hevi_jos

German is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic language itself.

The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of the language.

If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering.

Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much.

That was probably the most reasonable way to learn German outside Germany in 1880. It is not today.

If you are interested in learning any language, I recommend the book "Fluent forever". It tells you how to start leaning a language and all the resources to learn on your own.

I found it perfect on my OLED mobile screen.

OLED works better with darkness than with bright backgrounds.

One of the great advantages of the West happens when biased sources do not overlap.

That is for example the CNN or NYT looking with microscope whatever Republicans do badly and ignoring what Hillary or Obama does wrong could be extremely valuable is there are "opposite biased media" that looks with microscope whatever Hillary does wrong.

This happens in multiple levels, there are financial interest that own media and will never criticize its masters.

The Churches also own media, the Unions own media, the military and farma industry own media. Google or Facebook ARE media.

People in power should be controlled, and that is one of the most realistic ways to control people in power. Wanting media to be unbiased is a dream. Most people are biased.

You should escalate in difficulty levels. GPU Programming is infinite and will always take more of your time than you plan. With escalation you could get positive feedback fast. 2D image filtering is extremely complex for a beginner.

Start drawing a graph of thousands of numbers with the CPU. Easy enough, but harder than it looks.

Accelerate the graph with the GPU so it has smooth animation, moving, zooming... Easy enough but way harder that it looks.

Take a sound sample, uncompress it and visualize in your graph system. Easy?

Take the sample and filter it with CUDA. Way easier filtering a 1D sample than 2D samples.

Play the filtered sound to "feel it".

Then you can filter 2D images if you want.

I recommend the graphic interface Dear Imgui: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1902

Way faster development time than any other (states)interface with the disadvantage that it continuously draws in the screen consuming energy. Well worth it for rapid prototyping.

We should talk about complexity and complication here.

Complex is the opposite of simple. If there is 50 equal elements communicating between them there we have a complex system.

This is important because a thousand ants behave totally different from an isolated ant.

You just can't study an ant and expect to understand the nest or anthill.

Psychologists try to make it all the time and it is totally wrong: They studied isolated rats in order to understand addiction to drugs and they did not understood that they are social animals which travel 20miles-30kms each day.

So they jailed the rats in a cage, because it was easier to study them that way, and extracted conclusions that were totally bogus for human beings. Those conclusions were the basis for the US war on drugs.

Here they do the same. They make a very simple experiment, and extract conclusions about the whole system. In Africa, when humans whatever,more fiction than science.

It is ok to make fiction and speculation, but you should always differentiate what we really know with high degree of confidence from what we do not.

>Why do we think that way when we're young, that we're immune to damage?

Probably overprotection by parents. When I was a kid I was left alone with my friends with no parents supervision a lot.

We did very risky things and risked our lives several times, but in controlled and normal environments like climbing trees and going to the mountain. When something went wrong you will get painful feedback like bruises. But you knew what your limits were.

Quite interesting, those children that had their parents forbidding them to go with us actually had traumatic experiences later in life, once they were free from their parents. They will buy a motorcycle or car, take risks and die or almost die.

It was like they lacked the experience we had and replicated it, but with machines in non humane environments. Instead of bruises they will crash a very expensive car.

"The follow your passion" advice is flawed because you are focusing on your needs instead of the needs of others.

Society, or the world or the Universe, call it whatever you want, will reward you in direct proportion to the value you give to them, not to yourself. It does not care about you, it cares about itself.

On the other hand you should never forget your needs as a human being while working. Focusing too much on others, becoming in practice a slave, not eating well, not sleeping well, not having fun, will only burn you in the medium and short term.

That will for sure make you not to contribute much to others on the long term.

The advice is given by people that had overextended themselves and experienced the burnout in their life. They compare themselves to others and it becomes obvious that some people are doing exactly what they love to do.

They assume that this has always been the case. Usually it is not. For example my father met a man called Carlos Sainz, a car driver that won some Dakar, when people see this man succeed, they assume it was always easy to him. They can't see the effort and sacrifice that led to him winning races.

I fortuitously met Rafael Nadal, a Spanish tennis player. People see him winning titles and believe that is his life, but his life is 90% training training and training(repeating repeating repeating) to a level that will bore to tears any normal human being.

I like playing tennis myself but it will be impossible for me to spend my life doing that.

That is a personal question. Nobody can choose for you. Nobody. Not your parents, or your partner,or people on hacker news, it is you.

