Hacker News Reader

michjedion Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire

Surprisingly for many, Wittgenstein had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.

michjedion Are self-driving cars safer than human drivers?

thanaverage.xyz actually suggests that only 54% of people think they drive better than average, with 19014 participants

michjedion PeerJS – Simple peer-to-peer with WebRTC

This stopped being supported half a decade ago

michjedion What was Aragorn's tax policy? [video]

If anything, the fact that George RR Martin and this vlogger obsess about fictional governance, while Tolkien was more interested in myth and language says a lot about the change in times and what media-makers feel they should contribute to.

michjedion Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

Still valuable reading, if at least for historical knowledge!

michjedion Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

Exactly this - most of the libraries in my area have little if no technical books. I know exactly why too - I've frequently come across libraries in the UK that are selling off their technical books, because they're not receiving much attention. I've had multiple occasions where I've managed to buy dozens of books for the value of just one of them.

It's not easy to even ask for a book. I've asked librarians for books before, and I even have a friend currently working in a fairly large library request a book for me (with evidence from me of interest in it), and the request was refused.

The real books worth reading are those that make you a greater expert than the majority of the population. Libraries don't benefit much from storing books that will only be read by one or two people.

michjedion Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

Books.

I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.

I try to alternate books between different areas, more or less from these sections:

Technical(on currently used technology)

Technical(unused tech vaguely related and may be useful)

Management

Domain(scientific textbooks, best to search from related university course reading lists)

Biographies/accounts/events of typical and super users

michjedion Show HN: Testing HN titles against a neural network

That would not be noticeable to HN people apparently

"Scientists discover it is turtles all the way down" Bad: 0.9998 - Good: 0.0002

michjedion Show HN: Testing HN titles against a neural network

Although it turns out "covfefe"0 by itself would not have been a hit with the HN crowd. That is probably why it went on Twitter.

michjedion Show HN: Testing HN titles against a neural network

Turns out Trump was onto something:

"Planning sophisticated covfefe" Bad: 0.0002 - Good: 0.9998

michjedion Show HN: Testing HN titles against a neural network

Current top 10:

1. "Apple introduces 16-inch MacBook Pro, the world’s best pro notebook" Bad: 0.9964 - Good: 0.0038

2. "Developing open-source FPGA tools" Bad: 0.3381 - Good: 0.6652

3. "Show HN: Can a neural network predict if your HN post title will get up votes?" Bad: 0.0598 - Good: 0.9307

4. "How internet ads work" Bad: 1.0000 - Good: 0.0000

5. "More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities" Bad: 0.7413 - Good: 0.2306

6. "OpenSwiftUI – An Open Source Re-Implementation of SwiftUI" Bad: 0.9994 - Good: 0.0005

7. "How VCs Make Money" Bad: 0.9997 - Good: 0.0003

8. "OpenBSD: Why and How (2016)" Bad: 0.9988 - Good: 0.0013

9. "The Perl Master Plan: How to Put Perl Back on Top" Bad: 0.9997 - Good: 0.0003

10. "Jerry (YC S17) Is Hiring Senior Software Developers (Toronto)" Bad: 0.3142 - Good: 0.6800

So all in all, only 3 of today's top 10 had good titles... Either the titles could have been better but the content was too interesting, or this tool has very low recall.

michjedion Rock climbing and the economics of innovation

A great article and a lovely author - he helped me develop some ideas on my final year essay while I studied at the University of Sheffield, even though he wasn't lecturing me.

michjedion New federal rules limit police searches of family tree DNA databases

Wouldn't that be quite useful for police?

They may be able to pinpoint a location - the barber where all the DNA matches go to have a haircut, and a time - soon after all those with majority DNA in the pile of hair went to the Barber's. Then they can analyse who was in the area around the time and find a person involved.

michjedion Using Python to Get Free Chicken Sandwiches

It seems the whole thread is breaking the guidelines?

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle"

michjedion The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

This article is full of ad hominems and doesn't present any challenges to ideas. Rather poor in my opinion

michjedion London Bus Stop Distance Analysis

Thanks all for the help - some of you noticed the data was erroneous. It is all fixed now

michjedion How well do London buses match the timetables?

CityMapper are doing a really great job. Have you been tempted by their new card?

michjedion How well do London buses match the timetables?

Interesting! How do you usually plan your journey in Rome, and how often does your journey work out like the plan?

michjedion License Plate Detection Without Machine Learning

The first thing I thought about was - what if a tiny part of the plate is cut off by e.g. the side of another car? It would get the ratio entirely wrong and think it was anything but a plate!

michjedion Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?

How does it not affect others? 1. Vapours/Smoke affects those around you 2. Your behaviour change due to the drug affects those around you 3. Your behaviour change due to the need for the drug affects those around you

michjedion An Update on Last Week’s Accident

Does anyone have any data of % of accidents of autopilot vs drivers that don't speed? I am wondering, because I recently say some statistics that showed that a majority of drivers normally speed by at least 10mph, and that the majority of crashes occur when people are driving over the speed limit.

michjedion Ask HN: How to self-learn math?

what is your current level?

michjedion Ask HN: What do you actually use your biohack implants for?

You could easily cut an Oyster Card chip out of the card, stick it in your hand and use it to travel in London.

michjedion Hidden dungeons of the London Underground

Hi - author here. I'm afraid I don't have any statistics on this matter - in this case I was relaying what the staff told me. I will see if any of my friends in engineering can confirm this.

michjedion Show HN: Cqrs-react-router – A Redux alternative

Nice! Thanks for commenting. The reason that I tied the two together for react is that it saves quite a bit of boilerplate to let the router pass on the application service than having to manually add the service to each page individually.

However, the route and router are not necessary for the rest of the library to work and the rest of the library can be used as a plugin to use with a different router.

In terms of DDD principles - if you have decided you might need CQRS for your particular case, you might not want to spend a large amount of time setting up the routing/CQRS framework and you might want to spend all of your time on your actual business logic instead.

I am currently using this in a few of my projects and it's proving quite neat, although I may still need to add some details. I hope others can find it useful - if not, then at least this was a worthwhile experiment.

michjedion Book Review: Designing Distributed Control Systems

I was also surprised to see this, of all my articles get popular on hacker news. I put more effort into my primary school homeworks!

michjedion Ask HN: How would you go about finding a mentor?

Find someone who is better than you in your workplace and learn as much as you can

michjedion Final Year Project Dilemma

Use AI to find ideas for final year projects