Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383416

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For example, I broke down problems with to-dos, such as:

1. Find the definition for what math_term_X means in a particular problem.

2. (For breaking down part of the problem): Figure out how to show that a particular object is lesser than or equal to another project.

3. Write down headings for each case I need to prove.

...and so on.

Writing down explicit steps was far more practically helpful to me, than my previous conception of problem-solving from the quote about how Feynman solves problems (that is: "Write down the problem, think real hard, write down the solution"). Some people may not need to write down steps, but I was personally able to learn a lot more with a specific, more verbalized approach.

It's very neat and helpful to have a flowchart suited to any general problem, which I'll try out in addition to my current approach of writing down a list of to-dos for solving specific problems. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36313901

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The full source of the excerpt is also a news report in Le Parisien, a daily newspaper (co-written with the AFP): https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/bruno-lemaire-veut-reform...

[1] https://www.legalplace.fr/guides/abattement-auto-entrepreneu...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257337

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36244547

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230065

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I was moderately curious about Vim but didn't really need to use the tool, but eventually after many months, I got curious enough to start and complete vimtutor. The introduction to vimtutor says it should take 30 minutes, but it took me 1.5-2 hours over two days while also making notes after the exercises to better remember the lessons (in my case, my approach to vimtutor worked, as I use Vim nearly every day for personal notes to keep practicing).

However, I put off vimtutor for months because it looked like work. While completing vimtutor, the process of completion also felt like work. A more friendly UI like the submitted article can help people easily get started and increase completion rates, which makes it easier to pick up the skill.

I didn't check if the submitted article does this, but newer interactive Vim tutor projects can also teach commands that I believe are essential to reducing the friction of using Vim. For example, throughout vimtutor I spammed jjjjjj to get down and did the same with k to go up, but only later found out that Ctrl+B & Ctrl+F (go back or forward a half-screen) or Ctrl+U & Ctrl+D (go up or down a full screen) were far easier ways to scroll, or at least 4k or 4j (four lines up or four lines down). This makes Vim much more pleasant to use, and makes it far easier to navigate through a file.

Still, I agree that vimtutor is great as it's free and in the console, but is room to make the introduction more friendly. $15 seems pretty steep, though, especially as there are other free alternatives out there to make it easier to learn Vim (at the very least, video tutorials and written guides).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36021799

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013506

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988602

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In fact, the minimalist podcast version of The Economist magazine (technically a weekly newspaper) is very good, where presenters read articles word-by-word. In 2018, "only 10 percent of its app users listen to audio, but they tend to be very loyal." [1] I'm one of the regular listeners, because otherwise, I find it much more difficult to keep up with the magazine (it's easy to listen to while exercising or commuting, but when I have the free time to sit down and read, I usually prefer enjoying my time some other way).

Similarly, The New Yorker and The Atlantic also have audio versions of a good number of their articles, too. Out of all the publications mentioned, The New Yorker's audio recordings sound to me, with the most distinctive with music and a radio drama-like voice actor. But overall, the adaptations are essentially indiscriminate from the written word.

The goal of recorded news and magazine readings to understand the material to roughly have the same experience as the readers, where you can have your hands free to focus on something else. I never choose the audio version of the news because it's more entertaining, but rather because it's more convenient. So, the focus is on utility more than entertainment, though the material itself can be interesting.

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Perhaps that is why audiobook listeners generally don't have a distinct taste apart from book readers. If the audiobook deviates noticeably from the content of a book, it no longer becomes an audiobook, but an adaptation inspired by the source material. Then, book readers and audiobook listeners can no longer closely relate, due to the changes in the story.

At most, I do like audiobooks with a narrator with great voice acting to differentiate between the characters—for example, in an audiobook for Jane Austen's "Emma," the voice actor sounded very different for Emma & Harriet, and , Mr. Knightley & Frank Churchhill. The audiobook can also deviate from the source material in this sense, as the emotions expressed in dialogue are interpretations of the writer's intention (like the famous acting of "Harry, did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire?" in the film versus the book).

But once more, if the audiobook deviates too much, the reader can feel cheated as the experience is too different from the original material. At that point of deviation, a producer would best promote this as a "re-imagining"—which would be fairly separate from the original.

[1] https://digiday.com/media/economists-new-app-tries-keep-peop...

Alex Tapscott (at the talk as an Amherst College alumnus, known for being the CEO of a cryptocurrency company and writing a popular book published in 2016 about cryptocurrency): "The FBI started calling Bitcoin prosecution futures, because whenever someone spends it, down the road with enough information they can actually trace it back to who the original spender was, and they were able to reclaim a whole bunch of lost coin."

I searched a bit more to see if an FBI agent or attorney used the term on-the-record, but it looks like the closest source is a New York Times article that quoted lawyers without naming a name [2]: "Hence Bitcoin’s wry new nickname in legal circles: “Prosecution Futures.”

[1] https://www.amherst.edu/alumni/learn/amherstreads/pastfeatur...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/business/eagle-scout-idea... ; The MIT Technology Review cited this article with their report that prosecutors have begun to use the term "prosecution futures": https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/02/18/173936/marginall...

"For users at risk of losing their ability to speak — such as those with a recent diagnosis of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other conditions that can progressively impact speaking ability — Personal Voice is a simple and secure way to create a voice that sounds like them.

"Users can create a Personal Voice by reading along with a randomized set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on iPhone or iPad. This speech accessibility feature uses on-device machine learning to keep users’ information private and secure, and integrates seamlessly with Live Speech so users can speak with their Personal Voice when connecting with loved ones.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing is being able to communicate with friends and family,” said Philip Green, board member and ALS advocate at the Team Gleason nonprofit, who has experienced significant changes to his voice since receiving his ALS diagnosis in 2018. “If you can tell them you love them, in a voice that sounds like you, it makes all the difference in the world — and being able to create your synthetic voice on your iPhone in just 15 minutes is extraordinary.”

So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from.

But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951054

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940618

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My personal experience is with language learning, which might be comparable to focusing on sheet music and scales. When learning languages like Mandarin, Japanese, or Arabic, you can spend a lot of time focusing on fundamentals before getting started with how to say basic useful phrases (e.g. proper tones for Mandarin, and the alphabet system for Japanese and Arabic).

I spent more than a month learning the mundane fundamentals of tones in Mandarin before learning basic useful phrases. I was personally strongly convinced this was useful and was prepared for the mundanity, but I could easily see myself or other people quitting after spending several weeks without knowing more than a few phrases. With Arabic, too, I spent weeks with one teacher just focusing on the alphabet and how the letter shapes transform in certain letter combinations, without learning more than very basic phrases—which I appreciated, as the strong basis paid off down the line. Another teacher, however, spent about two-thirds of the time on phrases with romanization with English letters, and about a third of the time on the alphabet.

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For learners—especially adult students—already convinced about learning a subject, a mundane approach is acceptable because they already have the proper motivation to learn. But especially for younger students, perhaps it's okay to spend a good amount of time having fun learning the subject—but not in a way that's necessarily optimized for time.

For adolescents learning musical instruction, a better approach might be a split between theory and learning to play a simple but nice song without knowing how to read notes. But for already strongly-motivated students and/or adults, a few weeks or even months on more mundane can be even preferable, especially if the student has volunteered to spend their time working through the mundanity.