As an adult you start making decisions that will affect the rest of your life. Children have their decisions taken for them.

If you take the decision of going with the startup it will be one of the worst experiences in your life. If will be daunting, it will be taking risks every single day. At the same time, you will be making a contribution. Even if you fail you will learn things you will never learn in Google. If you success you will be free with freedom few things will ever give you.

If you go with Google you will be safe, isolated of the mundane problems most people have and you will be able to focus immensely on very interesting problems sharing your time with some of the smartest people on earth. On the other hand your creative and independent muscle will almost disappear, atrophied by not using it, as the big organization takes the load from your shoulders. Over time, it will make your shoulders less strong.

The decision is yours to make. Write down on a paper what your values and priorities are in your life and how each decision will affect them.

Procrastination is fear and most of it makes absolute sense, your body is telling you something is not right.

When I started working long hours in front of a computer,alone, I had to stop doing it. It was impossible to continue after some time doing that.

I though it was procrastination. Then I learn about the lymphatic system and how the body needs to move every single day or else you will feel miserable.

So I started doing exercise every day and suddenly I could work for long hours. There was something wrong and the body acted like a baby that does not know what is wrong but knows something is wrong and cries.

Any procrastination technique that does not consider the root of the problem will fail.

I also put my computer in front of my eyes while standing up, added physical objects to my work, devices that react to touch(3d mouses) or movement.... and my live improved enormously. The reason they work is even longer and more complex that the lymphatic system.

Another very useful thing was recording in a piece of paper the time(hours of real work) and intensity of my work(in a color scale). I realized I called "procastination" when I tried to do too much work (8 hours a day) of work that at the end of the day was super intensive.

It was kind of ridiculous. It is like considering that because you could walk for 8 hours that you could run a marathon with the same velocity and intensity as a sprints. And then do it every single day after that.

Being young, I could do one day(or two) this way, but after that I did burn out.

Computers are very antinatural objects for human beings. If you try to adapt yourself to the computer instead of the other way around,(making the computer speak for example) you are going to suffer enormously.

From my point of view the biggest gift if your life if you want to make a business is not money, it is not connections, it is just mindset, and the emotional training of your parents.

The most successful people I know in business have no formal education, no career. My super smart friends with PhDs and advanced degrees can't touch a business with a 100 meters stick. They work in places like Academia, constantly talking bad about it.

They will be paralyzed at taking risks, handling this much responsibility over other people. The constant fight, people looking at you for guidance and having to decide with incomplete information,people not paying you, your salaries, your taxes... The anxiety they would face is too much for them.

With all the money in the world, with all the connections it takes an entire emotional reprogramming of your mind to be able to handle this.

I regularly see people with 100.000, 200.000 euros in the bank telling me they can't create the business they always dreamed about, if only they had enough money...the reality is that they are in doubt, insecure about risking their own money but somewhat they expect someone else to risk their own money trusting them when they can't even trust themselves.

This is great. Mr Musk is a perfectionist, like Japanese are. He is not selling bad finished cars(like other companies will do).

They are also using lots of automation. This means there are lots of problems at first. With automation, once you solve a problem, it is solved forever.

How you could compare Tesla rework with other companies rework, where the threshold that determines if a car needs reworking is decided by the executives of the same companies?

I could make rework zero just selling broken cars. I bought a European car with a problem in one valve of the engine when it was brand new. I told the dealers about the strange sound, they told me it was normal. It was not and gave me lots of headaches later.

Agreed. The US is supposedly a democracy, in which people will respect the election made by others. They were proud of its System. Now it looks they have forgotten the principles of democracy as they take it for granted.

The US has become bipolar, the Media has become hysterical, using war propaganda to infer the worst intentions and personal qualities to the adversaries, instead of using Truth using prejudices, condemning people without evidence or counsel for the defense.

4 electric motors on wheels is extremely simpler than 2 motors, mechanical differentials and couplings.

I actually helped a mechanical engineer to create a simulator for car dynamics in software.

Today's cars are over engineered mechanically in order to support and resist the forces and torques from the motor to the wheels.

When you put the motors in wheel you basically reduce the required rigidity and the weight of the car substantially.

You point out some disadvantage of the approach. The biggest disadvantage of all is that is not a proven technology, like 100 years old driveshaft. That means the company that commercializes it will eat all the risk, like what happens when people exposes the motor-wheels to wet surfaces and some part of it is damaged. The lawsuits could bankrupt even the biggest company.

