bslorence

Except you probably didn't get permanently banned from using the library when you tried to search for that.

thanks much for the tips!

Well and honestly most of War and Peace is pretty easy and pleasant to read as well (I'm setting aside the philosophy-of-history stuff) -- there's just so much of it.

What is a "large company" in this context? My employer is on track to run about $5m through Stripe this year, which will be our fourth full year using Stripe. Our first year we did about $2.75m. This year I've been getting occasional emails from a Stripe sales rep for the first time, which suggests that we've crossed some sort of threshold...

Or you can offer substantial tax incentives for founders to cash out by selling to their own employees; e.g., the ESOP system in the US.

Maybe "asking 'why'" isn't the right way to express it. Perhaps what the OP was really after here was a concrete illustration of the formula, rather than a rigorous derivation of the formula from first principles.

There are many concrete geometrical illustrations of fundamental concepts in algebra, but most people aren't even aware that they exist.

The niece's comment, oddly, both points to this and glosses over it. You don't teach a child multiplication by only forcing them to memorize times tables. You also show them stacks of coins, etc. But we do teach children algebra by only forcing them to memorize symbolic procedures. Meanwhile Book 2 of Euclid is free online, or very cheap from Dover.

This goes to the question of why anything other than basic arithmetic is compulsory. The famous 10th-grader's whine "what are we going to use this for", which infuriated my own 10th-grade Algebra 2 teacher, and even made me roll my eyes at the time, is actually a fair question when algebra is taught as abstractly as it typically is.

I think you've explained exactly why here -- because the emphasis on abstract manipulation presupposes that this is useful for something that we need to get on to. But that's just false for almost all students. And yet they're required to take the class to get a diploma.

My vote would be to treat any math beyond basic arithmetic as a liberal art, and do a lot less of it in compulsory curricula, but spend a lot more time on deep understanding. This would benefit everyone. The current approach pretends that everyone in the class is going to be a certain kind of engineer or scientist some day.

Fair enough. Maybe I should have just said that it's possible to give concrete illustrations of basic algebraic concepts, and that doing this would probably help some students learn algebra, and might help others retain it.

But for whatever reason this is generally skipped in middle/high-school algebra.

> there ARE points in a student's academic path where they HAVE TO memorize stuff and do rote operations like the multiplication tables.

Sure, but imagine learning multiplication tables without having any idea what it means to "multiply"; literally just memorizing sequences of symbols, without ever looking at piles of coins or whatever.

Multiplication is so basic that this is hard to imagine, but I'm sure that, say, difference-of-squares rules feel like this to most beginning algebra students -- and for most people that probably never changes.

I first encountered difference-of-squares in late middle school, memorized the procedure and used it handily through twelfth grade, and had no idea that there was a visualizable geometric basis to it until I read Book 2 of Euclid's Elements in college.

Am I the only one who finds that quote-searching sort of kind of sometimes works in Gmail, but usually doesn't?

I suspect most of us have a serious imbalance in our lives between productive work, leisure, and recreation. See Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's book "The Capitalist Manifesto" for a rich discussion of these topics. They define 'leisure' somewhat counter-intuitively as work, but the sort of work that elevates the mind or advances the common good -- as opposed to the productive work one is required to do in order to earn a living.

Leisure for them is very different from recreation, which is a kind of rest -- think board games, light reading, hiking, Netflix, etc. Everyone needs all three of these things in their lives (leisure, productive work, and recreation) but we often get them confused or end up overemphasizing one to the neglect of the others.

I wonder if OP is saying something similar or at least resonant with this -- basically that we shouldn't treat everything in our lives like productive work.

Similarly I would doubt that anyone actually thinks that the past was good simply because it came before the present. The desire to return to "the way things were" is born of a critique of specific aspects of "the way things are", combined with a sense that tradition is likely to embody hard-earned wisdom that may not be immediately apparent or perfectly defensible by abstract argument.

This is an interesting take on conservatism. I suppose it must be a fairly common take among people who consider themselves progressive, and helps makes sense of some things I've observed recently.

