for the whole world- it can be quite different. And you don't mention any particular country.
But anyway, it's the second assumption that is more problematic. Because the number is just an average and using it as a hard limit is clearly wrong. First of all because death is not linear. Take a look at this sample table for the US [0]. Life expectancy increases with age. That means that initial life expectancy can be 80 years, but if you make it to 60, your total life expectancy goes up to 84. And if you make it to those 80 your life expectancy still gives you -on average- another 9.5 years to live.
Why is this relevant? Well, because such a calculator would assume the user, the person that goes there to see how much time they have left with their parents... well, still has their parents alive. It would be stupid otherwise if they know their parents are already dead. So this is 2026. The user states that their dad was born in, say, 1956. That's 70 years. Is the 71.5 average life expectancy right? Not at all. Even as an average, even as a hard limit, it is wrong. For a person at 70, that life expectancy would be something like 80+ and the remaining time should be calculated according to that. Sure, this means you need to write code that is a bit more complicated than what you've done here. Because you don't just have one average life expectancy, you need a whole table or function to calculate it. But, hey, this is learning! It's a coding exercise. So it is an opportunity to learn more and go beyond the simple tutorial into an exercise that is just a little bit more advanced.
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But then again, let's ignore even this. Let's go back and keep the simple exercise. Let's assume just one fixed life expectancy. Then, as I mentioned above, we have a problem that's worse, more... stupid. Because as I said such a calculator has to assume the parents are still alive. Otherwise is simply makes no sense. And yet, you're giving the user the option to choose birth years as far back as 1940, while directly assuming that anyone born before 1952 for men or 1955 for women is already dead.
When you offer that option, you're saying it is a valid option. But when the user chooses it, you're saying they are stupid for doing so.
What you're doing is like this conversation:
- Hi, I visit my dad every Friday afternoon.
- That's nice. But from this other perspective that may not be a lot of time. How old is he?
- Oh, my dad is 78.
- Bad news: your dad's already dead.
- What? No, he's fine, I saw him just yesterday.
- Your dad's been dead for years.
- You're an asshole.
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So... again, congratulations on your coding exercise. You did it. The coding is solved [perhaps]. Well done.
But take this as an additional learning point: The problems you solve will sometimes involve writing code, but they will always require you to think about the details and nuances of the problem itself. It's all about the decisions and assumptions you make.
To elaborate: I have never been requested to share my prompts/skills, like: strongly demanded to do this. It has been vague suggestions from managers to all employees sometimes to share them but while many happily started doing this, I simply ignored it like I never heard it. Sometimes on dailies I hear PM cheer my AI skills and asks how I do this, but I only smile and joke "magic", at most tell them my prompts are always elaborative.
I am more surprised why people are sharing this without thinking.
I am now independent contractor and parts are created on company A time, other parts on company B time and different parts at my own time. And so on, and so on. And you can't tell which one is which. For the new company I start as contractor I come with my AI framework, and I am adjusting it on daily basis. What then?
I am now hired by many companies because they know giving me task means it will be done in a day, not a week, and they know it is because I know "how to AI". (I am not perfect, but I work with other guys and I am surprised how inefficient they are when it comes to AI, but this is a different story)
You came here searching for an answer. The problem is you wanted one specific answer, one that validates your own stance. So now if someone gives you an answer that doesn't sit well with you, you will try to convince them that you're right anyway for whatever reason you want.
fair point, but it is because the discussion drifted to legal while I wanted to discuss more "how do you feel about sharing your AI moat"
In terms of legal, f* no, I am not going to consider my tool adjustments as part of companies properties :)
We can discuss but I will stand my ground: my AI skills - even written on a disc - belongs to me. Same, if I go to car paint garage to have my paint fixed I am not expecting the painter will reveal his method to get the perfect color or give me his notes where he self-described "how to paint".
Before "AI era" we all had our own system scripts, manually crafted in bash/python, to make repeating task automated. And then it was never a question to share it: the scripts are the way how I configure/tune my computer and how I get advantage over other developers. The .cloude/.cursor directory is the same.