This is what NASA could get to power their satellites, at NASA's pricepoint.

Commercial means what you can buy at reasonable prices.

It takes some time from knowing something is possible, experimental technology, like multitouch controlled computers, and companies selling them in the billions, like multitouch being in every Ipad or smartphone.

In Spain people used to the Mediterranean sea often get down a beach in the North, tides come and they can not get out as they did not planned for it.

What happens is that in the Mediterranean Sea tides are very small.

As a diver I have experience getting into bigger than 10kms/hr currents and thinking for myself: Wow if I had not the Cylinders I would probably instantly experience panic here.

As others have noted, the Japanese have their fair share of criminality and violence against other groups of people on more recent times than slavery in the US.

About the damage to the environment, here the Japanese also have their own share.

If "feeling all one with the environment" includes fishing salmon in deep waters until they had been almost extincted, or whales or dolphins' slaughter on the beach, Japanese does not look special over any other groups in the world.

From my point of view, the difference in perception about robots is that they need them: they are getting old and someone or something must do the jobs.

In places like India there is so much people that robots become a real threat against people's jobs. In Japan if they do not use them, they will be dissapear as a nation.

If you analyze your own writing you will realize there are implicit beliefs in your thinking that are not trivial to have:

-You believe ideas are properties. IP means Intellectual property.

-Ideas could be stolen, like any property, that is you take ownership of something letting the original owner without the ability to use it.

Europe and then US were developed copying and improving on the ideas of others. E.g Romans looked at people with mining knowledge and conquered them to acquire the knowledge(and the mines). They did the same with Greece. Toledo's steel real origin was a secret so Romans would not conquer them.

Europe benefited from ideas like powder manufacturing and improved over that creating dynamite. They improved over compasses making them suitable for sea navigation. Original compasses from China were terrible.

Britain copied the ideas and knowledge that lead to industrialization from the Netherlands, who had taken it from the rest of Europe, being at the end of a big river.

Then the US copied from England. Native Americans were exterminated as they could not copy the new ideas fast enough in order to defend themselves.

You are confusing two different things: Reality and perception of reality.

All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment.

Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war.

Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).

You mean like Intel ME?

You train your family, like you train your dog.

If you are working on a hard problem and you dog comes with the leash on her mouth, you can do what the dog wants or do what you need to do. Your dog will have to wait. Non negotiable. if you negotiate and are not consistent, you are in trouble.

Your dog needs to know that she is going to go outside, but when you say so. Dogs understand it very well. If it is a rigid schedule it works much better, it is not arbitrary.

If you are working on a hard problem and your son or daughter interrupts you, it is your job to make it clear to them that they can't interrupt you unless it is important.

They need to know you will spend time with them, on a consistent basis.

People understand it very well if you are an adult capable of saying "no". Rigid schedules work much better.

I believe you are confused. You can be disciplined and love your family. Sick child? Not the end of the world, it looks like it for first time parents. Homework assistance? You are not loving your children if you do their homework for them.

Speed reading also means "speed understanding". Glancing over words is not speed reading.

Speed reading means you could factually proof you could read extremely fast and retain most of the facts of the text.

From my experience, there is people out there that could do that (after extensive training). The main problem is that you need a standardized way of displaying the text so the mind could understand it super fast.

I have met speed readers personally in Spain, France and Germany.

For example HN does not let you speed read because of the format with long lines.

On a practical way way most text is not formatted for speed reading, it should be preprocessed first, which is illegal because of copyright in most countries.

What would you prefer: to live in a foreign country with lots of competition, all day working, or live in your native country, few skilled competition and huge quality of living?

Most people want to live in their own country , with their family, their friends and their language.

Chinese people have elders to care. In China family is sacred to a level individualistic US can not understand.

Reading about this always makes me remember how much we stand at the shoulders of giants.

Thinking about things like on each of those voyages half the crew will die of Scurvy and other illnesses, for hundreds of years.

Now it is going to the moon or Venus, or Mars what requires a significant risk to do, because of danger like radiation or absence of civilization out there.

Some day in the future, traveling to Mars will be routine and people would barely think on those that made it possible.

How much people think about the incredible thing it is we could travel to the other side of the planet on a single day?

The guys that wrote this piece have drunk the kool aid of Lisp.

To say that library support for bioinformatics is on the early stages is quite a misunderstanding. Lisp was one if not the first language to be used in everything, including bioinformatics. If it is not used anymore is because people have abandoned it.

