hmwhy

Have only been a backer before so take my opinion with a gain of salt.

Thinking ahead is great, but it's often too easy to overestimate how good an idea is and get lost in thinking about all the things that were never going to happen.

It appears that you are not going to spend any more time on validating your idea, so why not just focus on having a nice prototype, see how it goes on Kickstarter, and use that as an opportunity for idea validation? How quickly and/or how well your idea will be funded will likely give you an indication of whether or not you should be thinking about the next step.

Even in the case that it's underfunded, you still get an opportunity to interact with those who pledged, find out what works and what doesn't, and then decide on whether you can make things better or even eventually turn it into a business.

It should be noted that in the case that your idea is overwhelming overfunded, you will likely be forced to scale up and effectively doing many of the things (accounting, manufacturing, shipping, customer service, etc.) required to turn it into an actual business.

As I gathered, manufacturing depends entirely on what your product is and you may have to deal with overseas suppliers for cost reasons (there are horror stories, don't always go for the cheapest). I assume that most people only think about that after they see how successful their campaigns are (it's very frustrating that things keep getting delayed for the backers though, so please try your best not to over-promise). Some people take care of the the rest by themselves (if they have a team), or using third-party services. In any case, I don't think you will miss the signs when that happens.

Good luck!

Edit: removed random fullstop in the middle of a sentence. Typos.

My previous comment was a mental experiment for something that I found super interesting; it just kind of leaked out without much, um, thinking. It was definitely not my intention to suggest that Ricci's choice did not influence what is in the language today, not least because this is all new to me (the wrong choice of "historically" probably made things worse).

In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to explain, particularly the part about characters with no meanings!

Edit: typo!

A lot of the things on the list confound me, too, but I suppose we should use caution and not be too quick to judge. It is possible that schools are really that different in some countries; the author never had the opportunity to go through normal schooling due to illness; family issues; drugs; and, well, the list goes on.

What confounds me more is how the list got onto the front page of Hacker News to begin with (not being flippant). They are basically assertions with no references, there is little to learn from it, and there doesn't appear to be a lot of context/background on the author that hint to why this may get upvoted so much.

It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names.

The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters.

Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated.

I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given.

Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.

For someone who's tried seeking remote work (and kind of failed because most of my colleagues don't work remotely), remote work is all about work-life balance for me, and it signals that my employer intends to be lean and agile (mostly small companies?) and/or values my work-life balance.

If it's done the way it's proposed in the article then I think I'd think twice about working remotely for that company, this part is a particularly huge red flag for me:

> Also, the founders (or management if it’s a bigger company) should signal that this is something good, encourage it.

It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion". Isn't the whole point that remote work is successful for some companies because the people who are involved with it are good at communication, function cohesively, and hyper-focused when it comes to getting stuff done?

Admittedly I have never worked a truly remote role, but the reasons given in the article are all the reasons that I don't want to apply for a particularly remote role.

Edit: typo (remote --> remotely).

Please take what @farleykr and @robsinatra said very seriously and act on them.

A few years ago I suffered from anxiety/depression for about a year during what I thought was the most important time of my career. I was overseas at the time, obsessively working at least 10 hours a day without breaks and usually every day of the week, drinking a bottle of wine or a couple of litres of beer a night sleeping on average 5 hours a night. I absolutely hated myself, I stopped playing and listening to any music, and actively avoiding staying in touch with family and friends.

Then one night, when I was very drunk and literally crying on the streets, I somehow decided to call my sister (whom I have already avoided talking to for months at that point) and she made me stop drinking, sleep, and seek professional help. I've always had a lot of respect for her, and I think hearing it from someone I deeply care about made and the fact that she picked up the phone when I needed someone the most made all the difference.

Anyhow! The point of the anecdote is I can't stress enough how important the things @farleykr and @robsinatra said are. Once you start feeling better you will be in a much better position to act on the advice that everyone else has kindly given about career.

As for feeling incompetent, I think a bit of that is a good quality to have because knowing and admitting what you don't know something is a very powerful skill; just don't sit on it forever (as others have said) because nothing will become better if you wallow in it.

And one last thing about dealing with incoherent thoughts: write them down. I think it's too easy to sit there to theory-craft/fantasise/make excuses in your head all-day long; so try writing them down while taking care to organise them, and be honest to yourself, as best as you can.

