jaltekruse

Absolutely, there are certainly ways to put on a show like you're helping people and not really care.

Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.

If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.

Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.

I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.

Totally agree, but I believe anyone who has lots of money, and wants to defend they have money because they are smart and successful should realize that merely being a consumer isn't a very impactful way to contribute to society. Using piles of money to just scale up being a consumer to an absurd level is stupid.

I also think I wouldn't shed a year if Rolls Royce went out of business. There are manufacturing, design, welding jobs out there on markets that actually make sense to scale up. Some things in life you can currently buy don't provide enough value to justify them existing at all. They simply exist as a middle finger to everyone with less, propped up by the idiots that but them.

I'm not saying make anything illegal, I'm saying I judge people who support this and would encourage everyone else to do the same.

I don't care how you made your money, hoarding it should be looked down on. Greed is bad, we don't need to make things illegal, but I sure as hell am going to think anyone with a privately owned Yacht is a little bit worse of a person than someone reinvesting their money in their community and trying to explore new ideas, or if you are tired and don't want to personally invent stuff or run another business, go find some enthusiastic entrepreneur to support. I am not against rich people having power, I think we should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share, but beyond part of their money that ought to be allocated by a democratically elected government they can do what they want with their wealth to control the world. But anyone using their money to just show how wealthy they are is going to get serious judgement from me, and I think that is a healthy way to think about rich people.

I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.

What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?

There definitely is a line to be careful with, but I do think this is the vast majority of what is happening with most social justice movements today.

Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.

I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.

I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.

Free Math Foundation | REMOTE | Frontend and Full-stack engineers | Currently volunteer basis

Pre-funding edtech non-profit seeking early volunteers, with the opportunity to convert to a paid position when funding source is secured.

This might not being the spirit of the thread, as I cannot yet pay people, but I am looking for passionate people that could earn their way up to co-founder status with meaningful contributions to the project.

The Free Math site allows students to record digital step-by-step math work for a wide variety of grade levels and subjects. The site is open source and saves files that are easily collected using any existing course management site. Grading is done in bulk with similar student answers shown in groups. Teachers can quickly grade correct answers and see full solutions to give detailed feedback to incorrect solutions.

https://freemathapp.org

Contact: developers@freemathapp.org

Might be a dumb thing to post on hacker news, but I tried using the word boid or boids in Scrabble and my competitive wife wouldn't let me because it wasn't in the dictionary. It fit so well too!

Absolutely agree, if you can't represent some of your resources in it and have any idea if you'll be able to spend it somewhere near at the value you put in at, there's just no incentive to use it as a means of exchange. Kinda makes tether seem like a good idea if I wasn't so worried it's a ponzi scheme.

I still assume it is possible and likely that something like cryptocurrency will eventually become incredibly valuable, but I see that happening only when technical and social hurdles are overcome to make it as widespread and scalable as the current credit card system for everyday transactions. Unfortunately for current cryptocurrencies, they just don't have what it takes to compete with decades of trust to get everyone to put their daily spending money in them, that is what will make a future system valuable. The current role they play as a speculative investment seems quite silly to me, literally they only thing they are good for is transactions, if you can't do that effectively I don't see value in the tokens at all.

Imagine if someone started a stock exchange and listed a single stock, their own, the stock for the exchange itself, and no one else's. While you can buy some things with bitcoin or ethereum, it's nowhere near widespread, so that really seems to be effectively what it functions as for now, which looks very bizarre on its face. Unfortunately for the people who do want to get rich, if there is an eventual winner in crypto, their rise will probably look something like what we see now, limited buy in from speculators followed by some inflection point, so it's entirely possible buying this dip of ethereum or some other coin might be the right thing, but I'm just not sure any of them are ready yet. Even with SegWit and other stuff happening in bitcoin, it just isn't clear to me that becoming a cash or credit card replacement system is even the goal anymore, which seems like they are just riding on their first mover advantage to prop up the value more than anything at this point.

Note: reposting this from the stock trading halt discussion after its parent appears to have been deleted.

I still assume it is possible and likely that something like cryptocurrency will eventually become incredibly valuable, but I see that happening only when technical and social hurdles are overcome to make it as widespread and scalable as the current credit card system for everyday transactions.

Unfortunately for current cryptocurrencies, they just don't have what it takes to compete with decades of trust to get everyone to put their daily spending money in them, that is what will make a future system valuable. The current role they play as a speculative investment seems quite silly to me, literally they only thing they are good for is transactions, if you can't do that effectively I don't see value in the tokens at all.

Imagine if someone started a stock exchange and listed a single stock, their own, the stock for the exchange itself, and no one else's. While you can buy some things with bitcoin or ethereum, it's nowhere near widespread, so that really seems to be effectively what it functions as for now, which looks very bizarre on its face. Unfortunately for the people who do want to get rich, if there is an eventual winner in crypto, their rise will probably look something like what we see now, limited buy in from speculators followed by some inflection point, so it's entirely possible buying this dip of ethereum or some other coin might be the right thing, but I'm just not sure any of them are ready yet. Even with SegWit and other stuff happening in bitcoin, it just isn't clear to me that becoming a cash or credit card replacement system is even the goal anymore, which seems like they are just riding on their first mover advantage to prop up the value more than anything at this point.

