AFAIK (but it's been a few years since I researched this) there are exactly two: the Profitec Go and the Lelit Victoria. Both are small(ish) and warm up quickly, unlike machines intended for professional use like the La Mazocco. The difference between the two is that the Profitec has the pressure adjustment on the outside while the Lelit requires you to open the machine up. However, adjusting the pressure is mostly a one-time affair, so that's not much of a problem.

Like all machines intended for home use neither will let you (easily) pull a shot and steam milk simultaneously, because they have only one reservoir and the temperature for pulling a shot is different from the temperature for steaming. You can get simple, cheap, milk frothing devices, however, which work pretty well.

(all of this is assuming you already have a good grinder and decent coffee, which is, as everyone else said, much more important).

Not only are the songs they wrote really good and catchy, Ramones are one of those bands where it sounds so easy anyone can do it but if you give it a try, you quickly find out it’s difficult to get the nuances right and your results, unlike theirs, sound crude and obviously amateurish.

They’re like AC/DC in that respect. Or Melvins.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47519308

Points: 138

# Comments: 143

Arguing that this is meaningfully different from what happens in our own brains is not something I would personally be comfortable with.

Khan hides it well, though - it’s listed smack in the middle of sixth grade math and high school math courses. I skimmed through the list (again) and found some college math but not all. Maybe this is a new offering?

Which is where this beats self study using books, I think. With a book, I can sort of wing it and think I understand something when I only do so very superficially whereas when you do the problems you truly learn what you understand and what you do not. And MathAcademy is only problems, so …

I decided start with Calculus I on MathAcademy because that was the last thing I did in High School. MathAcademy disagreed and told me to do PreCalculus and even bits of Algebra II first, but I knew better (MathAcademy was right and in hindsight I should’ve just started the Foundation courses to build up my pretty weak algebra skills again).

For Calculus I simply use the textbook that’s recommended at the link above. As far as I can tell, it’s good. I don’t do the problems, though - for that I use MathAcademy.

They say 1 point is equivalent to 1 minute of work and that you should earn at least 45 points a day. Well, for me 1 point is nowhere near 1 minute of work: I’m sloppy and sometimes downright stupid so it’s 1,5 minutes at best and often much, much more.

Banging your head against a wall every day for more than an hour (sometimes much more) just to get to what they consider to be the minimum of 45 points is no fun, and probably even counterproductive. I managed to keep it up for four months and made reasonable progress during that time (on getting back to where I was at the end of High School, 30 years ago) but it also burnt me out. I’ve now scaled it back to 30 minutes (not points!) a day. As a result my progress is now glacial.

Also, they’re very much of the “just do lots of problems and you’ll learn mathematic concepts and principles by osmosis” school of math instruction. For me I had to buy a textbook to get some extra explanation.

The good thing is that the problems seem well thought out and the spaced repetition system definitely works (for me, anyway).

I’m going to keep it up, because I have enough disposable income to afford it (though it is much too expensive for what it is) and I really want to bring my math skills up to a level where I can follow along the math in ML papers (and also because math, it turns out, is kind of elegant and interesting). I could go the self-study route, but then I’d have to spend time and effort guiding myself and figuring out what it is I needed to work on. If nothing else, MathAcademy is good at taking care of this for you so you can focus on the math itself.

I think it’s very expensive, and the correct price should be €$25/ month at most, imho, but its spaced repetition system definitely provides value over self study.

In such a setup, lack of democratic oversight is not a bug but a feature. It prevents democratically elected but possibly not entirely stable governments from doing something stupid. The drawback, of course, is that it also prevents democratically elected and intensely well meaning governments from doing the right thing if the supranational entity does not wish to facilitate that right thing.

This setup works (after a fashion) for a group of small and fairly weak countries, but for a single large and powerful country like the US there simply isn’t a supranational entity powerful enough to reign it in.

I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44267387

Points: 5

# Comments: 0