chunky1994

I had asked the very same question about two years ago.

I would say that the list is probably still pretty good:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2698026

I'm 19 now, however my dad got me really interested in math when I was around that age. (Cs-ey math). He had this book on fortran which he told me to read before falling asleep as a way to get me to sleep by my bedtime.

It was a pretty profound book, and he used to always explain everything to me in terms of patterns and sequences, and could see if I could guess what lay ahead (in terms of a specific pattern or sequence). It was quite exciting when I got the answers right.

I would guess that a similar approach would work now, perhaps with a more modern language?

Also, kids (at least I know I used to) love stories on web security (admittedly the gritty details can be boring to them) however, with your expertise I'm sure you could find some way of conveying the excitement of beating the system without actually going into the details.

EDIT: To answer your question particularly about projects, I think that they will grow into coding from the more math-like perspective that I described. When they figure out algorithms and want to actually see them fleshed out in real results, they'll automatically take to coding things. After that, the world is their oyster.

bstrand mentioned net worth, not annual income.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-t...

The linked article, states a floor of $8.4 million, which is ~ $9 million.

I would like to direct you to the study by Dan Gilbert that concluded that a year after either winning the lottery or being paraplegic, the levels of happiness of people were about the same.

http://zionsphere.hubpages.com/hub/perceptionofhappiness

Unfortunately, I could not find the original study, however that link seems to summarize it pretty reasonably.

While most people may choose the money, that choice isn't necessarily better, and hence doesn't mean the people with more money are necessarily 'happier'.

I think the majority of schools have two ways for students to get through schools.

One would be to skirt the system, prepare for exams, and basically retain hardly anything.(This happens extremely often now, especially because of the number of smart yet not-so-determined kids who can get away with coasting, but they don't realize that it'll cost them later.

American schools tend to be lenient on the amount of time required to be spent on school work which allows them leeway to pursue things interesting projects if they are so motivated.

The second is to actually learn the material and work your way through it, thus being able to handle the exams well, and getting something out of your education.

The large part of why students pick the first option is most of the time the material is not very challenging and students find it much easier to slack off than take an initiative to go above and beyond the standard curricula.

The flipside occurs in Asian schools, where while the material is not challenging, it does take a lot of time and effort (not mental, but just constant work) to do well, and survive. This albeit crushes the innovative side that students should nurture at a high school level.

PG also has many essays that are regarding doing your own thing, and about life. Admittedly, I find PG much better in providing insight, however this article also does a pretty decent, (albeit with many platitudes) of giving us insight on living life. Something that apparently many people on HN think is not meh.

Indeed, biologists frown on whole group explanations, however I am not suggesting it as an explanation of reproductive usefulness (for the whole group), merely as a successful factor of having a good social standing among the tribe (i.e the chances of someone being more powerful are better if they are able to act as a leader/someone who can protect their tribe), which would quite possibly lead to better mate prospectives.

I think he means that the 11th is his birthday. (His comments below say he's married)

I suspect that the evolutionary mechanism behind this is that the members of the species (or tribe etc.) who are powerful (leaders?) must have some sense of ruthlessness in order to enable their whole group to survive; and empathy is directly counteractive to ruthlessness.

Unless I'm missing some obvious sarcasm here, isn't this exactly what a welfare state does?

His (Degrasse's) point was that when there was a spirit of critical thinking that was permitted, there were great advances in science, whereas when that was stifled (I do believe that the jews did not have such a rigid religiosity enforced upon them) they lost their ability to do good science.

That I think was also the point that Dawkins was trying to make.

It is very likely and probable that socio-economic status is a causal factor, however the point being made is not that that is untrue, it is that there is another one of (likely) equal importance.

I might be mistaken, however I think that Dr. Dawkins was trying to stipulate was the content of the talk by Dr. Tyson at the Beyond Belief conference (2006).

Here is the link to that talk [video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7rR8stuQfk

(It is quite long, but in my opinion worth the watch)

TLDW: He presents evidence of the rise of religion being a major if not the major contributing factor to the downfall of critical thinking, most significantly saying that people invoke a religious philosophy of ignorance at the end of their knowledge, and this is quite dangerous to scientific thinking.

I'm curious as to why didn't you come here then!

There's a bunch of us going from UWaterloo.

Oh I see!

If you've been through the same thing, I would definitely want to be able to contact you in case you have any advice on such matters.

Could I request you to provide me some way of remaining in touch with you?

Thank you!

This.

I couldn't agree more. WHile I've had only a brief stint with MATLAB at an internship, the code was possibly the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable.

I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, clean, and so god-damn readable.

To any other academics out there, I urge, no plead with you to consider using a more general purpose programming language. It is a nightmare for undergrads like me to try and extend matlab to further applications.

However, I'm glad to say that the first computational physics course we will be taking at our university teaches us python, thankfully someone in the department had a clear view of what was going to benefit us.

I would argue that this is highly dependent on the University/professor who is teaching you.

I've seen courses where we're taught next to nothing in terms of thoroughness and also courses that stick us neck deep in the subject, literally going from axioms to a complete, standard mathematical framework.

In reference to: I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I would add an addendum that a good professor can significantly accelerate my learning of a subject, while a bad professor (in University, and not in high school) does not slow it down, but does not add much value.

