tokenadult
Joined 18 years ago
Karma
62,538
Submissions
11,055
Member since
Nov 17
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Thanks for sharing this particular Feynman lecture. The treatment here, using what are basically the Peano postulates to derive the field properties of the real numbers and then the basic structure of secondary school mathematics, follows the treatment of Landau's Grundlagen der Analysis (Foundations of Analysis), a concise book that Feynman was probably aware of as he presented his lecture. Feynman of course added a sense of excitement and wonder that makes this lecture charming to read. Such treatments of the foundations of secondary school mathematics are fairly commonplace in the better university textbooks of mathematics. I first learned of Landau's book in a discussion of mathematics education in a Usenet newsgroup back in the 1990s, and bought the German edition on the recommendation of Michael Spivak's famous textbook Calculus, which follows a similar approach (but starting from the field properties of real numbers taken as axioms). In those days, I'm pretty sure, the standard calculus textbook at Caltech, where Feynman taught, was Apostol's textbook, which starts a little bit differently but also takes a theorem-proof approach.
Comment · 3 years ago
Contractual agreements are enforceable at law. That's what makes them contracts.
Comment · 3 years ago
My user experience on several recent trips is that Google Maps showed me the exit number for the exit I would use next very prominently on top of the display (where it shows the direction of the next turn). Maybe that isn't rolled out consistently for all trips.
Comment · 3 years ago
Further confirmation of the news that Post is open to all now.
Comment · 3 years ago
Post is currently a progressive web app. There is no immediate plan to build dedicated mobile apps for Post.
Comment · 3 years ago
To access Post on my desktop computer, I just any browser to navigate to Post [dot] news. It's just a website. I have stored cookies on one browser I use, and I typically start up that browser with Post as one default tab. I have another browser I use for testing websites that shows me what Post looks like to users who have never logged in.
Comment · 4 years ago
OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup.
I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.)
Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.)
The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will.
Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.
Comment · 4 years ago
The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post.
I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them."
Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.
Comment · 7 years ago
I would start by largely imitating the courses that already exist in the country of Singapore. They are pretty good examples of international best practice, and they are available in English, the language of school instruction in Singapore.
提要: 黑客的父亲.
tl;dr: A father of hackers.
I have no role in curating this site. I'm just one of thousands of participants like you. The Hacker News welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Hacker News FAQ
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads." To see more detailed comments about recent Hacker News moderation policies, follow the comments by HN user "dang,"
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
who is the lead member of the moderation team here as of 2014.
My screen name here, "tokenadult," originated on other sites, and I acknowledge that it doesn't fit well here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199939
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493266
The name has been controversial,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087129
but I use it with explicit permission from the site founder (I asked him) and feel like I'm stuck with it here after using it for so many years and so many hundreds of comments.
I'm founding director and math coach for Edina Center for Academic Excellence (my "startup," actually a nonprofit organization), parent workshop director for Epsilon Camp, past president (current director) of the Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented (volunteer), and homeschooling father of four children (one now living independently and developing his career as a hacker in New York City's startup scene). I am very interested in research on mathematics education and education reform in general. I hope hackers come up with innovations that disrupt and improve primary, secondary, and higher education around the globe. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues.
Because I have worked the last several years as a teacher of voluntary, supplemental classes in prealgebra mathematics for advanced elementary-age learners, I have had the opportunity to review mathematics textbooks in the original English and Chinese and in English translation from China, Taiwan, many publishers in the United States, India, Canada, Singapore, Japan, and Russia. I have used those materials and many articles by mathematics education researchers to prepare class materials for the classes I teach. The parents of my students have come from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, and various parts of the United States. All of the parents are aware that United States schools don't meet a "world standard" in mathematics education, and look for something better for their children. I'd like to see every child everywhere have the opportunity to have the best possible primary education.
For good information to add to Hacker News discussions, I highly recommend the online bibliographies
"Intelligence Citations,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations
and "Anthropology, Human Biology, and Race Citations,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations
which lead to many reliable sources that would do much to elevate the discussion here. Another good place to look for information is the Wikipedia article "IQ classification,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
one of the few reliable articles on a related topic yet posted to Wikipedia.
I post from Minnetonka, Minnesota. I live in a neighborhood such that my family can walk or bike to the public library, most of our shopping, a nature trail, the friendly local high school, and an extensive network of regional bicycle trails. I have been to every state of the United States (and to DC and to Guam). I have lived in Taiwan (two three-year stays, one before and one after Taiwan became a free, developed country) and have traveled to Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Canada.
Education: undergraduate degree in Chinese language, with elective courses in other languages and in linguistics. J.D. magna cum laude, law review. Languages I have studied include (Modern Standard) Chinese to a proficiency level sufficient for employment as a translator and consecutive interpreter, German for reading professional materials, Japanese, Russian, other Sinitic languages, the original languages of the Bible, samplings of Latin and of various Romance languages, interesting constructed languages (conlangs), and others.
Experience: English as a second language teaching, Chinese-English interpreting, Chinese-English translation, judicial clerk for state supreme court, immigration law practice, service on various nonprofit boards, Edyth May Sliffe award for mathematics coaching.
After letting it lie fallow for more than a decade, I have begun recoding my personal website, Learn in Freedom,
http://learninfreedom.org/
to HTML5 standards as part of celebrating the site's seventeenth birthday. During 2014, the site's nineteenth year, I hope to do many content upgrades on the site, and I encourage Hacker News participants who visit Learn in Freedom to comment on my Hacker News "Ask HN: Please Critique My (Tokenadult's) Website" thread
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094480
or use the on-site comment form links, or the email links to the webmaster, or my postal address, to reach me with your thoughtful ideas on how to improve the site. Thanks for your kind--or blunt--suggestions. The suggestions I have already received are now in my to-do queue (but are crowded to low priority by work and parenting tasks). Yes, to be clear about that issue, I ("tokenadult" on HN and two other discussion sites) am the same person as Karl M. Bunday, the founder and webmaster of Learn in Freedom, and you may call me Karl in emails or in comments on Hacker News.
HIVEMIND RESPONSE NOTICE
The two biggest forms of hivemind that I encounter regularly on Hacker News are a knee-jerk reaction to decry the United States whenever world politics is discussed, and a completely credulous reaction to any claim of "mind over matter" in human medicine, no matter how poorly evidenced.
I do this at my own peril, but I try to rely on sources of information evidently not available to most Hacker News participants (or at least not regarded by many Hacker News participants) to point out that
1) the United States of America is certainly not a perfect country, but it is quite doubtful that the United States is the most harmful or blameworthy country in the world today,
and
2) "placebo medicine" has so far only been shown to have any effect at all on self-reported subjective patient symptoms such as pain and nausea that ebb and flow in the natural course of untreated disease.
If you have strong evidence that all of us can look at to check whether (for example) Russia is a greater force for good in the world than the United States, or that placebos can actually change any objectively measured physiological sign, please come forward with that evidence in your Hacker News comments. I will put up with silent downvotes any time people disagree with me, but I reserve the right to only be convinced by actual evidence from reliable sources.
METAINFORMATION
Here are some questions I've asked or comments I've made to the Hacker News community over the years about the Hacker News community itself. I'd be glad to hear your point of view on these issues.
Ask HN: How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419539
Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084
Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174656
Ask HN: What do you like about the Hacker News community?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4399678
Ask HN: What is the consensus on Hacker News?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4489216
Ask HN: Whose Hacker News Comments Do You Follow?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529466
Suggest HN: Submit Reliable Sources with Original Titles & Canonical URLs
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933
A top-level comment under a thread titled, "Don’t believe everything you read"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664