People have abandoned it once its flaws became evident. The main flaw of Lisp is using linear data for everything. It is obsolete, it was designed for linear memory like tapes or punched cards, not random access to memory like we have today.

Languages like Clojure has not this limitation but they have others, like forcing you to use the java virtual machine, good if optional, terrible if mandatory.

In current systems with huge amount of RAM, when you could have 128GBs on a developer system having to use a system that shoehorns everything to Lists is going backwards.

It also maximizes verbosity as everything uses the same thing, pattern differentiation is hard for actual humans to read and understand. This was a serious flaw that even Lisp creators quickly identified and tried to solve, remember Lisp was considered a temporary solution while the good solution was(never) found.

Not to talk about the absence of privileged instructions, everybody on the team changing whatever it wants, even basic instructions.

Don't get me wrong, I love Lisp, it is one of the more interesting languages in the world. I am actually working on porting some of the features it has(introspection) to other languages.

But from my point of view it is not that good for production for most projects. I have drunk the kool Aid myself before and have the scar tissue from that.

French is an extremely easy language to pick for someone who already speaks English.

In fact, English took from French over 30% of its vocabulary. French was the official language in England of the highly educated until mere centuries ago.

Most researchers in France already speak English.

The huge advantage of the US/UK is one: money, you could become rich and apply your ideas to real products(in a bigger market) much much more easily than in France.

The huge advantage of France: quality of life.

Watering my plants outside.

Some of them are connected to the water line, so I use a german commercial solution that irrigates 1-2-3 times a day for x seconds.

I just hacked the electric signal of the valve with a cable, sugru and 3d printed parts to control it with a raspi, so it is dynamic, based on the weather and water sensors, so water is not wasted.

Other plants are not connected to the water line pipe. So I use terracota recipients and a raspi controlled deposit of water to add some water the terracota will absorb by capillarity and irrigate the plants this way.

There is no better system to irrigate plants than capillarity.

I fill the deposit manually once a month or so.

I also brought a bread-pizza mass machine as in some countries there is no good bread like in Spain or France, this way I could design my own custom cycles depending on parameters like the weight of the bread I will make. Automating it was super simple.

I created a book reader-digitalizer, all my books are digitalized, OCR.... The hardest thing to do was flipping pages. At first I used vacuum with a super complex system. A year ago or so I simplified it enormously with just a cheap Chinese electrostatic device.

I am good explaining things to people.

I just realize what people take for granted and make it easy to understand.

Everybody in Swizzerland-Austria knows how to sky. Kids learn so soon they do not remember when they learned like most people do with learning to walk memories.

In some Pacific islands they learn to dive. In New Zealand they learn to sail. In Japan or Spain people eat fish by tradition, in most Argentina it is a strange thing to do, you eat meat.

People on HN are mostly hackers, programmers, using a command line, what is a parser is or how to program is obvious for them, but is very strange to general population.

What is normal to us, is very strange to other people raised under other circumstances.

Learn about your audience. Use parables like Jesus to explain what they don't know with things they know very well.

It was only a matter of time.

Today computers like imacs, ipads, mobile phones or tvs(not even talking about Alexa), clocks could spy on you in your house at every single time and give the data back to home at the other side of the globe.

Your pulse could be monitored, your movement could be monitored, who you talk with privately could be monitored, who you sleep with could be monitored.

Once this is possible it is a temptation so great for the US Government(or any other Govertment) and status quo to resist.

It is only a matter of time that Governments react. Of course the other powers of the wold want to do what the US Govertment already does.

Massive surveillance spying using technology created by companies of the same country? Already done by the US.

Protecting sensitive data from outside Governments? Already done by the US.

Restricting companies from working in strategic sectors and forcing them to provide source code? Already done by the US.

Probably you are referring to "Kodakchrome", which was actually amazing quality. Ektachrome was the cheaper, simpler to develop positive film.

Good leaders know if you want others doing something to you, you come first.

If you want others following your lead, first you follow the lead of great leaders, listen to them, learn from them what makes them so great. Then you could be a great leader.

From my point of view, the article is egocentric. Ego is one of the biggest enemies of good work.

It should never be about following the leader blindly, specially if you manage(or co-work) smart, educated and experienced people, their opinions are of more value than yours in their areas of experience.

With ego over the table it is only about who wins the argument, and of course it is always the boss(who is up in the hierarchical level). Beware because this introduces resentment and procrastination on the team.

The article promotes this method, but this is not leadership, it is subjugation.