Hacker News Reader

PandaRideron Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview

Not a guitarist (take my comments with a pinch of salt).

Your teachers are both right: Either advices (1) or (2) works as long as the practice is hard.

That said, while (2) may sound easier because the approach pursues "comfort in the mind" over perfection... this is still hard because because by definition: you still need to get from uncomfortable to comfortable!

A similar example in bodybuilding: muscle confusion [1]. To build better squats, one requires both compound(2) and isolation (1) exercises

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/well/move/muscle-confusio...

(Huge Caveat: this only applies to physical deliberate practice!)

PandaRideron Rod McKuen Was the Bestselling Poet in American History. What Happened? (2022)

I have mixed feelings. I loathe instapoetry as much as any modern poetry reader... However, I also hate that every modern poetry demands readers to read "good" poetry first to understand why instapoetry is bad (spoiler: instapoetry lacks depth).

PandaRideron American Singapore(s): Competent city governance hiding in plain sight

What's the alternative of long-term bond investments? Republican-style tax cuts? If I understand the article correctly, Carmel's Republican mayor Jim Brainard broke off from his party's motto.

> The prevailing model of austerity, low taxes, and limited government in many Republican-led states and cities has often failed to improve the quality of life. Meanwhile, Democratic-led cities struggle to effectively address issues like homelessness, housing affordability, and public safety despite greater willingness to invest, just not in actual services and infrastructure.

PandaRideron How actors remember their lines

As a long-time Anki user (and memory enthusiast), I would like to offer some caveats for those transferring actors' memorization techniques to study techniques (programming languages, chemistry, math etc...)

> This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?”

1. Do embed emotions. For example: Go's CamelCase for exporting variables implies capital letters want to be loud.

2. Do invoke experience. Don't merely read and write code, teach it and activate multiple sensory inputs and multiple contexts!

> Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known

3. Do chunk it. Instead of creating new standalone memories, chunk it with other programming languages' syntax.

In summary, while engaging with the material is important, it is not sufficient for passive tasks (how many times have you read a book and forgotten the main points?).

PandaRideron Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich

> There are doubts that industrialization can create the game-changing benefits it did in the past. Factories today tend to rely more on automated technology and less on cheapworkers who have little training.

> Multinationals like Goldman Sachs, Victoria’s Secret and the Economist magazine have flocked to the city and set up hundreds of operational hubs — known as global capability centers — to handle accounting, design products, develop cybersecurity systems and artificial intelligence, and more.

PandaRideron Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich

https://archive.is/JdB26

PandaRideron Why "Freakonomics" failed to transform economics

What I wanted (from Freakonomics) was to peer through "the hidden side of everything"... What I needed was the serenity to accept that causality is too damn hard.

I appreciated the attempts by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to communicate with layman non-economists like me. I think The Economist article was, as always, too harsh and nitpicky. I think Freakonomics holds a special place in the "intellectual" and "rationalists" community. I cannot verify the flaws in techniques and conclusion as stated in this article but I would still recommend reading Freakonomics first over the dry economics textbooks or MIT OCW courseware.

PandaRideron What I wish someone had told me

> No.6 Communicate clearly and concisely

I have mixed feelings about this quote because I do not like when life writers write high-level statements such as this.

Personally, I prefer very very specific suggestions on preventing very very specific problems. For example: How to prevent broken-telephone problem when communicating technical topics to an un-initiated audience?

1. Recognize ambiguous pronouns [1]

2. Distinguish active voice from passive voice

3. Create helpful lists.

Maybe this is a one-off incident of lack of proof-reading? I noticed this SamAltman article didn't have the usual proof reading rigor

[1]: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

PandaRideron How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

But Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it.

In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230721011041/https://www.nytim...

Article is worth a read for all white-collar jobs. I personally disagree that "low-level programming" jobs are endangered because the jobs may get smaller but the project has become larger... unlike writers' jobs whose projects are limited to 10 episodes per season

PandaRideron Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?

Highly recommend the 2020 film by Pixar: Soul

PandaRideron Amazon hid its safety crisis

Tim Bray predicted it! [0]

> Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809291

PandaRideron Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?

Language.

I've learnt several physical stuffs (e.g. bodybuilding, music), several emotional stuffs (e.g. meditating, music) and other intellectual skills (e.g. game theory, the humanities and programming of course...) and if I had to choose one to recommend to the HN community, it's language.

Unfortunately, it's high reward [0] also comes with high effort. Even with the best resources, it will take time and patience. But you can start at anytime of your life and at anywhere.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

PandaRideron The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

> Many hardworking Singaporeans today resoundingly choose a government that promises economic stability even as censorship laws become more and more stringent and inequality is rife.

As a Singaporean, this is the point that sticks out as proof that the author has lost touch with local sentiment. In the recent election, young Singaporean citizens felt " especially agitated by Raeesah Khan being hit with a sledgehammer." and thus many voted against the PAP. [0]

Yet, on the author's point of paradox of cyberpunk... there is a kernel of truth. While most Singaporeans wouldn't scrape a temple for a new high tech mall like Jewel, (IMO) most Singaporeans would be okay if it was for a new train station so that we (ironically) can visit Jewel more conveniently.

[0]: https://mothership.sg/2020/07/inderjit-singh-pap-ge2020-crit...

PandaRideron IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

I attended an interview of a major non-tech CEO and he attributed the cultural attitude of Jugaad [0] as the reason why so many CEOs are of Indian descent.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

PandaRideron Ask HN: Are books worth it?

Most of the comments offer broad strokes of advice. I'll offer some here with examples but a huge caveat is that I don't usually read full books so take my advice with a pinch of salt. :/

Type I books: Recipes refer to books that teach you "how". They are often must-reads in the topic. Example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34689843-disciplined-ent... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18652777-disciplined-ent...

Type II books: These are controversial, non-mainstream books that challenge your thinking. Example: failory.com articles

Type III books: Wisdom refer to books that teach you "why". They are generalisations that offer a thousand feet view but often suffer from survivorship bias if one doesn't read it critically. Example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one

PandaRideron “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias.

I've tried searching but cannot find a good empirical study of privilege and entrepreneurship correlation. However, I've found an essay paper [0] that exactly predicted this twitter drama; that entrepreneurs simultaneously present and erase this conversation about class and entrepreneurship.

The paper also concluded:

> Whereas gender, together with race, have long been foregrounded in studies of entrepreneurial identity and difference, class may be a more powerful organizing discourse, though certainly one supported by discourses of gender and race.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/135050841246489...

PandaRideron Finland’s plan to train its population in artificial intelligence

If the objective is for applied research (research for the benefit of the economy), I disagree. My main argument is that we need domain experts outside of academia.

Moreover, theoretical research in AI is very open and countries with limited resources are better off stand on the shoulders of giants than try and be number 1 themselves. Finland might never beat Russia/China/US AI arms race but they just need to defend themselves should any of these 3 countries monopolize or weaponize on AI.