jliechti1

As far as putting on a show and performing with poise, Gatto easily wins. In at least some specific areas like clubs, Vova seems to rival him though. He is really consistent and has demonstrated he can perform pretty well too. Here's a direct link to Vova's video [0]. This is probably one of my favorite juggling videos to watch.

Incidentally, I believe Vova has moved on as well- he got a degree in Computer Science and is doing software development these days. His sister Olga has also gone on into engineering.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEb3YknGUks

The Taipei.py (Taipei Python User Group) also meets there pretty regularly and they are all really friendly people.

http://www.meetup.com/Taipei-py/

Reading source code of prominent projects is a good way to get better, but it's hard to understand the architecture if you aren't aware of the design constraints/requirements that led it to be the way. Surely there must be a way to fast track this to some extent. Under the deliberate practice model by Anders Ericsson's (i.e. the 10,000 hour rule), simply reading and understanding code is suboptimal because of the lack of immediate feedback on your understanding. I think it'd be interesting to see tutorials/guides that showed how a system design has changed throughout its history as well as the reasons for those changes.

Here is a specific example:

    Traditional Chinese

    車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
    不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)

    Simplified Chinese

    车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
    不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)

In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.

The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new comments?

Not Internet related, but there are some large students going on in Taiwan right now [0] based on concerns on how a new trade agreement with China was passed. The bill was passed in a legal way, but many of the discussions around it were behind closed doors and the Taiwanese people feel that the government is no longer "representing the people." The response against has been pretty described as "unprecedented", people who are normally not interested in politics are getting involved to see how they can help.

"We do not want to clash with the police...we just have to let the government know that never try to fool the people."[1]

I find their vigilance inspiring. This level of spontaneous organization seems difficult to carry out in the US though. Taiwan is considerably smaller than the US, and I think that makes a large difference unfortunately.

[0]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-19/taiwan-students-occ...

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/19/world/asia/taiwan-student-prot...

EDIT (to respond to guard-of-terra): > "Turns out they just sit in their office and pretend nothing happens."

Definitely a valid point. We shall see how long this sustains for.To clarify, when I say "getting involved" I mean many people are taking to the streets, not just armchair activism.

"For weeks I've been investigating...the killer with a certain morbid fascination..."

"This is in real time!"

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic...see if I can track an IP address!"

Link to clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

"We provided them with a copy of P1 without explaining that it was a program, and based on preconceptions from their past experience, they had studied P1 under the assumption that it was a mixture of requirements specification and top level design. They were convinced it was incomplete because it did not address issues such as data structure design and execution order.”

"The other kind of response had more to do with the 'cleverness' of the solution...[one of them] described the Haskell prototype as being 'too cute for its own good'.

These both sound like they could have been written today.

Reminds me of this from the Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages:

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that 'a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?'

So right now I'm not far enough in the learning curve to see all the benefits R provides. Is it worth investing time in R now if I'm already pretty familiar with a good amount of the Python ecosystem? Or, would it make more sense to continue on in Python?

Feynman explains this really well when trying to answer a question about magnets:

"Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital... when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why."

"I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands. I'd soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see."

The key quote being:

"I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you're more familiar with."

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

Transcript: http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_wh...

This could have the effect of validating the NSA's activities in many Americans' eyes ("see, the NSA is unable to its job without invading our privacy") and we would see a whole new round of new laws capitalizing on Americans' fears of terrorists (which means their terrorism succeeded).

"According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two."

Here are the categories they list:

    Management, Business, and Financial
    Computer, Engineering, and Science
    Education, Legal, Community Service, Arts, and Media
    Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
    Service
    Sales and Related
    Office and Administrative Support
    Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
    Construction and Extraction
    Installation, Maintenance, and Repair
    Production
    Transportation and Material Moving

    Sales and Related 
    Service
    Office and Administration Support
    Production
    Transporation and Material Moving

I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this kind.

