projectramo

What it used to mean to say someone was good at math was that they were very good at quickly solving complicated math in their head. One documentary I saw claimed that this is what they looked for at Oxford and Cambridge for their math programs.

As soon as the calculator was invented (okay, and made cheap and portable), this skill was useless. Then you had to set up problems so that the calculator could solve them. (Similarly with the computer).

This is a natural and good progression. All the best practices should be learned and mastered by people building the tool, and you should just be proficient at the tool.

Its just a strange thing to hear people say a physics masters is useful because it demonstrates your capacity to learn the same material as a computer science undergrad.

I certainly respect a physics degree for the same reason I respect a math degree: it shows me that this person can work really, really hard for a long a time.

If you're in physics or math you may know exactly what I mean, but if you're outside: it is bonkers how hard they have to work.

People vs things is not a thing.

Imagine someone wrote a paper that said men are horrible at management or anything collaborative because all their testosterone makes them so angry that they simply get too emotional to work with others.

If you are a man -- and who knows on the internet -- you know this is garbage. Yes men have more testosterone. That is a fact, and no one is arguing. Yes, testosterone means you are more likely to get angry, but it doesn't follow that your anger levels prevent you from working. Come on!

But now, instead of believing you, people say you are hysterical and anti-science, and you have to do a study to prove you don't get so angry you can't work. Every day people post examples of men who went ballistic at work. The study is inconclusive and you are wasting all this time trying to prove that the testosterone doesn't make you angry. Every time you lose your temper, people point out that you are a guy and of course you're prone to that.

That's what this "people vs things" distinction is like.

I think this argument would carry more weight if, you know, the numbers had changed. If the top spots in the highest paid fields (finance, medicine, management, research, technology, media, government) were actually reasonably close to parity, you might say the movement has run its course. But since we are still far off from that, and women are still expected to do more than half the work around the house and so on, it seems there is still work ahead.

I'm not saying men should not have parental rights (and, it should be added, obligations). And of course there are people working on that issue (to pick one). But do you have data that suggests this is as large an issue as, say, the dearth of women in top positions?

I had a C64 but no software, so I had to make my own by typing out the code from these books by hand. I love them though be warned that the programs are much simpler than the covers would lead one to believe.

When I was done, I realized I knew how to code basic. No one had to explain loops or goto or if after you type it in a few times.

I will add that OCR is not going to help you because a lot of the code was PEEK and POKE. I suppose your basic interpreter could also emulate the C64 memory space.

I thought I could easily tell the difference till I read this article...

I think you’re thinking of it wrong. It’s the journey not the destination. As long as you’re excited to learn things, try things, make things you’re okay.

It would be better to be a new writer excited to write a crap book than to be a Stephen King without the energy or will to write a word.

(As far as I know, King still has more energy and enthusiasm than most writers. The example was a counterfactual.)

Having read Bad Blood, I kind of believe it. Hear me out (also have not seen it).

I really think that she thought she could make the machines work. I think Holmes and Balwani thought that, given enough time and enough smart people they would eventually get a working version. I think they thought -- they may still think -- that it was a question of throwing more resources at the problem.

The whole thing would have lasted longer if they had not put a deadline on themselves by actually releasing it into the wild with the Walgreens deal.

Wait, you're telling me the Tesla doesn't drive??!!! They've fooled so many people!

Can't believe the founder just built v1.0 over a weekend.

Cleary they didn't know that they should have learned serverless, functional programming, and then iterated through 4 different front end frameworks before they actually built the app.

Low expectations for this one.

That is great. It seems like a lot of work. I have often wondered how hard it would be to find an honest, reliable contractor if I were to get a property in a distant city.

I would be happy to outsource all that work to you, and I hope you succeed so I can hire you. But how would you guys find one?

In other words, the issue with finding someone long distance is that you can't check them out in person, or see their work etc.

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

Weird that they have so many of them on "mail fraud." That part confuses me more than it enlightens me.

This is a much needed service, and I feel like I've seen a lot of people enter this space but I wonder what happens to all of them after a few months. They seem to disappear.

The main question I have is: which cities do you operate in?

The secondary questions: How do you handle the workmen? What if you customer thinks that you charged too much?

I understand why it is unethical, but what law did they break?

