Initially, no. They are a mechanism for counting, or a way of recording measurements. Many young people, when trying to learn mathematics, do not take the necessary step beyond these ideas.
They are not helped by educators insisting on presenting "word problems" when teaching maths. To get to the next level, you need to break the connection between numbers and the "real world". I've always felt that the number zero represented the first step that humanity took in this journey - and it's a step that every human also needs to individually take if they want to learn maths.
Bevy Labs, Inc. | Remote (North/South America) | Full-time | Engineering and Customer Success | https://www.bevyhq.com/
Bevy powers community for the best brands in the world. Enterprise-grade software designed to build, grow and scale global Customer-to-Customer communities, both in-person and virtual.
Startup Grind | Senior Software Engineers | US/Canada REMOTE (or onsite in Redwood City, CA)
Startup Grind is supporting, connecting and educating millions of entrepreneurs each month. We are looking to bring on two additional engineers to our team of 20 - likely one with focus on UI (strong proficiency of HTML/CSS/ReactJS desired) and the other person for the backend (experience with Python/Django required) to help us build the tools to make our local groups successful and the global community tick. We would love to talk with experienced software craftspeople who know what it's like to work on large software applications in startups and distributed teams.
If you think this would be a great fit, please reach out to abendig at startupgrind dot com.
Startup Grind | Senior Front End Engineer | US/Canada REMOTE (or onsite in Redwood City, CA)
Startup Grind is supporting, connecting and educating entrepreneurs worldwide. We are looking to bring on a senior front end engineer to help us build the tools to make our local groups successful and the global community tick. We would love to talk with experienced software craftspeople who know what it’s like to work on large software applications in startups and distributed teams. Apart from a strong grasp of HTML, CSS and JS, experience with modern JavaScript frameworks (we use React) would be very helpful.
If this sounds interesting please reach out to abendig at startupgrind dot com.
Startup Grind | Front End Developer | US/Canada REMOTE (or onsite in Redwood City, CA)
Startup Grind is supporting, connecting and educating entrepreneurs worldwide. We are looking for an additional front end developer to help us build the tools to make our local groups successful. We would love to talk software craftspeople with experience working in startups and distributed teams. Apart from a strong grasp of HTML, CSS and JS, experience with modern JavaScript frameworks (we use React) would be helpful.
If this sounds interesting please reach out at abendig at startupgrind dot com.
You might also enjoy the recent novel Speak, by Louisa Hall. It's a thoughtful treatment of the idea of speaking dolls/conversational agents and the connections we form with them.
It would be awesome if they could integrate that with a translation feature, such that content in high reading level (perhaps dense with technical jargon, etc.) could be translated into a simpler, yet semantically correct version.
Looks like fun. Some of the people commenting on that page don't appear to understand the intended meaning of the term hacker in that context. But then, they probably aren't the target audience of the competition either. :)
I like the idea of easy registration, but I am not really sure that No Registration Required is all that attractive to me (as a buyer or seller) for this type of application.
Other user goods marketplaces give an idea of seller's histories, in form of ratings, reviews, and so forth. I think that can be really helpful (and I do tend to avoid Amazon marketplace sellers with low ratings). Is that a feature you will want to provide?
Currently book listings have a Contact Seller link. I have not yet come across multiple listings for the same book (different sellers). How will you effectively distinguish those listings from each other?
Some smaller items that stood out:
http://beta.mrtextbooks.com/browse (Buy link) is broken.
On Buy|By ISBN,By Author, By Title all links point to the same search page. Each time though the Title filter is selected.
http://beta.mrtextbooks.com/search - if no matches are found (which could be due to filtering or simple title mismatches), then the same form is displayed again. It would be really helpful if you showed some message indicating "No results were found - try broadening your search" or something to that effect. Otherwise it may be hard to tell if search is simply not working or if there just aren't any matches for a given search.
Aren't numbers themselves an abstraction?