A bit of a tangent, I think the following part is gold and really captures the moment:

> ... It comes over you when you’re suddenly faced with a new result that shows you just how strange and unexpected the physical universe can be. At first, all you can do is just stand there and wonder what the hell just happened (and whether you can do it again!) The feeling is an intense version of the amazement you feel at watching a particularly good magic trick, intense because it’s not a trick.

Thank you for pointing that out! I did misinterpret that part of the abstract!

On a perhaps related note, it seem a bit surprising to me because when I first started with neural networks about a year ago, I tried to shortcut hyperparameter search by reusing weights and noticed that independently trained models with the same hyperparameters would produce model with different performance. I naively assumed that such correlation is something I don't want and it was something that everyone knows about so I just moved on.

Edit: typo (pointed --> pointing)

My recent experience has been quite different with using cash in China.

I was aware that most things are now paid with QR codes when I came here a few months ago, so I brought enough cash with me just in case things go wrong (and they did), but not once did I have to ask someone to pay for me in the first two months that they refused to open a bank account for me.

I've taken friends out to popular, touristy places and restaurants when they visited, and have never encountered a taxi driver who doesn't have cash (the part about hailing a taxi at weird times in the morning is, as far as I can tell, true though).

The only real issue was that I felt like people were staring at me like they have spotted a supposedly-extinct animal whenever I paid with cash. :(

I don't think the comment on log-log plots is limited to just log-log plots, and the point is that there are times when the width of the line of best fit, together with the size of data points, misleads the reader to think that it's more linear than it actually is.

Problematic presentation of a similar type is particularly pronounced in, for example, finite-size scaled curves, where the perceived goodness of fit is heavily influenced by the line widths of the curves, the size of the data points, and the resolution of the plot.

These misleading data representations are something that can be found even in recent publications in prestigious journals (I don't think it's always intentional and therefore won't include any references); also, sometimes it's difficult to notice there are issues unless you are very familiar with the methods, or have tried to reproduce the results (and have wasted months or even years of your life by then).

Thank you very much for pointing that out!

I'm not sure why it never occurred to me that mine could be a medical condition, and all this time I have been quietly hating myself for being extremely intolerant of others while the condition gets worse.

> Those that won't or can't, no school can help them.

Isn't that the complete opposite to what teaching is about?

Have you considered that maybe this isn't a problem with the students but a problem with society and the very problem with the education institutions and teachers like you that are just basically feeding on them?

It's far easier (and economically viable in a shortsighted way) to blame students for their shortcomings than to make the effort to help them. I hope you are not thinking that you're doing society a favour by failing them instead of making the effort to figure out what their strengths are and/or if the way your teach, or what your employer preaches, may actually terrible.

Maybe you shouldn't go back to teaching the next time you get "dragged back into" it.

I think you have presented a fallacy:

> If an experiment is run that says the sky is blue, then its invalidation does not mean that the sky is not blue.

If an experiment's hypothesis is that the sky is blue and the sky is indeed blue, then there is nothing wrong and there is nothing to be invalidated.

If an experiment's hypothesis is that the sky is blue because there is a bunch of leprechauns throwing blue Skittles at it, and there are evidence that this not the case; then the experiment is to be invalidated and, in your own words, "[i]t means we no longer have evidence for that conclusion."

If you don't have the evidence to support your hypothesis, then you can't draw any conclusions except for, and at best, that there is no evidence to support your hypothesis. To put it into the context of the running example, this translates to the sky is blue but it's not because leprechauns are throwing blue Skittles at it. You can't say just because my hypothesis about leprechauns is invalidated, it doesn't mean that there are not leprechauns throwing skittles at it—because that's simply just what you believe and wish to be the case; and a good scientist should be impartial to beliefs.

More importantly, the whole point of the article is beyond invalidating the SPE. It's, in my opinion, a great piece about much deeper problems in scientific or, well, "scientific" methods.

> This quote, and everything actually observed during the SPE, is consistent with Milgram's work, which has been replicated a zillion times.

I think you may be cherry-picking quotes here, here is another from much later in the article:

> In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

Economics and policies aside, I’m a bit skeptical about the approach described in that article regarding the use of potassium hydroxide (production, transportation) and it’s subsequent processing (to re-release the captured carbon dioxide, somehow transform it into fuel, and let people release again!?); even just the logistics would most likely be releasing a good amount of CO2 if cost is such a huge factor in this.

