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There is a reason the archetypal scam artist is referred to as a ‘snake oil salesman’.

On the other hand, the USMC has invested considerable time and effort in training this person to operate the F-35. Replacing him with someone else will take time and money. For the organization that invested all that into him to say ‘nope, we don’t want you to fly these things any more’ is itself a massive waste of resources.

Sure, that makes sense as a waste if you are operating under the assumption that they have no questions of ability and are simply being railroaded, and will never fly again.

In this case, the pilot is still flying. They are just not leading as prestigious and high risk command, because there are doubts that they suitable. There is no new cost, they are just rotating the roster. he will fly elsewhere and a different pilot will take that role.

It is only a loss if you double down thinking that he was the best or only fit for that role.


He's certainly a highly trained Naval Aviator, but he had very little time in the F35.

He was fired from command, not stripped of his wings.

There’s a big cross in the middle of the landing pad that you’re trying to aim for - you don’t need advanced laser systems to get an accurate fix on where the landing pad is from the rocket - or where the rocket is form the landing pad for that matter.


Optimistic locks are absolutely a distributed locking mechanism, in that they are for coordinating activity among distributed nodes - but they do require the storage node to have strong guarantees about serialization and atomicity of writes. That means it isn’t a distributed storage solution, but it is something you can build over the top of a distributed storage solution that has strong read after write guarantees.


This is unconventional use of the term "distributed locking". This alternative just punts the hard part of locking to the storage system.


I normally see it as a version column in a database where it being with the data makes it non-distributed.

I'm not even sure how it could be used for exclusive update to a resource elsewhere--all clients will think they 'have' the lock and change the resource, then find out they didn't when they update the lock. Or if they bump the lock first, another client could immediately 'have' the lock too.


Nonetheless the incidence of horse theft in Dedham has steadily declined since their founding.


Yes, code is a substance, like sand or iron. The system is built out of code (not codes), just like the table is built out of wood (not woods).

Hearing someone talk about ‘codes’ has the same weird vibe as when they talk about ‘Legos’.


Absolutely. You don’t need to come up with fake examples. Take a couple of high end British retail establishments: Harrods and Selfridges, founded by Messers Harrod and Selfridge, and neither styles itself with an apostrophe.


I don’t think you can say this is universally known in ‘game dev’. In fact just last week I stumbled using the UI in a game that let me enter a name for something, which it then displayed in uppercase.

Game UI is the place I’d expect to most likely come across horrific abuses of localization precisely because game UI is such a cobbled together layer of hacks on hacks.


I don’t know - given that an object in motion remains in motion, he might have been more of a ‘line goes up’ HODLer…


New math or common core or any approach that tries to center ‘understanding’ over rote procedure is definitely pushing in the right direction. I think that people who have the closed understanding of addition, that there is one true algorithm for doing it and who will start your 25137+1486 problem off by adding six and seven to get three and carry the one… are missing out on a deeper intuition about numbers, because they only think of those numbers as sequences of digits.

But someone who sees that as ‘add fifteen hundred and take away fourteen’ is much closer to understanding what that expression actually represents, as well as being able to produce 26623 almost immediately without writing anything down.

It’s not about ‘neat tricks’, it’s about numbers having shape and feel and flavor.


> 25137+1486 problem off by adding six and seven to get three and carry the one… are missing out on a deeper intuition about numbers, because they only think of those numbers as sequences of digits.

This is precisely the dichotomy that is bogus according to the article.

25137 = 20000 + 5000 + 100 + 30 + 7 and 1486 = 1000 + 400 + 80 + 6, then you add (7 + 6) + (30 + 80) + (100 + 400) + (5000 + 1000) + (20000 + 0) to get the result. The fact that we can do that and combine it all tightly into columns is IMO a very deep insight into what a "number" really is, while also providing a general pen-and-paper algorithm for adding any two numbers. The insight provides an algorithm, and the algorithm leads us to an insight.

Discovering that 1486 = 1500 - 14 isn't a particularly deep insight into numbers either. It's a useful technique and I think it's fine that we teach it, but I don't think it has any particular conceptual merit that the standard algorithm lacks. I certainly don't see how it puts a child any closer to understanding what addition really means.


No but that’s actually exactly what ‘new math’ was about. The thing Tom Lehrer was lampooning was all this talk of the ‘tens place’ and the ‘hundreds place’ rather than just plugging and chugging the digits, you know;

Seven plus six is thirteen carry the one leaves three, four plus eight is twelve carry the one leaves two, two plus four is six, five plus one is six, two six six two three…

Seeing that as a decomposition of multiples of powers of ten and how that makes ‘carrying’ happen is exactly a result of having a deeper understanding of the way the numbers work.


Yeah but what's to lampoon

For the student who doesn't understand, one rote algorithm is as boring and stupid as any other. That student is plugging and chugging all the same, whether or not they have heard of a "tens place".

For the student who does understand, the "new" algorithm at least is elucidating and actually makes sense as a direct application of the basic principles of our number system. The "tens place" is in fact a real thing, regardless of what you call it.


1500 take away 14 is presupposing commutativity.

This very book argues against teaching these tricks without allowing the student to discover it themselves.

Why is 4 + 7 = 7 + 4? Is it a general phenomenon?


I’m not remotely arguing against encouraging kids to discover the mathematical principles themselves. I’m also not advocating teaching swapping + (1500 - 14) into -14 + 1500 by a careful application of the laws of commutativity. I’m saying that having a comfort and confidence with what summation is is way more valuable than learning that addition is a procedure applied to digits.


So what "is" summation in your opinion? How does the 1500-14 trick relate to it?


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