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sharp11

693 karma · joined December 21, 2012

Email at pobox.com using name of cranberry.
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sharp11··on The average college student today
From your numerous comments on this topic, it seems that you are remarkably self-aware (for a college student) about your own learning process. That is kind of amazing. I hope you really know just how broken the system that you're describing is and that it is absolutely worth fighting to figure out how to really learn something hard.

Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.

sharp11··on Recovering from a kidney donation
Penny Lane just made a documentary about donating one of her kidneys to a stranger. It’s called Confessions of a Good Samaritan: https://www.sandboxfilms.org/films/confessions-of-a-good-sam...
sharp11··on Cellular communities reveal trajectories of brain ageing and Alzheimer's disease
More details here without paywall:

In game-changer, Israeli researchers find Alzheimer's markers 20 years before onset

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-game-changer-israeli-resear...

sharp11··on Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a single Swift codebase
This looks super interesting, congrats on reaching 1.0! If you do a lot of customization on the Android side, do merge conflicts become a headache? Also, does the Skip plugin assume that you're using Xcode's built-in git?
sharp11··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Personally, I find the writing to be just fine. It is clear and cogent. I don’t have enough background to follow all the details, but I certainly hope you are not discouraged from pursuing big ideas by negative comments on style!
sharp11··on Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot
As someone who uses ellipsis often, but certainly never with sarcasm in mind, this was fascinating and shocking to me to learn this. I also want to appreciate @bluestein’s graceful response to the misunderstanding.
sharp11··on The Physics of Karate (2021)
I’m disappointed this was all about the stunt of breaking things. I study Okinawan karate and true masters generate tremendous power via the tantien and rooting into the ground. It would be interesting to read a western analysis of that.
sharp11··on Ask HN: Buying Yourself a Job
I’m surprised that no one has suggested: pick something that you actually care about, which may not be a lucrative job opportunity, but gives you the opportunity to “make a difference“. Most nonprofits desperately need help with their tech.

A while back, I took a leave of absence from the tech industry to work on climate change issues, and was amazed at what it felt like to work on issues that really seemed important.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be climate change, but if you are interested in that, you might have a look at: https://airminers.org/

sharp11··on Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from science fiction to reality
There is an open source effort to do carbon removal: https://openaircollective.cc/
sharp11··on Show HN: Applite – Clean Homebrew front end app for macOS built with SwiftUI
I'm not the target audience (I prefer CLI), but as an iOS dev just wanted to say kudos. Great idea and looks to be very well executed. I'm curious to know how your experience with SwiftUI was on MacOS?
sharp11··on Physicists discover a new switch for superconductivity
Like many here I was wowed by the physics of this article but also wanted to say this is some great science writing. Super clear and to the point.
sharp11··on Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
That is utterly fascinating. From his pov, is it a problem, or only from yours?
sharp11··on Launch HN: Patterns (YC S21) – A much faster way to build and deploy data apps
Congrats on the launch! As an iOS dev who dabbles in ML, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by "data applications" and who this is for. I'm guessing it's targeted at teams that crank out lots of small apps and therefore investment in learning your platform would make sense? It would be helpful if you gave clearer explanation of the use case(s), beyond the generic "customer data platforms, fintech companies building lending and risk engines, and AI companies building prompt engineering pipelines" (which, tbh, means nothing to me).
sharp11··on Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
谢谢!
sharp11··on Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
Could you provide a link to original (Chinese) article?
sharp11··on The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
I can't speak to Spain, specifically, but the relationship between climate change and wildfires is well-established. See for instance: https://www.preventionweb.net/files/73797_wildfiresbriefingn...
sharp11··on The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
Our past forest management practices are a part of it, but climate change is also a huge part: <https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/>
sharp11··on Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?
This kind of thing is what Wildlabs is all about: https://www.wildlabs.net/
sharp11··on Lambda School is renaming itself to Bloom Institute of Technology
I do know boot camp grads that have succeeded.

Lambda’s deferred tuition model is life-changing for the people who can make it through. Many of their students come from backgrounds and life situations where no other option is really possible. That alone makes me want to root for the whole approach.

It’s true that the teaching and curriculum are uneven, and i wish they were less so, but you could say the same about many colleges.

sharp11··on U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
There is a moral hazard here, but the reality is that we’ve passed the point where emissions reductions alone can get us where we want to be. We will need both reductions and removal.
sharp11··on Swift Regrets
Unlike many commenters here, I came to praise Swift. Of course there will be regrets -- nothing's perfect -- but on the whole I think the designers (and community) did an amazing job with Swift. I say that after having written multiple apps in Objective C -- I would never consider going back.

Optionals and null safety, first class enums, first class functions are just lovely in swift, all in a language that is super readable when well-written.

sharp11··on Ask HN: How can I become the best software developer I can be?
Read Anders Ericsson’s book on deliberate practice
sharp11··on eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
If you're interested in learning to ID birds by ear, check out Larkwire[1][2]. (Full disclosure: it's my app.) I can attest that knowing what you're hearing is really a delightful way to expand one's connection to nature!

[1] iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/larkwire-learn-bird-songs/id54... [2] web app: https://www.larkwire.com

sharp11··on Powell’s says it won’t sell books on Amazon anymore
And similarly https://libro.fm for audiobooks
sharp11··on Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple
Could you elaborate? Doesn’t this require users to have telegram installed?
sharp11··on Show HN: Thinc, a new deep learning library by the makers of spaCy and FastAPI
... and fast.ai?
sharp11··on Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup
Self-promotion here, but my app, Supercoco, is far better for serious learners (Spanish only, iOS only). Focuses on speaking and listening rather than reading and writing, and is based on a large quantity of high quality content (about 300 conversations) that most apps just don’t have. https://supercocoapp.com
sharp11··on New plan to remove trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: Bury it
As the article explains, it’s sequestered in soil through practices like no-till.
sharp11··on Ask HN: Do you know of any good product taking advantage of voice interactions?
Might not be what you meant, but SuperCoco is an iOS app that teaches Spanish primarily through voice interactions.
sharp11··on Ask HN: Modestly priced mobile SDKs for 1 to 1 customer support messaging?
smooch.io is great
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