1,234 karma · joined July 27, 2011
In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is "10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of 100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.
Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary"
Did PG's prediction come true?
My major was not CS and I am working for a well-known technology company as a software engineer. Feel free to reach out to me privately (email in profile).
It uses Python's Twisted framework. You don't need to use this for your development, but I would recommend working through and understanding the tutorial. Once you get the concepts, you'll be able to apply them to other libraries/concepts.
I used Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi to learn the characters and then would practice them in a space repetition system. A few years later I can still write most of them. His method has you create a story and make mental image associations for each character. Eventually you forget the stories over time, but the character usually sticks.
And for those that don't know, it's not a small city (urban population: 2.7 million, metro population: 4.7 million). I had some young kids there tell me I was the first westerner they had ever seen.
You can listen to the actual clip here (I wouldn't say he screamed at him, but it was forceful):
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/11/audio_reco...
And the HN discussion on this article:
The biggest problem for me is the availability of Chinese audio books (specifically, non-abridged versions - anyone have recommended sources?) When your reading level is high enough to read novels, the English translation is no longer that important - if I could just get the Chinese audio and text I would be really happy. It looks like this is targeted at beginners. Not sure how helpful it will be for them, but I see a lot of potential for more intermediate/advanced learners. There's always that gap in language learning between text books and real texts that has to be overcome. I think this kind of service could be great for that.
Right now I'm reading Tian Long Ba Bu (天龍八部), and have gone through the first 200 pages like this (simultaneous reading/listening), and it's been really helpful.
Also, a feature request: give an option to display the text in Traditional or Simplified Chinese. There are browser extension to use this, but it'd me more convenient to not have to use it on every page.
For machine learning, a good place to start is Andrew Ng's course on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/course/ml
It's pretty light on math, while at the same time giving you experience in implementing and understanding these techniques.
From there, I might recommend Learning from Data and the associated video lectures:
https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
It is a bit of a jump, but it is a great course in presenting the field of machine learning and explaining the mathematical and statistical underpinnings in a systematic way.
Listen a lot, as often as possible. Watch TV and movies - there are many on Youtube and Youku. I like to convert interviews from Youtube into mp3s and listen to them during the day during down time. Pick a character in these shows and try to imitate their accent (stick to someone your own gender). Try not to read the subtitles (even the Chinese subtitles).
If you want to go further, strip out voice clips from these TV and movies and put them into an SRS system (Anki, Mnemosyne, etc...).
It may not have as many features as Anki, but it has a good plugin architecture and the UI is very simple.
Like David Spector, he is known nearly everywhere in China and has been on TV for decades. Also, most Westerners have never heard of him. Does any know any equivalents like this in South Korea or any other Asian countries?
This - it needs to be emphasized more. I feel a bit pedantic when I make this point, but I really think it's crucial.
If you read the original research, it's not 10000 hours of just practice. There is a reason many people can play golf for 30 years (and probably accumulate 10000+ hours of play), but still never even get close to shooting par. The term they use in the research is deliberate practice. The quality of the practice is just as important as the practice itself. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes things a habit. If you develop the wrong techniques in an area, you'll reach plateaus and hit a point where you can't progress. Deliberate practice requires tasks that are designed to stretch you in specific areas and have fast feedback loops so you are able to correct mistakes quickly. This is easier to apply in some domains (music, sports, etc...) than others.
Anyone know who else they might be bringing in? Does Zuckerberg do it every year?
"Although several people are drawing that comparison, they're really not in the same class. OPERA did an extremely thorough analysis of the faster than light neutrino result before they published. In the end it turned out to be a very subtle experimental error that cause the problems.
In contrast, this is just junk science from start to finish. The initial claim was likely an outright lie to lure investors."
Prediction: after some time, they will just roll out this policy everywhere - including US domestic airports.
"But the complexity of any proposed solution for this puzzle is immense, to me: it requires the parser (or more precisely, the lexer) to be able to switch back and forth between indent-sensitive and indent-insensitive modes, keeping a stack of previous modes and indentation level. Technically that can all be solved (there's already a stack of indentation levels that could be generalized). But none of that takes away my gut feeling that it is all an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption."
source: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
EDIT: This was from an earlier proposal in 2006.
Anecdotally, I think the answer is yes. Concentration is a skill you can develop like anything else. The kind of high with programming for me is similar to that experienced when rehearsing/performing music.
I used to perform on a competitive drumline and we would have 8-10 hour rehearsals on the weekends (usually in 3 hour blocks). One of the main ideas expressed was that if you want to perform at a very high level, and do it consistently, you must always rehearse at performance levels and be hyper attentive to details. These rehearsals were mentally exhausting. But over a few months, my ability to concentrate and to quickly jump into a flow state improved dramatically.
One thing that surprised me - after rehearsing with a metronome for that many hours a day and usually at the same speed, say 120 BPM (beats per minute). When we would change speeds, faster or slower, even a 2 BPM different (118 BPM or 122 BPM) felt noticeably different than 120 BPM.
After I stopped performing that group, my ability to distinguish these small difference in tempo regressed. I can't do it anymore. A wide gap like 110 and 120 is noticeable (probably even to non-musicians), but not only a 2 beats difference.
If you want to try this yourself, get someone around you to go to http://www.webmetronome.com/ and set it to 120 BPM and 122 BPM and see if you can correctly guess which one they set it to.
Two weeks ago I saw a post about Full Stack Startups. Is full-stack marketer another new term? What distinguishes a marketer from a full stack marketer? (I'm asking sincerely). Do hiring managers post jobs these days looking specifically for full-stack marketers?
But I guess everyone is learning that this is not a substitute for all the grunt work needed to grow a business. PG wrote it in his "Do Things that Don't Scale" essay:
--
On another note, I hope this term doesn't catch on, because full stack already has an abundance of meanings depending on who you are talking to:
- Full Stack Web Developer (backend, frontend, maybe design?)
- Full Stack Developer (backend, frontend, design, ???)
- Full Stack Developer (older meaning) (knowledgable about hardware and software)
- Full Stack Startup (developing, business, and everything else?. They call it a "complete, end-to-end product or service")
I think this makes a large difference for foreign language learning. I never focus on learning words. I always learn words in the context of a sentence. I choose my sentences by taking them from things people say, books I read, videos I watch, etc...This is especially helpful because when I review the sentences in the SRS sometime later, I will read the sentence and almost always recall the broader context in which I learned it (the page in the book, the scene in the movie). This works really well for learning how to use words (and idioms especially) in their proper context.
Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice: http://mnemosyne-proj.org/. Very customizable, but a lot easier to get started with than Anki. It's a local app, so no Internet needed, like Memrise. The one downside is no good mobile app version.
I use this daily for my foreign language studies. It has less features than Anki, but the interface is pretty clean, intuitive to use, and has a powerful plugin system. Plus, the whole thing is open source, written in Python, and highly extensible.