It just feels like the carbon dioxide released would be a substantial offset to that captured. Ultimately, it would still be viable if the net outcome is a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide; but I’m not convinced, at least with the approach in question, that humanity’s interest is at the top of the list.

It would be absolutely fantastic and very much appreciated if someone who knows about the actual “accounting” of carbon dioxide in this type of carbon sequestration technology can comment.

Genuine question—how would this bug be produced in the first place?

My (limited) experience makes me think that cleartext passwords are somehow hard coded to be logged, perhaps through error logging or a feature that’s intended for testing during development.

I personally would not code a backend that allows passwords (or any sensitive strings) to be logged in any shape or form in production, so it seems a little weird to me that this mistake is considered a “bug” instead of a very careless mistake. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Thank you very much in advance!

My comment is probably also considered "negative" but I actually come from an academic background and appreciate the value and importance of good research.

In my opinion, the major problem with your post is that your view crystallises the ivory tower mentality instead of really discussing the difference between "researchers" and "tinkerers". In reality, statuses and titles aside, there is only a fine line between a seriously good "tinkerer" and a seriously good "researcher", and the assertions you have made are simply shallow and narrow.

Your attitude towards opposing, but non-hostile opinions is also rather off-putting—you are simply making light of people who wish to add to the discussion and dismissing them instead of addressing them. It doesn't seem to be that of a reasonable person who is willing to consider different views and explore different possibilities, and definitely not one of a good researcher.

I tend to disagree with those distinctions and I'm inclined to think the difference is simply that, to a "researcher", doing things is a job; and to a "tinkerer", doing things is a joy.

## Scholarship

To begin with, there are many "tinkerers" out there who practise good scholarship and at acknowledge prior art, as well as provide references. Anyone who is courteous and has the awareness that the world doesn't revolve around her would honestly document these things even if she is a "tinkerer".

And just as there are "tinkerers" who practise good scholarship, there are "researchers" who practise bad scholarship as has been pointed out by @jacobolus.

## Testing

I'm not sure what makes the author thinks that rigorous testing is only a "researcher" quality. The article just insulted all the "tinkerers" out there by saying:

> "Here's another big thing. A tinkerer makes a thing and puts it out there. A researcher also tests the thing in some way, and writes up what happens."

A "tinkerer" doesn't just make something and puts it out there. A serious "tinkerer" would not want to put something that doesn't work out there—it's embarrassing and it's just, wrong. To make something (reasonably complex) that works usually involves a lot of testing, even if the goal isn't to publish a scientific paper it would still involve a lot of testing.

## Goals

This bit really lost me. It sounds like a bunch of self-contradictory, "researcher"-glorifying statements one after another.

> Usually, goals in research are not just goals, but ambitious goals. The reason we don't know what the results of a research project will be is that the project is ambitious; no-one (as far we know) has attempted what we do before so our best guesses at what will happen are just that: guesses.

A "tinkerer" can have ambitious goals. A tinkerer may do something that nobody has attempted before and, naturally, in that case she would just have to make guesses.

If, hypothetically, I set a goal to investigate the possibility of using CSS to make high-quality 3D games that can run at 60 FPS in web browsers, does that make me a "tinkerer" or a "researcher"? What if, in the process of doing so, I practise good scholarship, document everything carefully in a well-organised format, but just simply have no interest of publishing it in a scientific journal—does that make me a "tinkerer" or a "researcher"?

On this:

> However, if you read a scientific paper those are usually not the stated reasons for embarking on the research work presented in the paper. Usually, the work is said to be motivated by some scientific problem (e.g. optimizing real-value vectors in high-dimensional spaces, identifying faces in a crowd, generating fun game levels for Super Mario Bros). And that is often the truth, or at least part of the truth, from a certain angle.

The stated reasons in scientific paper is usually after written after the research has been carried out and they are designed to tell a reader why the works is important. In a space where everyone is struggling to keep up with publishing so that they can keep their job, who in the right mind would begin a paper with "our research group embarked on [insert amazing thing] because it seemed fun to do so and has never been done before"? Actually, I would love to read papers like that, because most of the time you know it's the usual standard crap when academics start a paper by stating a problem—it probably means that they haven't solved the problem and are not even close.

Also, I would like to draw your attention to the last, contradictory sentence. It seems that the author isn't quite sure either.