I consider myself generally conservative but would sum up my outlook more along the lines of "change isn't necessarily/automatically good" than "the past was right". Chesterton's Fence etc.

>In the early seventeenth century, for example, the French Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard complained that the Wabanaki did not have to work hard enough to feed themselves ... “Had he ever gone fishing…? Gathered nuts, or berries deep in thorns and mosquitoes? Ever tracked a deer through snow, skinned a rabbit…?”

Huh. Seems probable that an early 17th-century missionary to North America knew a little bit about roughing it, maybe even more than the OP's poet... who also seems to have missed his point. Here's something he actually said:

"They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions." [1]

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46218/46218-h/46218-h.htm#XI...

I could not get into Lord of the World although I really enjoyed another novel of Benson's.

worth it for book 3 though

> a much later add on.

Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm going to re-read Canticle soon-ish but I wonder to what extent Miller endorses even the latter. I feel like his concerns were much more immediately spiritual than cultural. I'm thinking particularly of the scene where the main character of whichever volume meets the Pope up-close and is taken aback to see that his garments are moth-eaten and threadbare.

Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?

Yeah I think Miller was using the nuclear holocaust as a vehicle to reflect on original sin (i.e., the inevitable tendency of human beings to engage in self-destructive behavior) and the antidote to it offered by the Catholic Church. If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.

Reminds me of Jakob Nielsen's rule for writing a good "About" page. If you can insert a "not" into a sentence and get something that no other company would ever put on their own About page, the sentence is worthless.

Your password was probably reset: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31255450

I can't be the only person who uses the Quickbooks Online API for private, non-interactive integrations between internal systems. This new process – a 40-minute legal/security questionnaire that includes questions like "how do you mitigate against CSRF?" – is preposterously draconian for our use case.

Compare with the process for getting a Stripe API key: Step 1 - Point. Step 2 - Click.

Sigh. I've been wondering for a while at what point our business would outgrow QB Online. Maybe this is the answer.

ah, ratpoison. I passed many a fair hour doing network-appliance dev with ratpoison + screen + vi (not even vim) back in the day.

It seems like this is your argument:

1) If some religions are false, then all religions are false

2) Pacific-tribe cargo cults and ancient Greek mythology are clearly false, plus there are some stories in the Bible that are hard to swallow

3) Therefore God doesn't exist

Is that right?

Twice a year we have to deal with calendar screw-ups because a third of our employees are in a locale that doesn't observe DST and the rest are in locales that do observe it. If an employee from that first group sets up a recurring meeting, the meeting time changes for everyone else in March and November.

I suppose everyone's experience is a little different. I started writing code when I was about 7 and I really don't think the K-12 curricula I went through had much direct impact on my career. Maybe some people catch the bug in school, I sure didn't. This was roughly 1986-1998, though, maybe things have changed significantly.

I wonder how many STEM professionals' K-12 education has anything at all to do with their career. Zero connection for me, and I went to a flagship Silicon Valley high school and maxed out the math curriculum there. I can't think of anything I learned in K-12 that relates directly to software development & IT.

I did however make a friend at that high school (in English class) whose dad worked at a big tech company and helped me get into the industry. The school's computer programming club was fun too.

Then again I'm almost 40; maybe it's different for younger people.

The main thing Euclid did for me was to enkindle a love for math as such. Geometry done that way is just so ... beautiful.

Unfortunately I didn't have this experience until I was an undergraduate. For the prior 12 years of formal schooling, math mostly felt like repetitive drudgery with occasional flashes of excitement when I would learn a new technique.

If I'm reading bundler's docs rightly, the new 'source' syntax only appears to prevent this: https://bundler.io/man/gemfile.5.html#SOURCE-PRIORITY

Dawkins thinks that the first three "Ways" of Aquinas all hinge on the premise that a chain of causes can't proceed infinitely backward in time. This is a standard misreading that could be straightened out by a quick perusal of secondary literature, or just by reading a little more Aquinas, who makes clear elsewhere that he thinks the universe does not, in principle, need to have a beginning in time.