Might be able to replace the salt with something like fertilizer beads.

That I did, I thought the map shown was next to his was one he saw before he started his project.

I should have read more carefully, I didn't realize that the map he was frustrated with wasn't the one shown on the article. I do then agree that it looks like they are claiming copyright after copying his work which is definitely BS.

Agree on most points here, but the article I think does some damage to any claim to "clean room" approach. He saw the one map and thought he could improve it. The map is all there is, there isn't a secret underlying implementation that can be ignored to accomplish similar goals and dutifully respect IP right be not de-compiling or otherwise reverse engineering. Copyright law definitely is a complicated topic, and I don't think there is a brightline I can point to, but being derived from something else I certain instances is a copyright violation. For written works, using the likeness of copyrighted characters in totally different storylines and universes is a violation of copyright.

I am going to go against the grain here a bit. While I do think it is dumb that publicly funded IP isn't shared under a creative commons permissive license, I do think the maps do look very similar.

I'm having a little trouble finding the link, but I read an interesting article sometime in the past few years (possibly after it was posted on HN) about the difficulty of designing good metro maps. Geographically accurate maps would be cluttered and confusing, so lots of thought has to go into how geography is manipulated to make an understandable and visually pleasing design. The work that goes I to this is copyrightable, and I do think the two maps share a lot of these elements. Yes the independent map was worked on for 300 hours, but adding up all of the changes over the years probably amounts to thousands of hours to generate the original map.

Again I don't necessarily think this is a good use of government funds or time, but I don't believe the copyright claim is compeletely invalid.

I'm not sure this is the strongest case you could make for saying this ought to be the responsibility of the government. If people can make more working than childcare costs, then they can make their own decision about how to invest their own time and money. Why does the government need to pay for this, if they argument is ultimately that the wages of women now working is what ends up paying the cost of the service?

I am generally not one to rail against the government running efficient programs for general welfare, I support single payer healthcare in the US and many progressive policies. I do however think we need to consider the line where anything you buy has the government involved in re-distributing resources to make it cheaper for people with less money.

Ultimately, it might be good to allow economic forces to produce an economy again where single income households can afford to raise children, regardless of the gender of the parent who is earning an income. More work doesn't always mean societies or families ended up better off, parents spending time raising kids should not be seen as just sunken cost because we could have gotten tax money out of them.

Maybe the reduction of the corporate rate during the trump tax cuts? The defense of this change, was that it was going to bring home money stashed in foreign tax havens.

During the bush tax cuts, there was also a tax holiday that allowed money to be brought back into the US at a very low tax rate. Can't imagine that 0 corporate lobbyists were involved in the process of creating these laws.

from wikipedia: "In 2004, the United States Congress enacted such a tax holiday for U.S. multinational companies in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA)) section 965, allowing them to repatriate foreign profits to the United States at a 5.25% tax rate, rather than the existing 35% corporate tax rate."

While you certainly cannot migrate the community, I recently learned how comprehensive the import tools are for gitlab. They will import PRs, wikis and a bunch of the metadata from Github and even try to link it all up to Gitlab accounts if the same public e-mail addresses are used by your contributors on the two services. No affiliation, and I don't even use the site today, but I would certainly consider recommending it to open source projects I am involved with in the future.

There are several countries in Europe that give maternity/paternity leave and vacation time to all full time employees by law. The result is not a massive drop in productivity, on the contrary studies have indicated higher overall productivity in many cases. There are things besides short term business gain that societies can invest in that can end up with everyone better off in the long run, even economically.

I don't think many Americans consider how lucky we are that we have practically unlimited land compared to many industrialized nations. In Germany housing is very expensive. Homes are often passed down generations and parents move back in with their kids during retirement much more often than in the US.

This might be a good final ending step, with a society full of code literate students, but currently we aren't anywhere near that. Students and professionals alike use math notation, and I think it is important we find ways to bridge the gap between paper and digital math representations.

Every process that has moved to computers has seen immense productivity enhancements. Production of written text, audio editing, video editing, engineering drafting, all of these things involve producing a ton of unique information in a workflow. Copy/paste, versioning (even primitive versioning saving old docs), undo/redo, and re-arranging large groups of content are just so powerful that you can't go back to life without them once you can use then second nature in a given context.

I think this might be a way that such a project could be accelerated. Machine learning is good, but math is extremely ambiguous. Symbols are re-used and their orientation relative to other symbols changes their meaning. Some problems want you to simplify, others want you to expand something. This project at least removes symbol ambiguity in written work.