Most on HN seem to support the idea that not everyone should become a computer programmer (as a profession), but being exposed to the ideas in used in CS are very helpful for learning how to think about certain types of problems.

Personally, from a practical standpoint, I think a lot of people could benefit by learning basic scripting to automate computing tasks - I've seen way too many people doing extremely tedious tasks by hand, when a simple script could have saved them hours.

---Similar discussions---

Everybody does not need to learn to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6237007 (74 comments)

Why everyone should not learn to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5302157 (62 comments)

Please learn to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3975992 (147 comments)

Please don't learn to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3975744 (268 comments)

"© 2013. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners".

I guess this is just one person aggregating the information together?

I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.

In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!

Just curious - does "require" here really many they are legally required to evaluate your resume in this way? Wow.

One of the authors of Learning from Data, Hsuan-Tien Lin, just started a Coursera course on Machine Learning taught in Mandarin Chinese (with English slides).

https://www.coursera.org/course/ntumlone

One thing I really like about Learning from Data is that it gives Machine Learning a certain "framework" instead of just being a hodgepodge of different techniques. The book is quite clear on the mathematical underpinnings, while at the same time introducing various "rules of thumb" for practical considerations.

[0]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht...

What can you remember about the person standing in front of you in the ATM line this morning?

What can you remember about the unicyclist you saw this morning?

This is interesting. It's not just words, but events as well. It seems our minds are quite adept at finding things that are unordinary. If you asked someone living in a city environment "How many people did you see walking today?", no one would be able to answer. However, if you asked "How many people did you see riding unicycles today?", you would likely get a pretty definite response.

I've spent a good amount of time learning memory techniques to retain information that is largely abstract/arbitrary (learning Japanese/Chinese characters for example). The key to these techniques is to take something abstract and figure out how it encode it in concrete images/stories (a mental "bookkeeping" system like Roman Rooms is helpful as well). However, the strength of the encoding relies on how memorable your images are. In essence, you are creating a mapping between the brain's ability to work with images and abstract knowledge. Generally, the more crazy, ridiculous or absurd these image/stories are, the more memorable they will be, and thus the easier it will be to remember whatever you are trying to remember.

A task that normally seems extremely difficult (say, memorizing the Periodic Table, or the order of a deck of cards, or even just remembering people's names!), becomes almost trivial if you map the knowledge into something the brain is easier to understand.

---

When I first came across HN (around the time I started programming), I was a bit overwhelmed and intimidated upon seeing the projects/people/success stories in the community. I spent a lot of time just reading before I started posting. I've heard other people express similar thoughts.

Eventually, I just decided to start posting - there is no need to "wait" until you have a certain skill/expertise in an area. You can still make valid contributions to the discussion (of course, please read the posting guidelines).

So any lurkers out there, I encourage you to stop lurking and join the community. I did - and have consequently met many interesting people through HN and learned a lot of new things.

---

On another note, the only group of people that seem to get tech/"internet" related (being purposely vague here) news faster than HN is people who use Reddit. I've had many conversations with friends who use Reddit where I will say "Hey, did you hear about X?" and they respond "Yeah, I already saw it Y hours ago on Reddit." Usually the difference isn't very large.

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." [0]

Most people don't perceive these changes to affect them/their daily lives, so they are not concerned with it. They don't care.

[0]: http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

"We (i.e. the Python core developers) predicted when Python 3.0 was released that it would take about 5 years for 3.x to become the "default" choice for new projects over the 2.x series."

He suggests the 5 year timeline begins in June 2009 with the release of 3.1 (since 3.0 still had many bugs) - so that means there is a little more than half a year left for it to become the default, if the prediction holds true.

The rest of his post goes into the issues in adopting Python 3.x.

[0]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63859/why-do-...

"PTT is arguably the largest BBS in the world with more than 1.5 million registered users. During peak hours, there are over 150,000 users online. It has over 20,000 boards with a multitude of topics, and more than 20000 articles and 500000 comments are posted every day."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System