## Persistence

If a someone spends 10 years modifying and perfecting something that has never been attempted before, but does not care for its scientific value, does that make her a "tinkerer" or a "researcher"?

Bottom line, anyone who appreciates, and wants to do, good work will naturally do all of those things above—"tinkerer" or not. To throw away sentences like:

> Probably the most importance difference between tinkering and research is scholarship.

> A tinkerer makes a thing and puts it out there. A researcher also tests the thing in some way, and writes up what happens.

> While tinkering can be (and often is) done for the hell of it, research is meant to have some kind of goal.

> Tinkerers are content to release something and then forget about it. Researchers carry out sustained efforts over a long time, where individual experiments and papers are part of the puzzle.

... is just simply conceited.

I was immediately reminded of a wiki page about enlightenment (Immanuel Kant) [0] after reading through the essay, which may an interesting additional reading to some. The English translation of the essay that the wiki page is based on can be found here [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_the_Question:_What_i...

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html

Serious question/statement looking for an answer here—I don’t understand why every time an article along the line of this gets attention it makes me wonder if anyone out there is working on two things:

1. Educating the general population how the latest technologies can/are being used to affect their privacy

2. Working hard to be an independent, trustworthy part that scrutinises the government

I honestly don’t understand the general attitude of most of the comments on articles like this, particular when you are not living in a country where censorship is “okay”.

In an ideal society (in my opinion) the government would act in the best interest of the society and the government is scrutinised by a well-informed population. This is certainly not what is happening in most, if not all, countries; but seeing some of the comments on HN repeatedly that don’t go beyond “scary as” or “this is not okay” is quite disappointing and makes me wonder where else I should look for reasonable opinions sometimes.

Have we not learn anything from storeis about govermental mass surveillance programs in recent years? How about perhaps we should all sit down, think, and set standards for how to protect everyone while setting encforcabke standards for what is an isn’t okay?

This article really doesn’t add anything new or helpful to the conversation. The message seems to be “chill, people, we have been doing okay and we still seem okay, so we will be okay”, the relevant paragraph being:

> For all of the concerns of the press that there is a new brain drain in Silicon Valley, I think we can rest easy. Despite Palo Alto’s shabby look, lack of mobile payments, and lack of face-recognition software, America still has many, many desirable qualities. It’s safe and clean. Corruption is reasonably rare. Universities are still the best in the world. The bureaucracy around running a business is reasonably simple and well-trodden. Freedom of speech and expression is also strong.

There is effectively no additional information or arguments to support that in fact all other references seem to contradict what the author is claiming.

I don’t know whether or not brains are really being drained—but if I were doing business I would be wary of even the slightest possibility that sourcing talent may become increasingly difficult, Chinese or not.

This is from someone on the receiving end and is probably slightly older than your kids—I think it's great that you are teaching your kids how to deal with conflicts and making them think, but I'm not sure that stressing them to the point of snapping is a good thing.

My dad did that to me and he still does it occasionally even when I'm "in the right"; I think he probably means well (he claims that he does when I confront him about it), but it's still an awful feeling that doesn't make me thankful of what he does or like him more. If you really do make your kids feel like that you are bullying them, maybe you should consider cutting it back a little.

I think you have every right to engage—not least because I started my response emotionally to begin with (and thinking why there are so many "good" NYT articles all the time).

I honestly did not mean to offend you in particular and, given what you said, I really am regretting having made an emotional response without considering and qualifying all parts of my arguments now—I did not consider the possibility that one may or may not have considered (and/or may or may not have the technical insights into) all the references in the article when I commented. I would have shared something that I think is interesting without understanding all parts of it.

Please accept my sincere apology for lumping everyone together (in fact, maybe there really isn't anyone who want to promote articles and people just happen to read NYT more often than any other sources), and I really didn't meant to offend you by venting my frustration. :(

EDIT: typo. Clarification.

I really don't want to say this in an uncivil way but can people please stop spamming Hacker News with these articles full of cherry-picked scientific studies from New York Times or can their posts be automatically weighted less if their goal is to promote articles from NYT?

It's really frustrating having to spend a couple of minutes to read seemingly interesting articles only to find out a few minutes later it's probably someone writing for his own gain (well... popular media).