Sure but those are mostly old to very old (7y+). I counted only 7 threads in the past 3 years with at least 10 comments, and if you filter by past year there's no thread with more than one comment.
Basically zero traction here recently, while I would have intuitively thought the vision would spread with recent trends: AI spread, privacy concerns, OS enshittification, disinformation wars, device attestation/control, GDPR...
I walk to the park during slow hours, sit on a bench, wait for a bunch of sparrows to come, and then I give them some sunflower seeds. Sometimes -but not often- a magpie will approach too. You have to be quiet for birds to come near and fairly calm for them to approach you at all.
Others can only be spotted from a distance. Wagtails are quite timid but can be seen running around sometimes, and the blackbirds can be heard a lot even if you don't see them. I've also spotted a couple of woodpeckers. And once the park fell suddenly still and I looked up and there was a kite passing by (they have been spotted nesting in a much larger park a couple of miles away).
If the park is busy, then I'll watch the dogs, people going by. I ponder about the futility of life. Just sit there silently, doing nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611866 ("Show HN: Agentmatic, AI marketing platform that generates full campaigns for you")
It has not been deleted, as you can see.
On the other hand, I don't see any asking for reviews or feedback. What I see is self-promotion, similarly to your previous post from a couple of months ago, which is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You'd probably need to detail what exactly you have done to clean up, but it sounds like you didn't actually remove the commit?
You can remove a commit with an interactive rebase and then force push the new tree. Or depending on the current state of your tree, you can use other options. In any case, you have answers to this on Stack overflow. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40245767/delete-commit-o...
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But... now let's think for a moment about what you're doing there. Not the technical bits, but what the user sees.
You have decided that the average male lives to 71-72 and female to around 74. You have then decided that this average should be taken as a hard, fixed limit. And that people will die at that age no matter what.
These two assumptions are somewhat tricky. I mean, the first one is fairly random without a context. For, say, India, this is about right, but for other countries of the world -or as an average for the whole world- it can be quite different. And you don't mention any particular country.
But anyway, it's the second assumption that is more problematic. Because the number is just an average and using it as a hard limit is clearly wrong. First of all because death is not linear. Take a look at this sample table for the US [0]. Life expectancy increases with age. That means that initial life expectancy can be 80 years, but if you make it to 60, your total life expectancy goes up to 84. And if you make it to those 80 your life expectancy still gives you -on average- another 9.5 years to live.
Why is this relevant? Well, because such a calculator would assume the user, the person that goes there to see how much time they have left with their parents... well, still has their parents alive. It would be stupid otherwise if they know their parents are already dead. So this is 2026. The user states that their dad was born in, say, 1956. That's 70 years. Is the 71.5 average life expectancy right? Not at all. Even as an average, even as a hard limit, it is wrong. For a person at 70, that life expectancy would be something like 80+ and the remaining time should be calculated according to that. Sure, this means you need to write code that is a bit more complicated than what you've done here. Because you don't just have one average life expectancy, you need a whole table or function to calculate it. But, hey, this is learning! It's a coding exercise. So it is an opportunity to learn more and go beyond the simple tutorial into an exercise that is just a little bit more advanced.
---
But then again, let's ignore even this. Let's go back and keep the simple exercise. Let's assume just one fixed life expectancy. Then, as I mentioned above, we have a problem that's worse, more... stupid. Because as I said such a calculator has to assume the parents are still alive. Otherwise is simply makes no sense. And yet, you're giving the user the option to choose birth years as far back as 1940, while directly assuming that anyone born before 1952 for men or 1955 for women is already dead.
When you offer that option, you're saying it is a valid option. But when the user chooses it, you're saying they are stupid for doing so.
What you're doing is like this conversation:
---So... again, congratulations on your coding exercise. You did it. The coding is solved [perhaps]. Well done.
But take this as an additional learning point: The problems you solve will sometimes involve writing code, but they will always require you to think about the details and nuances of the problem itself. It's all about the decisions and assumptions you make.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
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