AnyoneCanDoIt Alternatives

AnyoneCanDoIt reviews and mentions

• Why Mathematics Is Boring
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2024

  https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

  I think the big issue is a lot of the uses for math in real life are things you don't see unless you.... already know math and can get a job that uses it...

  It's hard to give concrete examples of when someone would use math in everyday life that people won't just say "Isn't there an app for that?", but the people who know math well seem to see applications the rest don't

• Ask HN: Does this math education idea make sense?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2024

  A while back I tried to make a list of all math I've ever encountered IRL, which is all considered entirely trivial, and all the "Too bad I don't know that, or I'd be making a lot more!" stuff I'm aware of.

  There's absolutely no actual math education exercises, it's purely an overview of things a non-specialist would want to know about the existence of.

  It's been partially looked over by people with real math knowledge, but there could still be some incorrect things here, and there's still some stuff I'd like to add but never got around to.

  https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

  There's likely nothing of interest to someone who knows anything like calculus already, this is all stuff that is kind blowing and exciting to those of us with boot camp coder or average non-technical person level math knowledge.

  But perhaps someone who actually knows math could do a similar article, but for nontrivial math?

• Anyone Can Do It : Math ELI 5
  1 project | /r/homeschool | 29 Mar 2023
• Math: Explain it like I'm 5
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2023
• Ask HN: Math for Programmers?
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2023

  This is not a math textbook. It's a listing of the math that I am glad to vaguely be aware of, without anything that requires true understanding, because I don't have that, but with references to what the people who do have it can do!

  It's 90kb of pure text and covers a lot of domains with just enough info you could figure out how to make a CAS do the things, with maybe some googling. It's had some reviews, and it fact I think is the only project I've ever got PRs on, but may be incomplete or inaccurate, I can't prove most of this for myself, just test it or find references.

  There are examples but no excercises, my assumption is that math is a computers job, and I only give a starting point for any study beyond "This exists and a machine can do it".

  Further contributions welcome, especially in the domains I haven't covered (Graphs, automata, and lambda calculus would be great of there's anything to add that matches the level and tone I'm going for).

  I'd love to have more CSy stuff, right now it's all from an embedded, wedbdev, and 3d printing perspective.

  https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

• There's no such thing as not a math person
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2022

  I have a project exactly about this, cataloguing all the things I wish someone had told me, as a non-math person(https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...).

  They can be understood without any real talent, and used in everyday life(If you're a programmer).

  But that's more like knowing a collection of calculator tricks than knowing math. I would probably have a very hard time even getting a D in high school math class.

  I don't think I'm much closer to the really life changing stuff, like what you need for an EE degree, or the general ability to comprehend systems with interacting parts and events that happen simultaneously, compared to an average grade schooler.

  Math is almost like drawing, in that people pretend you get started by following lists of steps, but each step by itself requires a mode of thought that takes lots of work to develop.

  It's like trying to learn to dance, and someone says "It's easy, just copy me", like as if the ability to copy a pose is just something everyone can do without training.

• Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2022

  I'm just an artist/techie with no academic background in psychology(So feel free to call out any mistakes I've made!), but I have written(partly, I've been lucky enough to have a few contributors) this project(https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt) which I believe someone actually reshared on HN a while back.

  Basically it's an attempt to document a set of strategies for doing things in a way that does not depend on having any particular talent, in the most extreme high-process way possible, to be scaled back or ignored as needed for a situation. It's based on some pretty "pop self help book" level pseudo-research.

  The other part of the project is the the math eli5, an attempt to document as much of the math that is actually useful or interesting in real life but that doesn't require years of study, plus the reasons why you would want to go and do that study, rather than actually trying to transmit the deep understanding(which I sure don't have!) directly.

  I've also got a blog(eternityforest.com) mostly full of more creative work and essays on random historical stuff, plus some unpopular opinions about how software is (mostly) not in fact going down down the toilet.

• Anyone Can Do It
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2022
• Document your mistakes and then try to block them in the future
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2022

  I've done this extensively and have compiled a lot of data because of how many mistakes I make, and am working on this document, an ongoing set of strategies for decoupling success from natural talent: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt

  My most important rules:

  1. There is no later. I assume that time is a concept only machines can process. If someone tells me to do something when X happens or check something in an hour or so, I immediately set reminders. I don't even consider trying to just remember as an option, I know my failure rate will be well over 80%.

  2. Absolutely no mental rotation. Learn to recognize any thought process that involves a rotation, and assume results are invalid. I check the map after after every turn. I never compare objects in different orientations.

  3. The verbal machine gun strategy

  When someone is trying to get me to do something dangerous, and starts talking fast, I assume it's basically suppressive fire for thought.

  If I were to explain why it's a bad idea in their pitch and tone I'd sound like a maniac, but they can talk as fast as they want because they are relying on tradition and intuition, not complicated reasoning.

  "Come on, it will be fun" is easier to say fast then "I literally know a guy who was very experienced, who tried this, and died".

  The only defense I know of is to not care what they think or how you look, and have nothing to prove, especially not to yourself.

  4. Never assume any task is too simple and easy to need a plan. If you give me a bucket of balls and ask me to count them, I'm going to pull out a counter app. That 10% of the time I lose count before getting to 10 is embarrassing enough to be worth the trouble to avoid.

• So you want to Study Math
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2022

  I am literally working on exactly that, as an project I'm calling Math: ELI5, all open source on GitHub: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

  The catch is that I myself don't actually understand this well. It's just "What I learned googling stuff while working as a programmer. I've had help reviewing it but there could be errors.

  I'm trying to cover all areas of math that a nontechnical person, or typical non math focused programmer would need to know, but I treat actually doing any of it by hand on paper as an arcane thing for the really dedicated, so there's not really any excercises.

  Instead of actually teaching a real understanding of math, which I can't do, because I don't know it well, I just explain what people who do understand it use it for and why you might want to go actually learn it.

  I also have any historical math related stuff that I find interesting.

  I can't tell you how to derive or prove Euler's equation , but you don't need to know math to understand the emotional impact from a humanities perspective, and be amazed that all those constants fit together like that, and that someone could discover it.

  Ultimately, I think traditional math education has it totally right. My life would be so much better if I knew it, because there's jobs that seem to require exactly what they tech in math class.

  It's not directly useful for non STEM types, but the idea seems to be give everyone a head start since so many do want STEM jobs.

  I think you really do have to get to the being able to do proofs level to make use of it in the real innovative applications.

  The common everyday applications math people like to cite can usually have a dedicated software package. It's not like we still need to add two numbers on paper. If you want to build something, we have RealThunder's FreeCAD.

  Excel's Goal Seek and CAS systems do the stuff people say we will use algebra for.

  But if your in tech eventually you run into the wall and need to do something like a Kalman filter or calculate stresses in a bridge and you're screwed.

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