Even if you could make a computer understand how to solve a bunch of problems, I'm not certain that blind machine learning would produce a good feedback system for getting students back on course when they misunderstand something. They could probably find some likely candidates where students may have made a mistake, but I don't think anyone has tech anywhere near this right now.

I completely agree with this problem. While I haven't solved the full problem you are describing, including graphs and diagrams, I think they will all fit nicely into this application model soon.

The biggest problem with pens is palm rejection, which some recent hardware has gotten right. This actually works find on a screen you can only write on with the pen, like a graphics tablet, but people love their mobile games, so even laptops get capacitive touchscreens in most cases these days.

I cannot wait for good tools for managing mathematical work like we have for prose today, I think it will be a real productivity boost for students as well as professionals. So many workflows get forces into Excel and Word because they are the tools that people know. While they are great at some things and pretty good swiss-army knife products, they just don't work for managing a bunch of floating diagrams/images and lots of equations.

Thank you!

For better or for worse, tech is being forced into classrooms by textbook companies. At least this project emphasizes students working on good old complete assignments, rather than tiny bite-sized activities. It is also free, rather than $100 per student per year/semester.

Computers are okay at deciding if an answer is correct, but they are not good tutors. Teachers can use Free Math to find the gems in their students work that demonstrate their misunderstanding. Currently there is no way for them to process all of the data and work produced by their students every day and have access to this granularity of information.

I considered having an app that would take pictures of student work, but OCR just seemed unrealistic for math. Bad handwriting and symbol ambiguity are almost guaranteed to make any automated transcription of math work buggy. Unlike with natural language, which you can produce on your approximate mobile keyboard, there is no way to auto-correct a symbol or number based on the context.

I also want to assume good faith, but some people in education are far more skeptical. I have been in meetings where those in charge or enforcing policy said things like "officially we have to have logins for each student", when a teachers said they preferred a simpler platform with a single quiz URL and students putting in their own names to identify their submissions.

I think one of the major problems with other products, is that they come out swinging with an accusation that all students cheat. Most tools these days have unique problems per students, which can make it harder to go over an assignment, because no one did the same problems.

I know there are varying opinions for what constitutes technology for improvement of a process, vs tech for the sake of tech. I think the world needs a digital way to represent symbolic math, it's one of the last complex processes done daily by millions that is locked out of a computer. Making something digital allows you to have undo/redo, and could eventually lead to a lot of interesting productivity enhancements. Nearly no one writes large amounts of text with pen anymore, because there is just so much more flexibility with a word processor.

One of the few things that forces people back to pen and paper is if part of what they need to write involve math formulas, because the current editors that include equation editing aren't fast enough. This platform isn't currently designed for mixing text and math, but it isn't too hard to add soon.

I totally think this would be a good container format for these various interactive tools. I think one of the reasons why they are not daily tools for many classes is that so much of math is symbolic. So far symbolic math has been confined to paper, even if a district decides to pay $100 per student per year for access to one of the existing services that will nicely collect your students final answers and machine grade them, students still do their work on paper, and the software is oblivious to it.

On tools like Geogebra, I think we need more interactive tools, but they need to exist alongside the symbolic work that everyone needs to do in most of their classes. Managing a classroom full of students working on computers (which can be distracting), is hard to justify if it is only displaying supplemental material and you also need to transition to "normal homework time".

I definitely need to add a generic diagram editor to make this useful for classes like physics.

Sorry, I forgot to mark the repo as public. Should be fixed now.

The project is a bit messy, I still need to set up proper dependency management and a build system. For now the app all lives in the index.html file.

Thanks! Definitely one of the hardest things to do getting products into a school is having them approved for support by IT. This doesn't apply to websites, unless they need to manage logins. While there would be some workflow optimizations with a fully managed web app, most districts wouldn't want to have a special gradebook for a single subject/department. This also simplifies development for me early on, so I can focus on the rest of the user experience without a bunch of dev ops work to keep the service up.

Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the value of all of the bitcoins to the total assets under management of the large banks? Many of them manage over a trillion in assets. Bitcoin is designed to be a replacement for bank accounts and credit cards in a sense, just without all of the centralized authority and meat powered overhead to keep everyone trusting it. Its kind of crazy that it has worked out so well. While there have been significant investments on hardware to power the network, I'd have to assume the cost of maintaining the network is pennies compared to what a bank spends to manage assets. That is the real disruptive power of bitcoin.

I don't think it is fair to say the code quality is low. There are a lot of complex concepts in the optimizer and the community is always working to add tooling and documentation to make it easier for newer developers.

There are some organizational quirks to how the code is written. It has been around for a long time, so it still has some design elements from working within older Java versions. Like many projects it is reliant on integration tests, likely more than would be desirable.

As far as the wider Apache ecosystem, I know there are projects that get by with pretty low code quality. Unfortunately there aren't many central voices at Apache enforcing specific policies around how codebases are managed, they are more focused on community development. I think they may be better off trying to take a closer look at codebases during incubation. Then again, there is no excess of resources waiting around to review code, and a lot of budding communities that want to take part.