Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823166

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I lived and worked in Beijing for over 5yrs and I think his conclusions are in general pretty accurate. Which is fairly impressive for spending only 3wks there.

The number of issues surrounding the idea (customs, legal issues, etc.) are obvious, and the discussions around them reminds me of the questions thrown at many of the other major sharing economy start-ups initially (Uber, AirBnB, et al.), but with a good team and some experimentation they will figure them out, as other major startups have done and continue to do.

People who have spent a good chunk of time in countries outside the US, already know people have been informally doing this en masse for a _long_ time. I have family in in West Africa who would be using this years ago if available, and I have lived in Asia, and other countries where every time I travel there are friends and friends of friends who ask me to buy and carry goods on their behalf, in both directions.

To me it seems Shypmate is just creating a formal system for these actions to take place, and if successful, will make it more efficient, useful, and available to more people while extracting some value for themselves (as any startup seeking profitability should).

Good luck to the team. I think there is a lot of potential here.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940470

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Don't have a great reason why I chose it other than that it was really popular at the time, and I felt it would cover general day-to-day language well, which it did.

It takes real determination to correctly shadow though, like patio11 said you need to reproduce the sample _exactly_. This can cause you to spend an hour trying to perfect <5min of speech. But it's extremely rewarding. For example, when I was learning Mandarin I chose a 20 episode (1hr each) tv show as my shadowing material. It took close to half a year of working on it almost every night to finish. But afterwards I had "somehow" developed a deep sense of what words/phrases/idioms/etc _felt right_ to say when speaking and how to say them in that oh-so-close-to-native like way. The topic has been extensively discussed on the learn any language forums. But suffice to say, if you want to improve your spoken ability, doing a lot of shadowing would help.

[1] http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485339

Points: 43

# Comments: 7

In answer to both questions, I do both. I usually go through the articles from #1 to ~#120, reading articles I find interesting, and usually reading all the HN comments for that article too (you can learn a ton from reading more than just the top couple of comments).

Sounds like this approach would suck up a lot of time, but HN submission topics are often pretty narrow, and my interests are somewhat narrow too, so I usually only end up reading only 4-5 HN articles or less a day.

I've been looking forward to a tool that would make going through the posts easier, so very happy to see this!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218012

Points: 30

# Comments: 7

I'm very curious to see how they go about automating preprocessing and identifying algorithms to use, as I thought this step was part of the hard-to-automate magic that separates your data scientists from data analyst/statistician/etc.?

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/users

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7392536

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There is something to be said about the drawbacks of living in such a small but highly networked society (esp. in S. Korea where the entire country has a particular 'small town' feel) but I do not have the energy to organize and put my thoughts to keyboard at the moment.

After that, you should have a good foundation to self-direct your learning by studying relevant texts (like the two you already picked up) and finding data sets you can play with to just see what you can do and push your skills further.

Good luck to you.

The guy organizing it doesn't seem to be around anymore, but could shoot him an email to check.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4686564

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

As a long-time avid reader, over the past decade its been an interesting change going from a wholly physical library to mostly digital, thanks to my Galaxy Note and Kindle.

But something I truly miss is having friends come over and curiously rifle through the books on my shelf and the conversations that were started as they asked about each one (as well as the opportunity to show-off a bit). Almost as nice an experience was, sneaking a peek at the cover of the book a guy sitting next to me on the subway/bus was reading and going on to discover that it is another good read.

So far, none of the digital bookstores/libraries have been able to sufficiently reproduce this experience for me.. though I have hope they, or something else, will be able to in the near future. Until then, I will keep a physical copy of any favorites on my shelf for that next curious mind.

The deal is that big. Youku/Tudou is now THE video site of China's 1.6billion+ population.