The first scientific journal article that is linked to appears to use the word "parental" to refer to the relationship between a child and her/his parents instead of, and as suggested in the article, between parents (see "parental warmth" and "parental restrictiveness" in the abstract of the journal article). The second scientific journal article that is linked to is used to argue that "architects and scientists were compared with their technically skilled but less original peers"—but the article that is linked to only mentions architects (apologies, but not actually too sorry, if it's actually because of the pay wall and that the authors did not mention scientist in the abstract).

This is probably considered an emotional, and potentially uncivil, response. But it's really, really frustrating. Just because some guy has a PhD doesn't mean what they write is credible when they quote scientific journals—I know plenty of people who have PhDs but what they say are far from credible.

I mean, is it even at all surprising that people who are subjected to an environment with more conflicting views (both good and bad) of any kind are probably less likely to comply and think more?

EDIT: expansion of why I think the interpretation of the first article I mentioned is wrong and cherry-picked. Added emotional sentiment at the end.

If you go to the bottom of the page for any book (well, I only sampled a few so "any" may be exaggerated), it says:

"The [LANGUAGE] Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow."

The way I interpret the writing is that if one understands who she is then the act of pleasing herself is meaningless "doing" that would never cross her mind in the first place.

I really don't think there is anything in the writing that promotes/suggests the "please yourself pop culture" you mentioned; in fact, I don't think there is anything in the writing about pleasing oneself at all.

The closest thing that I can imagine is consider that you are on a hike alone and all of a sudden you feel the urge to play a tune. You take out your ocarina and just naturally play a tune. When you are done you simply continue hiking. You didn't play the tune to please yourself and you didn't play the tune to please an audience—you simply played because it felt like the most natural thing to do that moment, and it's good because of that.

> I personally believe that you can't truly know yourself unless you also invest in others so you know them well enough to contrast who you are and are not.

I tend to disagree with this. I personally think that you can't understand yourself through contrast with who others are (not least because you can never understand others better than they understand themselves)—that way you are simply creating an image yourself based on the opinions you have on other people, not because you are just being you because you understand yourself.

I am ashamed to say that I have a similar probalem (but I don’t have a family) but, let’s face it, you already know the solution because you asked the question—you know that drinking is a problem in your situation.

Just stop if you love your family at all and tell yourself that you need to get your shits together and prioritise your family.

The fact that a seemingly “reasonable” person like you is asking this question is because you are conceited and you think that the people around you are dumber than you (at least for now) and won’t understand.

So... just deal with it and make it right by your wife and kids? Otherwise you are just giving yourself excuses to keep running away from the problem, like asking this pointless question that you already have the answer to.

I absolutely agree with you.

Over time, I have developed the habit of writing thoughts and detailed discussions of why certain things were done in my lab notebooks (I was taught not to do that as an undergraduate). It's very frustrating to have to follow someone else's work, particularly unpublished work, without knowing what had gone into designing experiments.

If you are referring to just the slogan for this particular campaign then I would say yes (I don't think they are trying to make it a universal Alipay slogan in all Chinese-speaking countries).

The calligraphic font used for the phrase in question in that advertisement is commonly used for slogans or take-home message in modern Chinese advertisements. The placement of the phrase also suggests that it's a slogan.

Other images from MTR Advertising[1] also seem to suggest that it's the intended slogan of this campaign, too.

[1]https://www.facebook.com/mtradvertising/photos/a.15944807239...

I think the analysis may be interesting to readers who can't read Chinese, but I don't think the author has taken the time to analyse the phrase in the context of advertising, and I don't think the conclusion is at all surprising.

To begin with, I tend to disagree that the alternative the author suggested ("yīqǐ Zhīfùbǎo 一起支付宝") is catchier. Using "let's" in this context does forgo rhythm but it's also a lot catchier when it's read out in an advertisement for exactly the same reason—I would argue that people remember it because of the sudden interruption introduce by the disruption in rhythm and change in language.

In fact, if this multiscriptal advertisement was carefully designed (instead of the designer thinking that it's simply cool), I would go as far as arguing that they only want people to remember the second half of the phrase, "let's 支付宝".

As for the conclusion that "[Alipay] wanted to sound international, since Alipay has global aspirations", as I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's at all surprising.

Growing up in Hong Kong, multiscriptalism in advertisements has been around for as long as I have been alive and the purpose, at least for as long as I have been able to understand the purpose of advertisements, has always been to either make a product appear to be hip and cool and/or international.