Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
It sounds useful to me because you can use tone information to help with the translation, which text-to-text translation can't do. But I'm not sure if that's how this model actually works.
Comment · 4 years ago
I see, so the answer is that the effect doesn't exist but it's easy to think it does by not controlling for a variable very well.
Comment · 4 years ago
Yes, the only videos demonstrations involve throwing the water into the air, but nothing in this article or the Wikipedia page about the effect suggest that throwing the water is necessary for the effect to occur. I don't even know where these people got the idea to do the experiment that way. Their result is way less interesting because it can be explained by surface area.
Comment · 4 years ago
Why am I unable to find a single good video on the internet demonstrating the mpemba effect occuring? If people were really heating their water before freezing it in Aristotle's time, then this shouldn't require any precise technology to reproduce. The article addresses the fact that this seems very easy to test, but then doesn't explain why no one's reproduced it on camera.
Comment · 4 years ago
What an interesting trick. A starting point to intuit a resolution: yes you have a 50% chance of doubling and a 50% of halving. But the doubling only happens if you have x dollars, and the halving only happens if you have 2x. So you can see you either gain x or lose x, so your expected return is 0.

When the amount you multiply your money by depends on the amount of money you currently have, you have to factor in your initial money to each case to compute expected return.

Comment · 4 years ago
The autocorrect method also uses a dictionary, and then some.
Comment · 4 years ago
The trick is to encode the numbers in binary, not plaintext. But still you'd probably want to use a Huffman coding rather than plain indexes so that the common words are shorter.
Comment · 4 years ago
Every time there's a post giving advice on making money or entrepeurship, the majority HN response is "but success is mostly luck" + "you need not want this kind of success". But when there's a post on, say, how to win at poker, people don't feel this need to bring up these points, even though they still apply at least as much. Somehow we're unable to accept the concept of picking a game and playing it when the game is getting rich or making an impact. I suppose it's because this game is so culture dominating that it affects those who don't play it too, as it makes everyone feel like they're supposed to be playing it, and resisting requires extra effort.

I guess this is fine and inevitable. But it makes me wonder where to go to find focused quality discourse about entrepreneurship / getting rich if not HN.

Comment · 4 years ago
Haha, even less effective than I expected but enjoyed the read nonetheless.

I think if you have the luxury of assuming every token is a dictionary word, you can do much better by simply encoding each word as its index in the dictionary. Using the pidgeonhole principle, you can probably prove that this is at least as good as the autocorrect approach no matter how sophisticated the autocorrect is.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
I think the main problem is that they're too attention grabbing. Especially in a UI in HN where everything else is plain text, an emoji would have so much visual weight your eyes would have trouble focusing on anything else on the page. Forbidding such visual grenades helps keep the focus on the content.
Comment · 4 years ago
This is pretty eye opening to me, I would have never thought anyone found C major more difficult to play in than other keys. To me, difficulty is directly proportional to the amount of stuff in the key signature, but that may be because I've never had proper education (~5 years of lessons as a child from a very casual teacher).
Comment · 4 years ago
This is really interesting, thank you for sharing! I wonder if it would have been more successful if it had just two rows instead. The duplicate rows add more power, but at the cost of adding ambiguity when sightreading, as you have to impromptu figure out what fingering you want to use. And it also makes it more expensive and intimidating looking. I feel like two rows would provide the core benefits while being more accessible. But I could be totally off, as I've never touched this thing.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton