Readit NewsThis was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997. Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and seemingly predict their moves.
Similar to Tosa, people questioned Ungar's poker prowess as to whether he was cheating or not (it's a pretty deep conspiracy rabbit hole that you can go down if you'd like). People wondered if he had some secret method for reading his opponents — like whether his blue glasses were letting him read marked cards, but it turned out to be like Tosa, he was a product of pretty deliberate and intense practice.
In both cases, it's a weird example of humans being exceptional at pattern matching in ways you almost can't imagine after deliberate practice.
Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten high to win.
I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker players).
epigrammar works as sort of a nice play on words when you consider epigram. But epihub does not.
Teachify is much better. The only point against it is it isn't very euphonious but then neither is epihub.
Maybe edify, since it is already a word. But I think even so Teachify is better because everyone gets immediately sort of what your problem domain is.
Big Teachify crowd here!
I will say, Epihub was really the byproduct of Epigrammar (as Mike highlighted above) and us just using the term “hub” a lot. It was hard to mispronounce, we had the .com, it felt like an homage to our previous work, and we didn’t think about it too much afterward.
I do like Teachify though. It’s a pretty great name; I can’t lie.
I'm wondering if this will be useful for an online conference we're putting together where we need to schedule 1:1s with presenters for expert sessions. How customizable is the text that appears (Students, Tutorials, etc. ) that wouldn't be appropriate in a conference setting?
I think it could work, we haven’t tried it for a conference, but email me directly (first name at company name.com) so we can make sure you’re setup right.
To answer your question, not only is every single string of text customizable, but so is every icon. So you can rebrand and redesign it however you please and the interface will update.
Yes, Abinsthe is quite incredible! I have used it with react and vue and had some success. However lately whenever liveview is the right fit I find myself fist pumping all over the place. Something magically about writing most of your code in elixir and only sprinkling JS when needed. Your site is very ui heavy so I imagine it needs to have a lot of js strictly client side so a SPA makes sense (I just find the mental overhead of having to deal with a js framework front end and a elixir backend tricky).
Yeah the original application borrowed heavily from our first product which predates LiveView so we stuck with what we knew. Our first product actually predates contexts and schemas in Phoenix. We started working on it around the time Phoenix was deprecating models from 1.2 to 1.3.
LiveView is incredible, but I haven’t used it enough to know the shortcomings. From the outside looking in, it does seem nice to work with a view that’s already nicely coupled with the app.
Then I realized that the funny part is that PG has already linked to Hamming's talk on his site (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), and mentioned it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048).
There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely.
In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."
I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it.
Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup…
(Hamming’s talk has been shared countless times here and this feels like PG’s contribution to a similar idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778036)).