Some of the smartest people I know watch MLP, so I would have to say no.

Here's my two pence as a student,

I highly admire the approach of prof. Dijkstra here, since the purpose of going to University is to learn the most we can, from people who know the stuff they're teaching very well, or have the ability to understand said things at a deeper level than the student currently has.

Thus, I cannot see how paying tuition entitles us to demand a professor to do X/Y/Z for us, we're paying not for them to be at our feet, but for access to their understanding of subject matter, which often (depending on the prof./University) is world class.

I also do not see how the professor comes across as omnipotent here at all, he gives students complete control, as can be seen in If I use a word you don't recognize or a sentence you cannot attach a meaning to, it is your duty to ask for clarification. If I go too fast, it is your duty to slow me down.

We pay for our professor's time, and very often the professors who treat the students as adults are the most effective, and are contributing not just to the knowledge of the student, but to their growth as independent thinkers as well.

I would probably say that we can classify our personality as the difference in sets of what anyone with our ability and in the same situation would do, and what we do.

That being said, our ailments could probably be categorized by affecting all aspects of our life equally and in full measure of time (i.e something that doesn't fluctuate across the years is probably an untreated ailment).

As a current undergrad from India who chose to seek an education abroad, I probably have a unique perspective on this.

1) Yes, most Indians who graduate from their colleges often are lacking quite horrifically in their knowledge as compared to a similar non-Indian counterpart, primarily because the culture within the educational system is largely based around acquiring short term knowledge and then never looking back.

While in the Canadian system, I found it quite pleasant that everything is gradually built from what you learn in your first year, the Indian system is modularized and disparate, with large parts of what they learn forgotten in their earlier undergraduate years.

2) There is a vast variation between the quality of universities in India, however even the IITs are definitely not the same thing anymore. My father who went to IIT gave me the impression that it was definitely a centre for higher learning, where the students actually seriously thought critically about what they were studying, whereas now (through the descriptions of most of my friends and colleagues), they have been reduced to places where one no longer has such a luxury, as their marks matter more than the actual knowledge they accumulate; this wouldn't be much of a problem if the courses actually aligned with real world problems, however the courses deal are largely tangential to real hard work that one might see in academia or industry.

3) In contrast to this, American (Or Canadian) universities offer a much more comprehensive education, and while definitely relying more on the initiative of the particular student, they generally encourage independent critical thinking, and don't place much emphasis on a number received from a three hour exam. This I think is the crucial difference between graduates of these universities and graduates from Indian universities, those who actually go on to do something important would have had a much harder time in an Indian university than a non-Indian one.

I should also probably state for completeness that I am not pursuing and Engineering degree, and I am a physics major, however I don't believe that makes much of what I have said irrelevant.

Thank you! On a side note I'm a physics major, haha.

>"Perking up" when another person's uncomfortable emotions come to the fore and steering the conversation away teaches them that their problems are their own, and that their full selves are excluded while a partial self (with unpleasantness filtered out) is welcome.

I suspect that the author meant this in non-intimate situations, however I agree with your general trend of reasoning. These types of people are comforting to the extreme, I would assume that would (technically) make them satisfying friends and lovers. I'd love to see a clarification of your use of unsatisfying here.

I think OP was saying that knowing Shakespeare is inherently important because it transforms your ability to think. For example, take a case where someone knows how to think, and has read relatively easy children's authors like Enid Blyton. This person would still have learnt to think from writing a a critical analysis of whatever novel they've read.

However their ability to think is still limited to merely the thought processes of an author for children ( Disclaimer: I have no intention of belittling Enid Blyton here).

By just reading Enid Blyton you can't think in terms of metaphors or similes or puns etc. By reading Shakespeare you gain an inherent ability to think in a completely new way. This is also perhaps very similar to what PG says in ANSI Common LISP about LISP's unusual appearance, to quote PG: ' You have to think in a language to write programs in it, and it's hard to want something you can't describe. When I first started writing programs-- in Basic-- I didn't miss recursion, because I didn't know there was such a thing.' Similarly if you didn't know there was such a thing as personification, you wouldn't miss it!

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-moves-to-se-domain-pr... Torrentfreak's artcile citing the above article and explaining why there's a .se in the link!

However, lots of teenagers will be glad to be on google+, I've felt extremely frustrated at not being on it not because it's a "hip" social site, but because of google's constant integration of google+ into everything. It was like going to disney-land without seeing Mickey Mouse, so I hardly think the complaints would be justified.

Also, not to forget lots of teenagers are tech-oriented, let's not forget how apple and Microsoft started!

This appeared in a newspaper as well, it was ultimately dismissed as political figures trying to cover up articles that portrayed them in a bad light, nothing to worry about as the government has no intention of doing anything like what China has done.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't even look at the username of the person whom I'm replying to. I just put in my two cents and take part in the discussion, only if it turns out to be really, really interesting do I actually look at the username to go to said person's profile. I'm quite sure a lot of other posters have a similar attitude. HN is a forum about interesting stuff, and (dare I say it) similar to it's secular community, is also probably a very asexual (unconcerned with the gender of the participant) community. If the author of the post had included more examples, then perhaps we could come to some sort of statistical guess about whether gender really is a 'problem' or not.

Happy birthday to one of the greatest thinkers of our time!