jlev1's comments

A couple more I could decode from your question marks:

- rauenes: ravens

- “all that heard him were adrade”: I’m guessing it means “were filled with dread”, maybe “were adread”

- I think deme is actually a conjugation of the archaic verb “to doom”, as in “I doom thee to the death”

- “none shall thy biwepe” would be roughly “none shall beweep thee”

Aside: typing this is hard on my phone, it’s so close to modern English that nearly every word gets autocorrected.

What is different about how your app teaches language?

I have moderate-to-profound hearing loss and have worn hearing aids since I was 4. I currently have Oticon Opn1’s and have had Oticons since 2017 (and got new ones in 2022) and they are fabulous. I find the sound quality in noisy environments much better than any other aid I’ve had - much better perception of voices in restaurants, for example. I rarely have to fiddle with the volume control and in fact do not even use any other settings than the main program - I find that whatever the core program is doing tends to be basically what I want.

I also very much appreciate that they can natively connect to iPhones (this is also essentially the main reason I have an iPhone). This makes phone calls and music and podcasts very easy. (Whereas up until 2017, I used to dread phone calls.)

I actually tried Phonaks briefly in 2022 and hated them. Lots of controls to fiddle with (some with oddly unintuitive names), but that meant I was constantly trying to adjust it and was rarely able to just exist in the moment. I found them markedly worse in noisy environments - I basically couldn’t have a conversation in a restaurant.

Agreed, this is the real takeaway for those who think it’s unsurprising: they simply haven’t understood why it is surprising.

I have always found this response to the hungry judges study much more compelling than the study itself:

http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j...

> […] I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism.

> If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal.

The phrasing “bias against AI” seems to beg the question here. The article takes it for granted that people are wrong to say they’re more interested in stories written by people than by AI, because they can’t tell the difference if they’re misled.

Compare with a hypothetical study saying: people say they prefer true inspirational personal stories to fake inspirational personal stories. But if you lie to them, they think the fake ones are just as good!

Obviously, this would not prove that they are “wrong” or “biased”. The whole point of stories written by people is that a _person_ wrote it, based on their actual human thoughts and experiences.

No, in your analogy building a helicopter capable of going there is impressive. (Though I dispute the idea that it’s more impressive simply because helicopters were invented more recently than mountain climbing.) In any case, riding in a helicopter remains passive and in no sense impressive.

If there were a single element that generated the whole group, the group would be abelian.

Obama was correct in observing that he looked different from past American presidents. As for “claims to admire”, the implication that Obama doesn’t really admire MLK (and that this speech proves it!) is just ludicrous.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you just don’t like Obama. Didn’t like him before you read this article, don’t like him now.

Make up your mind, are you mad they pressured him to withdraw or mad they tried to keep him in the race?

Given your voting record and the fact that you’ve just criticized the democrats for two opposite courses of action in back to back posts (and I see your now several other posts hoping to find democrats mad at the DNC), I think you’re a plain ol’ conservative who’s inclined to find fault with the Democratic Party regardless of what specifically they do.

Yes, that was the point of the parent comment.

Tripled its housing supply since 1960 according to that article. Meanwhile Vancouver’s population went up by more than 4x. So it doesn’t seem surprising affordability would get worse!

Edit: Patrick Condon (who wrote that biv.com article) seems terrible. Here he is opposing connecting UBC to Vancouver’s SkyTrain: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/01/29/Last-Voice-Against-Sky...

Relevant context: it’s very hard to learn from research-level math talks, because the material is almost absurdly complicated even when presented well. This advice is for grad students who are often totally at sea as to how to get anything useful or real out of attending a math talk.

This seems very cool & deserving of more attention on HN!

I see, that makes sense. Though the phrasing of "how the world works" still makes it sound like you think it's shady and unethical, when I don't (necessarily) think it is.

This is just... not accurate. The closest I can agree with your description is that (a) getting help on specific questions about the class, is not highly differentiated from (b') having conversations about the class (or about your studies) with the professor. But (b') talking about school and (b) schmoozing are two different things.

