btam

This is so impressive - kudos to you. Thanks for sharing and being open to questions.

How much overall has this costed you? Do you think that a middle-class person could afford to do what you did?

> So, I laddered up the academic food chain using a little cash (donations), emails, airline tickets, and conference admission. ~2 years after my diagnosis I found myself in a closed-door session called the MPN Roundtable in Chicago with 100 of the foremost experts in the world. No cameras, no transcripts, just some of the greatest minds in the field earnestly debating the path forward to a cure.

Why don't they allow recordings at the MPN Roundtable? It could be useful for others to learn from.

What exactly do you mean by "a large percentage"? Cancer.org[1] says that it's 1 in 8 men during their lifetimes, the parent post says "almost all men get it at some point" -- where is this info coming from?

[1]: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/prostate-cancer/about/key-stat...

Will this be for fall 2020 or fall 2021?

> After reading many reviews I kept on coming back to the same brand which I had sworn to never buy another item of due to their disrespect of users’ systems integrity, aka the ‘rootkit debacle’

Does Sony really have the best noise cancelling headphones? What brands/models have worked for people here? I've continuously struggled with distracting noises through my education.

> I have a pile of examples, but not the time to elaborate - I'll add them later.

Please don't forget to share, this sounds very interesting to me as a novice.

I have some advice that I think could be great for improving Impact Trail, but your email address isn't in your profile. Would you mind sharing your email address?

If you'd prefer to just email me, my email address is in my profile.

Can you give examples or links that explain what sort of "tweaking" you're referring to?

It seems like giving all of the people in the test area Chromebooks would be a really great move by Google, because people would associate Chromebooks with "lightning-fast" once they advertised the two products together.

Thoughts?

Would you please elaborate on this? Why are curled-in shoulders especially bad?

I think that whether you decide to show the comment scores immediately or not, you should should show them after some delay.

Judging from the replies to your comment, pg, at least some people read old threads. I know I do. I find helpful advice and information from them all the time. I think that people reading these threads should be able to get the benefit of seeing the scores.

The arguments against showing comment scores are almost exclusively about the thread quality. If the scores aren't shown until it's too late to comment, there isn't going to be any noticeable impact.

If I haven't overlooked anything significant here, you wouldn't be hurting any aspect of the site, but you'd be helping some people get more out of it.

I think hartror's meaning was the same as "Do you prefer the language Ruby to Python, or vice versa?" The idea is that if you like Ruby(for example) better, Rails is the way to go.

Even if that wasn't what hartror meant, you probably should still give this some consideration.

There's also the possibility that this comes more from the change in atmosphere than the particular atmosphere that you change to. Maybe for some people here the change to an atmosphere of ambient sociability is just more of a contrast than the alternatives they've tried.

I've heard and have a lot of anecdotal evidence that would suggest this, but of course that's anecdotal evidence. However, I think most of the answers here are influenced at least somewhat by this.

Thoughts?

You're pretty much right on the math competitions front, but the first few problems on the AMC are pretty simple IMO(pardon the pun). They are barely above the level of mechanical problem solving. It does get harder, though, and I agree that that is more daunting.

You've reminded me, however --

I remembered thinking that the Phillips Exeter Academy model for math education (the "Harkness" method) is amazing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy#Harknes...

  > Exeter does not teach math with traditional textbooks. Instead,
  > math teachers assign problems from workbooks that have been
  > written collectively by the Academy's math department. From these
  > custom workbooks, students are assigned word problems as
  > homework. In class, students then present their solutions at the
  > blackboard. This means that in math class at Exeter, students are not
  > given theorems, model problems, or principles beforehand. Instead,
  > theorems and principles emerge more organically, as students work
  > through the word problems."*

This is what we want. Discovering math makes it fun for everyone. Honesty and actual learning with that method(my whole would be not be too difficult, because everyone would inevitably have their own personal spin on the origins of the theorems et cetera. Plus, it'd be embarrassing to go to the blackboard and say that you haven't done the work.

----

By the way, expect an email regarding what you said about the IMO.

The thing is, students already think of math as difficult.

If we switched from algorithms to actual creative problem solving, it would become a lot more intimidating. I'm pretty confident of this. I'm in high school, and the other students have noted how much more they would 'hate' math if it were like the creative problem solving math competition that we have here in the US each year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mathematics_Competitio...

What many -- perhaps even most -- kids really want is a course where they do only simple mechanical work, and get a boost to their GPA. At least, that's what it seems to me to be.

Also, we have to consider that unfortunately, not all teachers care. Now that teaching to the test is rampant(at least in the US), I think many classes would fall apart if the added structure and 'accountability' disappeared, like it would if we made that switch.

I don't disagree with you. The world would be a better place if we could get rid of this; if we didn't have all of this baggage to deal with.

EDIT: RiderOfGiraffes seems to have said the same thing in a different way in this thread; check it out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390960.

The TechCrunch article hinted at this feature being rolled out to everyone performing a search on Google, so this sort of thing may very well affect us all.

I imagine Google will manage some sort of defense, though. This feature could kill their product otherwise.

I think what he meant is that the kids who sat through the horrible Java and ASP.NET classes show that they can live through drudgery in the coding world.

It makes sense in theory, and I'm sure there are examples of it. Hiring a student who enjoys coding so much that they s/he is cripplingly unmotivated by doing the tedious/boring stuff may have considerable repercussions.

That being said, I think that this policy should give exceptions to people with proven industry experience, like you. It shows that they can live through the parts of the job that they don't like without being fired.

Is it so difficult to believe that that was a joke?

I can see myself making that sort of joke in person, but after seeing what's happened to Zuckerburg, I would treat the internet as a press conference.

Zuckerburg has been described as socially awkward more times than he's been described -- you can't be sure that he wasn't just going too far with a joke. That's very common for the stereotypical logical type -- doubly when he's talking to a friend that would be fine with the joke.

But suppose it were not a joke. This guy has changed the world forever in an incredibly short period of time. I'd be surprised if he didn't change his philosophy somewhat, if not drastically.

Few people have to adjust to being one of the most influential human beings in the world, especially in their mid-twenties.

Note that these information agencies that you refer to are in competition. That makes manipulating Zuckerburg a lot more difficult, doesn't it?

Also, his '26 year old mind' is not alone. He's not the only guy that wants to support his ideals.

I'm not saying that he can resist manipulation, but I don't think it's as easy as the parent of my comment makes it seem at all. If anything, it's a war for Zuck; it's not a war on Zuck.

For example, the US and say, North Korea are not going to be working together for control of Zuckerburg; they're going to be competing for it.

What you're missing is that PG says "can." When you're in a ten-minute interview that could change your life forever, you're going to be concise when possible.

That being said, I don't believe that one's 'natural' verbosity has any correlation with intelligence. Minds aren't that simple.

The word "hypocrites" would only apply if Mark Bao had done something that the legal system would do, like send the guy to jail.

I imagine that the 2-10% figure also helps YC keep its elite status.

Not as many founders would find YC worth applying to if they had to give at the minimum a fifth of the company's equity.

The difference here from malaria would be that our bodies evolved, adapting to the nutrients that we were getting. We're more efficient on them -- more capable of living 'natural' lives.

[Of course, whether a 'natural' life is desirable is debatable.]

Malaria, however, we attempted to evolve away from(sickle cell anemia).