11001

A somewhat related question: I'm about to start a job at a company with "open office" structure, after having my own office for the last 4 years. Anything I should be prepared for?

EDIT: Any headphones suggestions?

"The Devil's Cup" is great! He also has "In the Devil's garden", which is quite good as well. It presents the history of food in terms of the seven deadly sins.

Just finished Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A time of gifts" and I can't recommend it enough! One of the best English books that I have read. You will particularly like it if you're interested in European history (political, as well as art history), if you like traveling, if you're into foreign languages and if you don't mind using a dictionary once in a while. I'm really excited to start its sequel "Between the woods and the water".

Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

What was the rationale for excluding oils, nuts and avocados from the diet?

There is so much more to Vermeer's art than just clever use of tools. I like this article much better (it got completely ignored on HN):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254447

To anyone who is actually interested in the subject, I highly recommend this excellent free class: https://www.coursera.org/course/plantknows

> I figured someone who speaks X and wants to begin learning English would use an X-English / English-X dictionary.

At first. You should switch to X-X dictionary as soon as you can, far before it becomes natural and easy to use X-X dictionary. X-English/English-X dictionaries encourage people to continue "thinking" in their language, while successfully learning a new language would absolutely require embracing new ways of forming phrases, building sentences, etc.

Source: English is my 3rd language, I'm on my 5th now.

> I find it ironic to think that in Australia the government is singing praises for copper network lines [...] yet war torn anarchic Somalia is pushing in the other direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

I'm so glad they put this guy in charge of the content!

>My favorite, by the way, of all the things I posted recently that didn't get any attention, is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6713259.

Off topic. So, what's the opinion on RD Laing currently in the scientific community? I remember reading "A divided self" and wondering the whole time, is the whole world mad? Or is the author mad? Or is it both?

Any particular "math" you're interested in?

If you just want to get your foot in with pure math I'd recommend studying basic abstract algebra and analysis at the same time. For abstract algebra look into Hungerford (Intro, not his grad text), for analysis, maybe Rudin, or Kolmogorov and Smirnov.

Are you saying that you, or someone you know has developed celiac disease after eating exclusively chemicals-free wheat their whole life?

Textbooks and exercises. Avoid shortcuts such as online tutorials or anything with "for hackers" in the title.

@facebook.com was supposed to make people feel that all their electronic communication needs can be met by facebook. I'm guessing, it turned out people didn't mind that much logging into both their gmails/hotmails and facebook.

Of course not. In fact the police brutality towards a few peaceful student protesters was what triggered the mass protests in Kiev and all over Ukraine, it wasn't about any particular agreement as many people wrongly believe. I'm just talking about the Russia vs the West politics in Ukraine.

Here is an ELI5 version of what's going on in Ukraine:

Ukraine doesn't have any money, it needs to borrow it. It can ask the west, but the west gives back a list of conditions to be satisfied (human rights, economical, etc) that are incredibly hard for the governmnet to achieve given deeply rooted corruption on all levels.

There is another source for the money: Russia (which, despite some westerners' beliefs, is a very rich country). In return Russia's demands are to make sure that the deeply rooted corruption on all levels works in Russia's favour. That is much easier to achieve.

Hence the recent $15 billion loan from Putin, that officially appears to be unconditional.

Another point I'd like to make is that many people in the east (I come from one of the big industrial cities in the south-east), don't just dislike Europe and like Russia. It's that their jobs literally depend on Russia, most of the industrial exports go straight to Russia, that's why people there are terrified of any sanctions.

Exactly. Sometimes HN'ers scare me...

Maybe your website will help people see the plethora of inconsistent findings, so they can start questioning the state of science and think of "better ways" for themselves ;)

Thanks for the link!

You didn't understand me. It's not about being lazy or not getting enough exercise. It's about being more connected to your work. Maybe it's not the case for you, or even most people, but I am much more connected to what I'm doing if there is a physical component to it (writing down a lecture, even if I'm never going to read it, reading a book on paper that I'm touching, etc.)

I really don't want to diss your work, I respect your intentions to bring scientific discoveries to the masses, but...

This is part of a huge problem in science, the "one sentence summaries", or simple interpretations. It might be tempting to think that knowing a one sentence summary is better than not hearing about the research at all, but it's not so obvious to me.

Most (social science, nutrition, environmental science, economics, psychology etc.) research is deeply flawed. That includes study design, statistical analysis and interpretations. Politicians love to through money at scientists that look for simple straightforward causal relationships between such incredibly complex systems as human behaviour, brain chemistry, nutrition, genetics, etc. And that's why there is so little reproducible research. You won't get a right or wrong answer about whether, say, cannabis is harmful without taking into account, a person's genetics, daily stress, the use of coffee, alcohol and other substances, their diet, their level of physical activity, social life, childhood trauma etc. But that would be too hard to interpret. Instead we get headlines like "Teenagers smoking pot are (arbitrary number) more likely to develop schizophrenia" and "Cannabis has been shown to kill cancer cells", which leads absolutely nowhere, because they just delude people to thinking the scientists are answering the original question ("is cannabis harmful?"), which isn't well defined in the first place.

The necessary part of improving the current state of social "sciences" is acknowledging that simple rules rarely govern complex systems, and therefore the public should be incredibly skeptical to any headlines that report that "the scientists proved" some straightforward "law".

Source: I do data analysis for multiple research groups that include psychology research (hormones, behaviour, depression), nursing research (breastfeeding, childbirth complication) and psycho-oncology research (quality of life of cancer patients and their caregivers).

I kind of wish for something opposite, not a tool to minimize my physical movements, but to actually make me move more. I'm not talking about a computer on a treadmill. But, for example, if, say I'm moving something from one virtual place to another (copying files, etc), I would like to be moving something physically as well, I feel like that would get me more connected to what I am doing. The same reason it is much more pleasant and less distracting(to me anyway) to read a physical book that I'm holding, rather than something on the screen.

I have no concrete suggestions though.

It is the largest country that is entirely in Europe

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_...

What impression did they give you during the interviews? In retrospect, do you think that was their whole goal, to get acquihired by Google?

You're right, and not many people in the opposition are celebrating "the victory" yet. Most still call for the immediate re-election, and discarding all the recent changes to the constitution.

For the record, the mass protests weren't triggered by any particular agreement, they started after the police beat the shit out of (not just dispersed) a group of students during a completely peaceful demonstration. They grew bigger after Yanukovich signed anti-protest laws.

The anti-protest laws have been repealed as well http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/ukrainian-parliament-repeals-ant...

This was Russia's move.

I'd suggest going back to the original youtube[1] and course materials[2]. Coursera version is nothing but a hand-wavy watered down "feel good" version of the original class. I also really like the Caltech's take "Learning from data"[3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E

[2] http://cs229.stanford.edu/

[3] http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html

I'm surprised there aren't many books like that already in English. It was a Russian children's book that spiked my interest in programming when I was a kid. I didn't even have a computer, and neither did my school at that point. I don't remember the details too well, but it was basically about some boy in some imaginary land learning about algorithms, computer viruses, etc. in a really fun way. There were tons of very clear analogies, like algorithm and a cooking recipe.