Speaking from personal experience (I'm an academic in my late 20s / early 30s, and I know a lot of fellow academics, and we talk about things like teaching and office hours), office hours are for helping students. They're not some kind of country club -- I spend my office hours working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus).

The injustice in this situation isn't that "rich students are getting unfair help", it's that poor students aren't accessing this appropriate help. Going to office hours, asking professors for help, asking for the occasional (well-justified) extension -- these are not "entitled", they are all perfectly appropriate things to do.

(To add, I see a weird vibe of resentment running through this and a handful of other posts. For what it's worth, I will say that academics basically universally loathe students who suck up to them and complain about their grades. So we're agreed in that...)

The vehemence of this response surprises me. First, from the anecdote, there's no particular reason to think this student was the only one who was given a chance to take a make-up test.

Second, re: the 'integrity of an education system', there are already all kinds of problems with using tests and exams to evaluate student skill, and one serious flaw is how sensitive they are to random fluctuations -- like being tired or sick the day of the test. Many educators hold this view, and professors often have a lot of flexibility in how they structure their tests (and classes more generally), compared to say, high school teachers.

I am curious about the circumstances of the parent post. In a 600-person Psych 101 class, I would agree it would be inappropriate to offer makeup tests (unless they were available to all students). But in a 15-person upper-level class? There's no grading curve, the whole process is basically individualized.

Good point, it's not necessarily possible! That said, it would be enough to know that the intersection just contains all the rational points (and is finite, though that's automatic for 2+ polynomials in two variables with no common factors). Then we can just check them one by one, discarding the non-rational points.

Alternately, it's possible the construction gives a system of auxiliary equations, which, together with f(x,y) = 0, pick out the rational points of the curve. (The term "variety", as in "Selmer variety", means solution set to a system of polynomial equations). Still, short of knowing the points in advance, I wouldn't know how to easily produce such equations.

Hmm. I don't know about this particular equation (which sounds like it's mainly significant because it's viewed as a bellwether -- if the method works on it, it's likely to work on other problems). Anyway.

First -- for "homogeneous" equations like the one being studied (or simpler ones like x^2 + y^2 = z^2), a rational solution can be rescaled to get an integer solution -- replace (x,y,z) by (cx,cy,cz), a new solution with denominators cleared out. Homogeneous equations are very, very common.

That said, yes, the ultimate goal is to understand integer solutions (and as you say, they're often the only meaningful solutions in practical situations). But integer solutions can be impossibly hard to find, whereas rational solutions are just... very hard.

I guess I could imagine some unusual situation where rational solutions make sense but real ones don't. But it would have to be some context where x,y are "sort of discrete", they can be broken down into finitely-many parts (so fractions make sense) but no further (so sqrt(2) is out). But this does seem less likely.

Just to add a comment on "why this idea is cool" from my perspective (I'm a mathematician).

The situation being studied is: C is a curve in the plane (as another commenter pointed out, the z variable can essentially be ignored and set to z=1), described by a horrendous equation f(x,y) = 0 with very few rational solutions.

Well, thinking abstractly, if there are only finitely many rational solutions, then there certainly exists a second equation, g(x,y) = 0, giving another curve C' that intersects C at only the rational points. (Because any finite set of points can be interpolated by a curve, e.g. by Newton interpolation. [shrug] Nothing deep about this!)

But, it seems completely hopeless to try to find the equation g(x,y) in practice, other than by first finding all the rational points on C by other means, and then just writing down a different curve passing through them.

So what's special here is that this "Selmer variety" approach provides a method, partly conjectural, for constructing C' directly from C. And the paper being described has successfully applied this method to prove that, at least in this one case, C' intersects C at precisely the rational points. (And once you have the two equations, it's easy to solve for the intersection points -- we now have two equations in two variables).

PS: Part of what's special here is the connection between number theory and geometry. A Diophantine equation has infinitely-many solutions if you allow x and y to be real numbers -- there's the entire curve. It's usually an extremely delicate number theory question to analyze which solutions are rational. But here, we're converting the problem to geometry -- intersecting two curves (much easier).