Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions

#121

Post by mikekchar » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

hyperpallium wrote: post #44

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? ... one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. When I tutored, I found students often had some misunderstanding, somewhere. So my task was to listen , to find that misunderstanding, so I could correct it. This "teaching" is listening, more than talking. The idea is they are lost, but to know what direction they need, I…

I tend to believe in some of Stephen Krashen's notions of language acquisition. Specifically that there is a difference between learning (being able to remember and repeat something) and acquisition (being able to use it fluently). Also that acquisition comes from comprehension. I also believe that language acquisition is no different than any the acquisition of any other skill. Many people don't agree with these ideas, but I'm laying it out as my assumptions before I start :-)

With that in mind, one of the interesting findings in language acquisition studies is that when free reading (reading things for pleasure), it takes 95% comprehension of the text in order to acquire new grammar and vocabulary in context (quite a bit higher than most people imagine -- which is one of the reason people advance a lot more slowly than they might otherwise).

With that, just like your experience, the key to teaching is to ensure that the student comprehends at least 95% of what you are saying. The only way to ensure this is by constantly testing their comprehension with a two way dialog. Once a very high level of comprehension is reached, and once enough repetition happens to remember the thing, you will acquire the knowledge.

It is incredibly difficult to do this unless you are teaching 1:1. There is a special technique called "circling" that you can use to teach language to a larger number of students and it worked extremely well for me. I still can't effectively do it for more than about 10 or 15 though. If you think in a 45 minute class, if I have 15 students, then each student gets 3 minutes of my time. It's not actually surprising that classes of 30 or 40 basically impossible.

Quick note: I'm no longer teaching, in case it is unclear from the above.

Re: Questions

#122

Post by Waterluvian » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:11 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #110

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage. Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" envi…

> On the web, you can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote call entirely.

This is true if you go to a production website and try to start debugging. But it's untrue for any modern development environment. The minification comes later and even then, source maps are first class supported in browsers, mapping the minified code to the source.

It's funny. In my experience the web debug tools are some of the best of any language/environment I've experienced.

Re: Questions

#123

Post by lisper » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:12 PM UTC

dasmoth wrote: post #113

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

I agree regarding the symptoms, but am less convinced that run-time efficiency is the sole (or perhaps even major) cause. If it were, I'd argue that we'd see less usage of, e.g. , Python. I don't know the true cause -- I wish I did. But I do do see a trend towards an ever more "hands-off" style of software development: large volumes of automated (especially unit) tests in preference to interactive approaches (or hybr…

This decision was made and become deeply entrenched long before Python came along. Python is pretty good, but even it is constrained by the decisions that went into the design of C, since Python is implemented in C. Its underlying data structures are C data structures. Its memory management is C memory management. The GIL is there because C.

Re: Questions

#124

Post by flexie » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:13 PM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #47

chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

Winter is not horribly dark and boring in Scandinavia unless you are super rich. It’s equally dark and boring for everyone. And virtually everybody in Scandinavia can afford to travel south to sunnier places for a few weeks, if that’s what they want.

I’d say proficiency in English and quite wealthy populations is what matters.

Re: Questions

#125

Post by Tongueincheek » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #124

unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

Winter is not horribly dark and boring in Scandinavia unless you are super rich. It’s equally dark and boring for everyone. And virtually everybody in Scandinavia can afford to travel south to sunnier places for a few weeks, if that’s what they want. I’d say proficiency in English and quite wealthy populations is what matters.

That's not true. The super rich are taking luxury vacations and spa trips.

Re: Questions

#126

Post by mrborgen » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:20 PM UTC

Shameless self-promotion:

"Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else?"

That's one of the things we (Scrimba) are trying to enable dev teams to do seamlessly these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsorl3-TjdY

Instructions on how to try our beta can be found here: https://scrimba.com:9000/@welcome

Re: Questions

#127

Post by plaidfuji » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:26 PM UTC

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?

I think the answer to both of these looks something like a text- and figure-heavy Jupyter notebook distributed with a Docker container and embedded datasets.

The point being that books and papers introduce people to certain datasets, then teach how to gain insight from them. This would add the ability to interact programmatically with the data and equations being presented. I’m talking about technical textbooks here specifically.

I don’t know what the successor is to the scientific journal. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this and every time I’m less convinced it can be disrupted. It will require a coordinated international effort.

Re: Questions

#128

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #9

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently. The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of cha…

A larger economy is more diversified, diversity will create a regression to the mean. And sheer scale creates momentum -- it takes a lot to accelerate and a lot to decelerate.

Less diversified economies show wider swings. Australia rode on the sheep's back for most of a century, these days the country's fortunes closely track the prices of coal and iron ore.

Still, from indicators like number of public companies, market capitalisation and so forth, the USA's economy is growing less diverse at the moment.

Re: Questions

#129

Post by shimon » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

Maybe the reason for this has more to do with the type of development structure that helps a language get scale.

The rich powerful development environments you've described exist primarily in proprietary, integrated environments. If you want to integrate the editor, debugger, OS, and language, it helps to be able to coordinate the design of all those components.

On the other hand, languages that have gotten to huge popular scale have typically been more open in their specification and implementation process. Perhaps this is because the creators of breakthrough tools that drive language adoption (like web frameworks or data science kits) prefer these tools, or because the sorts of conditions that lead to creation of such tools are inherently marginalized ones. In other words, if you're a happy iOS developer using a lovely integrated world of xcode and swift, you're not going to spot a dramatically underserved development niche.

Re: Questions

#130

Post by mvilim » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes with almost unavoidable slowdowns and inefficiencies. The Lockheed P-80 is nowhere near as complex as the F-35. The BART extension might take longer to build than the transcontinental railroad, but there was no networking equipment on that railroad.

It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad (i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up). To be fair, most of the examples in the original article are indeed "deep" projects, but, for example, the Empire State Building was constructed quickly partly because there were 3500 people working on it. As technology has advanced, deep projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the last, there is still complexity added at every level.