beanlog

It sounds useful to me because you can use tone information to help with the translation, which text-to-text translation can't do. But I'm not sure if that's how this model actually works.

I see, so the answer is that the effect doesn't exist but it's easy to think it does by not controlling for a variable very well.

Yes, the only videos demonstrations involve throwing the water into the air, but nothing in this article or the Wikipedia page about the effect suggest that throwing the water is necessary for the effect to occur. I don't even know where these people got the idea to do the experiment that way. Their result is way less interesting because it can be explained by surface area.

Why am I unable to find a single good video on the internet demonstrating the mpemba effect occuring? If people were really heating their water before freezing it in Aristotle's time, then this shouldn't require any precise technology to reproduce. The article addresses the fact that this seems very easy to test, but then doesn't explain why no one's reproduced it on camera.

What an interesting trick. A starting point to intuit a resolution: yes you have a 50% chance of doubling and a 50% of halving. But the doubling only happens if you have x dollars, and the halving only happens if you have 2x. So you can see you either gain x or lose x, so your expected return is 0.

When the amount you multiply your money by depends on the amount of money you currently have, you have to factor in your initial money to each case to compute expected return.

The autocorrect method also uses a dictionary, and then some.

The trick is to encode the numbers in binary, not plaintext. But still you'd probably want to use a Huffman coding rather than plain indexes so that the common words are shorter.

Every time there's a post giving advice on making money or entrepeurship, the majority HN response is "but success is mostly luck" + "you need not want this kind of success". But when there's a post on, say, how to win at poker, people don't feel this need to bring up these points, even though they still apply at least as much. Somehow we're unable to accept the concept of picking a game and playing it when the game is getting rich or making an impact. I suppose it's because this game is so culture dominating that it affects those who don't play it too, as it makes everyone feel like they're supposed to be playing it, and resisting requires extra effort.

I guess this is fine and inevitable. But it makes me wonder where to go to find focused quality discourse about entrepreneurship / getting rich if not HN.

Haha, even less effective than I expected but enjoyed the read nonetheless.

I think if you have the luxury of assuming every token is a dictionary word, you can do much better by simply encoding each word as its index in the dictionary. Using the pidgeonhole principle, you can probably prove that this is at least as good as the autocorrect approach no matter how sophisticated the autocorrect is.

It'd be more accurate and illuminating to say that a px is an angle.

The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm’s length. For a nominal arm’s length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm’s length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch). - https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#absolute-lengths

This explains why 1px is small on phones and large on televisions; the physical size varies by expected reader distance. The angle tries to stay constant, though in practice it gets rounded to the nearest multiple of the physical pixel size.

I think the main problem is that they're too attention grabbing. Especially in a UI in HN where everything else is plain text, an emoji would have so much visual weight your eyes would have trouble focusing on anything else on the page. Forbidding such visual grenades helps keep the focus on the content.

This is pretty eye opening to me, I would have never thought anyone found C major more difficult to play in than other keys. To me, difficulty is directly proportional to the amount of stuff in the key signature, but that may be because I've never had proper education (~5 years of lessons as a child from a very casual teacher).

This is really interesting, thank you for sharing! I wonder if it would have been more successful if it had just two rows instead. The duplicate rows add more power, but at the cost of adding ambiguity when sightreading, as you have to impromptu figure out what fingering you want to use. And it also makes it more expensive and intimidating looking. I feel like two rows would provide the core benefits while being more accessible. But I could be totally off, as I've never touched this thing.

Ever since I learned that the frequency ratio between adjacent keys on a piano is always a constant twelfth root of 2 regardless of whether you're going black-white or white-white, I've been sort of frustrated with the way pianos are designed. Transposing a song to a different key could have been effortless if keys were structured differently, such as with uniformly alternating white and black keys, rather than the 2 black 3 black groups we have now. By optimizing pianos for C major / A minor, we've made everything else so much more difficult. And no other instrument does this afaik. String instruments don't obscure the constant ratios at all, so it's easier to transpose songs on them.

I suspect someone may reply to this with "it'd be harder to keep track of what notes you're on if keys were uniform like that", but I don't think we actually rely on feeling the keys to know where we are. Would be willing to be proven wrong on that. But I suspect simply coloring/shading each fifth and octave differently should do the job, maybe also texturing them differently for the blind.