enjalot

regardless of whether he continues (it looks like and I hope he will) my point was rather that everyone should follow these blueprints.

I know I'm inspired!

This is the future of education. He just laid the blueprints.

Or you want to see something happen but you only want to donate if everyone else does. They hack the tragedy of the commons, and it's been enough for me to support a couple projects.

Thank you! I came here to post this. I was really disappointed when an alternative wasn't presented after they declared algorithm quizzes useless.

I'm all for code walk-throughs and explanations. You can't bullshit your problem solving process, but you can memorize (or forget) algorithm trivia.

For what it's worth I've failed and succeeded at these kinds of algorithms on the whiteboard interviews. Even after nailing it I felt uncomfortable and disrespected. I think there is a real problem with continuing to do these interviews because it's the cool thing to do, and these smart people don't feel like turning their problem solving skills towards the hiring problem.

> I have a feeling that the marketing push is very much still to come.

sign out of google services and go to google.com If everyone gets that little arrow, that's a pretty big marketing push...

Thanks for this. I've also consciously tried to improve my voice, especially in the context of story telling. I just got tired of people getting bored when I talked and I started looking at what I could do to improve the experience for others.

While its nice to know many others in this thread and the article experience the same personality traits, I think its important for us not to use that as an excuse not to communicate better with others!

I also share this stoicism, and have a good friend who is the complete opposite.

I like that this thread both supports people like us, but also reminds that it has a real effect on communication with others. I like how you put it, it's like we need to learn to speak their language to keep communicating.

The burden is on us, because our natural state is to not communicate in the ways they are used to.

My friend has come to understand me and now knows how to read and question me to pull what he wants out, but I do think that many more people are like him than you or I.

I'm with you.

I'm very inspired by this scrubbing calculator because I think it is the perfect tool to introduce algebra. The abstract concept of a variable is not something that comes easy to everyone. This tool allows you to visualize the idea of a variable and play with it.

I think this would allow the introduction of algebra at an even earlier age for some, and make the transition much smoother for the rest.

That is fair too, China has more history than any other country, and only few cultures can claim to be as old.

When asked about democracy most Chinese I have spoken to refer to their last hundreds years of history, which is filled with all kinds of turmoil. When thinking of managing a billion people stability is an easy concept to appeal to.

This seems counter-intuitive, I thought the competition for hiring in the valley was already too high.

Isn't the benefit of being outside the valley cost of living and human capital?

It's an interesting question, and not an easy one to answer policy-wise I assume.

My 2 cents are that opening up a country is more effective than isolating it. I've been to China several times, and there are a lot of people living good lives out there, even by America's standards. As oppressive as internet tech communities like to make it sound, it is still more than possible to do business, make friends and have interesting political debates (even on subjects like democracy) over there.

I am a vehement supporter and believer in free speech, and I do not like the practices they have implemented over there. I just do not believe that cutting China off completely would solve anything (China has cut them selves off a couple times, you can read about how it worked out for them).

Laws aren't always based in morality, even when they align with morals. Even when a person commits a "bad" act, that does not necessarily make them a "bad person."

After all, only God can judge them, right? ;)

Right and wrong are often different from legal and illegal. I will pass no judgement (also because I still hold the believe that some communications technology is better than none) but using laws by the German government as a counter point is probably not the best idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Trial...

I disagree with you on the point that it shouldn't be the job of the vendor to determine right from wrong. Only you can determine that, and it is your responsibility. If you let other people determine it for you, you will have no defense come judgement.

First off, I take issue with starting an article by citing an emperor from over 2000 years ago to bolster a claim about a modern government.

That said my brother is in China now, and I setup a squid proxy for him using AWS (in singapore). Unencrypted it does no good, facebook and youtube actually cause the proxy to stop working for him briefly (without a proxy its a coinflip wether they will load or not).

So he just sent me a public key so I can setup an SSH tunnel. That should do it, too bad it's impractical to set up 1billion+ SSH tunnels for the citizens over there!

I get one too t.t

I like your points so I will compliment the mechanical fish ;)

To bring it back to the OP's point with your perspective, we should then not attempt to make the designers famous but rather highlight the importance, fun and satisfaction that is their craft.

We all appreciate what the designers make, but we don't spend much time exalting the designers. I don't think the OP necessarily wants all of them famous, just like we don't sit around talking about various primary care physicians. We do tell our kids that they can grow up to be those doctors though. I'm of the opinion that the next generation of parents could be telling their kids that they can build anything they want when they grow up. Something that legos drove home to me, but I consider myself lucky enough to be in a family that encouraged such thinking and could provide the tools for me to explore it.

