HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

afterwalk

94 karma · joined January 3, 2020

submissionscomments
afterwalk··on Lowell HS Got Rid of Merit-Based Admissions. Then Students' Grades Tanked
My friends and I once argued about the primary reason top schools "produce" overachieving students. She thought that at least a part of it is from better staff and student to teacher ratio, whereas I argued that most of it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Families that cares most about education will sacrifice the most (time, money, opportunity cost) to get kids into elite schools, and those kids will work harder and devote more resources to test-prep.

This article states that failure-rate went from 8-9% to 25%, but I'm curious how that compares to the regional average. If say 35%-40% of 9th graders failed in surrounding regions, it would be an argument to keep the lottery based system.

afterwalk··on SAT score distributions in Michigan
I wonder how much of this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to racially weighted admission. i.e Many Asian parents are painfully aware of how much the deck is stacked against their kid, and therefore allocates extra time and resources accordingly to overcome the difficulties.
afterwalk··on How I Practice Piano
I’ve always been taught to spend >50% time practice hand separate first, increase tempo one hand at a time, and only combine after much practice, which seems to differ than the post. Does anyone have a view on how soon to jump into two hands when learning a new piece?
afterwalk··on Robinhood Files Confidentially for U.S. IPO
You can buy a put option on robinhood to put your bet to the test with limited downside risk.
afterwalk··on Early-Retirement Update
What interests me most about the FI community on reddit is how they split into two very different subgroups(leanfire and fatfire). Part of it is a difference in frugality, but part of it is is a fundamental difference in modeling risk.
afterwalk··on Open Application Model – An open standard for defining cloud native apps
I really like this approach for simplifying Kubernetes. A few projects similar to OAM in that it provides a higher level "Application" CRD:

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp

https://github.com/k11n/konstellation

https://github.com/kalmhq/kalm (We ended using this one, which came with a set of matching web UI)

afterwalk··on Minecraft vs. Roblox (2020)
Exponential growth is very counter-intuitive. Although it's been around forever the vast majority of users probably came onboard recently.
afterwalk··on What I Worked On
Give that pg is someone who can walk away from running YCombinator to work on other stuff for fun, he probably doesn't care about maximizing utility or impact at this point.
afterwalk··on Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
It’s like podcasting vs YouTube. Audio-only can be better under certain contexts
afterwalk··on I Really Blew It (2020)
Speak for yourself. I make my $$$ selling saas tools to people who make tools for people who invest in tools for ad peddlers.
afterwalk··on Best Story Wins
I agree with a few of the points, but it lost me at Tesla. I like my Tesla a lot because it’s a really well designed product, not because of some Elon Musk story.
afterwalk··on Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser
That has got to be the most frustrating landing page design... waiting 5-10 seconds for the slogan and the call to action to appear...
afterwalk··on A Framework for Writing Better Documentation
I really like the system and it seems there's also a temporal order to the learning path:

1) Tutorials <- starting point 2) How To <- intermediate 3) Reference <- comes back to it regularly 4) Discussion <- final step to understanding

However as the video mentions, it's all connected in a circle, as perhaps having some discussion up-front(why, context, alternatives) is useful for newcomers to evaluate whether this project is worth diving into.

Curious as to whether the author(and everyone) thinks on how much "discussion" should be put into the "Getting Started" page.

afterwalk··on Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC
I personally alternate between taking courses and doing projects.

Doing all MOOC is bad for some of the reasons the articles covered. But doing all projects is also sub-optimal because sometimes it is hard to know what you don't know. Balancing theory and practice works the best for me.

afterwalk··on Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
In other industries for example gaming and desktop tools, people eventually just ship a new version that existing users have to buy again. For continuously deployed web products a repricing is the only way to frame it in customer's minds.
afterwalk··on Launch HN: Aviron (YC W21) – High-Intensity Peloton for Rowing
This looks cool but I'd be in the market for a software solution that gave me "games, races, and programs" with a Concept 2 + iPad. If anyone knows of such a product please let me know.
afterwalk··on A story about pivots
That sounds interesting. Out of curiosity does AWS have streamlined support for vendor deployments? (I don't work in large organizations so have never seen how non-saas deployments work)
afterwalk··on A story about pivots
posthog looks like a great product. But it's interesting that a product offering with "open source" and "on your infrastructure" still has "cloud" as the first tab in the pricing. (Not a criticism at all, just pointing out the interesting dynamics of the open core business model)
afterwalk··on Ask HN: Are you preparing for a market crash? How?
Any thoughts on real estate?
afterwalk··on The Most Influential 80-Plus-Year-Olds in America
In the 21-80 section
afterwalk··on Some U.S. Colleges Cut Tuition
That figure includes the gains, and represents approximately how much college will cost in 13 years if trends continue. My point was that $600k for going to college sounds so ridiculous that the trend shouldn't be able to continue.
afterwalk··on Some U.S. Colleges Cut Tuition
Recently playing around with a 529 college saving plan calculator, it told me that for a 5 year old aiming to go to a 4 year private school, I need to save up $600k in the next 13 years. I thought the calculator was broken, but it was simply using the past decade's grow rate for tuition to model the next decade.
afterwalk··on Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy
I wonder what percentage of kids age 8-12 want to become a professional athlete. I bet it's at least 100-1000x than the amount of job opening at the "can make a full time income" level.

In that case it's mostly the parents that subsidize the lifestyle up until college level.

afterwalk··on Global chip shortage threatens production of laptops, smartphones and more
This gen of console spec is exceptionally good vs PCs, see https://youtu.be/WebInZUvcGA
afterwalk··on Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)
Any specific suggestions on brand/tech/material?
afterwalk··on DoorDash from Application to IPO
I've experienced cheap delivered food done well when in Bejing, and it's definitely a real thing. However if you tag a $10+ service/delivery/tip onto the bill, it kind of negates the "cheap" part of the experience.
afterwalk··on Airbnb S-1
How can an unprofitable companies rack up $1.3b in taxes?
afterwalk··on Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend
The value proposition was clear and well written, until I got to this part:

"you want to do it without having to standup layers of infrastructure on AWS or be beholden to the legacy players like Heroku or other providers who don’t get that you want the same Netlify like experience on the backend."

So exactly how is Heroku "legacy"? From past experiences pushing a simple backend service onto Heroku was pretty smooth and "Netlify-esq".

It would be nice to explain or show the shortcomings of using Heroku as the backend for your Netlify app.

afterwalk··on Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them
The first reason is interesting to think about. It's similar to how one needs to be careful in prescribing certain antibiotics, otherwise the bacterial will adopt.
afterwalk··on Show HN: HyScale – An abstraction framework over Kubernetes
A lot of attempts at "simplifying k8s" seem to be writing some type of "coffee-script" that generate the underlying yaml. What I (think I) want is just some good UI built for essential workflows.
Page 1 of 2Next →