The coach is not a government employee, so aren't you legally permitted to bribe them?

Pretty good so far, but I don't see anything about IoT, drones, and solar power anywhere.

Aren't their mailing costs involved in buying directly from the website?

And those Amazon costs are much higher than I would have thought.

YC is different.

Consider: "YC’s terms, which see it investing $150,000 in exchange for 7 percent of each company — a stake that it can maintain throughout the company’s life it it so chooses, per its pact with its founders."

If this is true, it can afford to do different things. Picking the wrong company does not matter. Picking the right company matters a lot. In other words, false negatives are much worse than false positives.

With that type of structure, the more they take on the better.

Sam's philosophy -- from his talks and such, I don't know him personally -- seems to align perfectly with this reward structure. He has grown it in the right direction.

Now, the hit rate will necessarily be lower, and that might hurt another organization but because of their unique structure, I think it helps YC.

So you are describing the end effect and the program figures out what you want? Wow. This post has inspired me. I want to add a comment here that:

1. makes you laugh

2. blows your mind with its insight

3. is considered deeply relevant

I can't actually come up with it, but now that I have given you the description, please simulate the comment in your mind and give me credit for it.

I found no dose effect (weird, intuitively, I know). I ate a packet of gummy bears that, I didn't realize, turned out to be melatonin gummies! I think the packet had something like 15 mg. I was on a flight from china and had barely slept the night before (becuase of flight connections). I fell asleep for 2 hours and then I was awake for the flight. Conversely, I've taken 1.5mg and slept soundly.

I have the same concerns and every doctor I ask tells me the study show no long term effects at all.

One explanation: I tend to take melatonin when I am very tired and didn't get enough sleep the previous night. But on those nights I sleep very well anyway. And once I have enough sleep I don't sleep as deeply the next night. Perhaps that is a lurking variable for me.

Do you have a fitbit or something to track the sleep?

I don't think the issue with your feedback is that it is unkind, but that it is not specific.

"Cheap" is not a type of design.

"Probably a quickly modified free template" does not say what you found wrong with it.

"Unreadable" is just, on the face of it, false since I could read it.

If you had been specific with your feedback -- even if it were negative -- I think it would have been better received.

I hope you can C that there aren't enough puns, so get with the program. You need beta testing than this, and then come back. If I were your boss I would not give you arrays.

To be fair, s/he was responding to "Today you have to download and understand a stack of tools and languages before you get anything printing on the screen."

It is true that people don't generally ship code written in devtools, but then most of the programs shipped on the Commodore 64 were not written in basic. (Unless you count hundreds of peeks and pokes as basic.)

I do miss the immediacy of the programming experience, but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser.

I guess I'm more interested in whether my ability to learn machine learning (or whatever the equivalent is in 10 years) will decrease over whether I'll be able to remember a 7 digit number.

Call that what you will.

I am confused about what you consider "ability to perform". Education is a context for performance.

Disappointed by the tasks they chose. This is because the data is collected in a lab but we have so much more data these days.

Does anyone work for Udacity/EdX/Coursera? I would be interested to know if/how performance on those courses decline/improve with age.

It would also be interesting to see if performance is correlated because of lurking third factor. (My money is on exercise, or time).

What if the article is aimed at people who didn't know that?

I think you think I am saying the opposite of what I think I am saying.

I can't beat this for terseness, but I think I could whip up something close (say 15 lines) in Python (readable) or Perl (would be shorter than Python but more readable than linux).

I guess I am more curious about what Knuth did! Did he just comment it a lot for "literate" code?

As always I feel the Python (or Ruby if I could write it) is the sweet spot between being easy to read and easy to write.

tl;dr: yes it mostly is.

I am not opposed to this being upvoted. It is a fairly interesting paper, and I am glad to see people express a variety of interests.

I am curious though: there are many, many, many philosophy papers out there. Many are written on this topic (Carnap and Quine). Indeed there are papers by Carnap and Quine.

Why then, of all the papers out there, did this particular one make it up to HN's front page?

p.s. In general we are not supposed to ask why things were upvoted, downvoted, or claim that things do not belong. I guess this isn't that. I am not asking why this is here, or why it was upvoted. I am asking why all the other papers aren't upvoted, and why they aren't here.