I think the point is more that the analogy is so misleading, that it hurts the student's understanding.

A similar bad example would be using familiar round objects to teach equivalence: there are 10 apples, and 10 oranges, so apples == oranges.

Car's don't extend vehicles, and duck's don't extend birds. Just because we can organize these physical things into conceptual hierarchies based on their functionality, doesn't mean we can use them to understand polymorphism.

I've been using google docs for these kinds of notes, searchable, shareable and accessible anywhere I can get to gmail.

I may consider dropbox + txt files, but gdocs is working fine so far.

Walmart's supply-chain management software sounds like pre-cognition to me, at least in the sense that they are making some pretty good decisions about the future based on predictions.

It's just like artificial intelligence, once you get how it works it doesn't seem all that intelligent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn.2...

Extortion can bring out emotion. Extortion is disgusting, this is the "business" being analyzed here. You can take your emotions out of business if you want, but you shouldn't take out ethics.

I just recently decided to not pursue a PhD in scientific computing, so I'll be finishing my Master's and working at a startup starting in September.

One of the biggest reasons I decided to not do further research is that I have noticed that there are an unfathomable amount of people hobbling about on ancient and primitive tools when there are existing implementations and papers available that would make their lives orders of magnitude more efficient. So I've made a personal choice to not pursue the latest, fastest and most cutting edge algorithms and rather bring my knowledge, experience and problem solving abilities to people who are trying to solve real problems right now.

My point is that even though you think you can't compete with these guys who read, study and do 'real' science they could use a lot of help from the likes of you. Sure learning some linear algebra and bayesian statistics can help in directly implementing the algorithm, but usually the biggest problem I've seen is a complete lack of software engineering and hard coding specific to certain data sets.

I think the scientists can gain a lot from the software engineering field, especially open source practices. They will be resistant to it, as others have pointed out the incentives don't always line up, on the other hand there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of improvements a decent programmer can pluck.

I know a professor who has a big grant to sequence a whole bunch of animals, and will also do a high res CT scan of each specimen. He plans to make a comprehensive site where scientists and school children can access the data they are interested and learn more.

He even has money for a dev position for 4 years, I'm just worried that he gets someone who slaps together a proprietary and incompatible site when this would be a perfect chance to experiment with implementing some standard data access APIs.

I've heard bioinformatics people complain about the lack of standards and fragmented nature that comes from various small groups of scientists doing it on their own.

If anyone is interested pm me and I'll put you in touch, he is in South Carolina so he can't offer the salary and other perks of the Bay, but it's a real chance to put good development energy into science.

I don't think it would work to have a Patent Haven, because the patents would block usage in the U.S. I suppose if everything was hosted in that other country, but what about payments?

someone should DDoS the court with other types of civil litigation.

I get so enraged when hearing these stories. It is no different from extortion, and now I hear that you can be sued for libel for calling it that? I wrote a blog post the last time there was an HN thread on this calling to action: http://enja.org/2011/07/09/the-software-patent-racket-what-d...

I'd love feedback and ideas

I think you should keep in mind that you appear to be an intelligent, skilled and avid driver. For you driving is an experience you take seriously and also seem to enjoy. I'm not worried about what you do on the road, but I am worried about the millions of less intelligent and skilled drivers that are pushing 3000lbs of metal around at lethal speeds.

I think you are justified in wanting and buying a machine that suits your needs, but please don't assume that everyone is or even should be as adamant about driving as you are. I for one will happily let the computer take the wheel and allow me to focus on things I care about like conversation or coding. If I want a joy ride hopefully I'll be successful enough to own a classic gasoline powered driving machine ;)

I interpreted your point to be that we should leave government to the government specialists, i.e. politicians.

You forgot to mention that we should leave voting to the politicians :P

Would you still be against a group of people (non-violently) disrupting a business if that business illegally denied you service because of your race? Wouldn't you want the community to stand up for your rights?

I'm not defending the actions of the LOIC users, I don't think they are doing quite the same thing but it's close. If the balance of power is off then it is up to the community to try and put it back in place, as another commenter has posted one particularly successful method in the past has been the sit-in. Just as it's not ok for any mob to do whatever they want to a business, it's not ok for any company to do whatever they want to a community.

I think my interpretation wasn't well put. I also see the child-like wonder, but what it does the most for me is remind me that even someone as great as him feels insignificant compared to the marvels of nature, so I don't need to stress if I don't get everything. I may be lucky to find one smooth pebble or touch an interesting shell.