That seems true in general, but it's still dangerous to declare that you're working on a famous problem (P!=NP, 3n+1, Riemann); it's something you keep to yourself until you've made serious progress.
6,131 karma · joined February 24, 2007
That may turn out to be the more valuable post -- I hope to see it on the front page here whenever it's ready.
I can't wait to play around with it; some of these examples (nutritional labels, the actuarial stuff, ISS location, etc.) are just dead cool.
That said, a team of good ball-handlers can beat a strong press if they stay calm and pass well. Patience and poise.
(Which is probably why the press is so effective in younger leagues: players at that age get frantic under pressure and just don't have the dexterity/skill to keep the ball under control)
If we want to know what American normality is -- what Americans want to regard as normal -- we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just invaluable, fiction-wise.
His style begs to be parodied but this is a facile attempt, in my opinion.
- a Canadian in America
"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in fifty years you're going start doing some thinking of your own, and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fucking education you coulda got a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."
"Yeah, but I will have a degree," he says in return.
It's an open question whether the markets in general (i.e. not just startups, tech, etc.) will get over the apparent value baked into a college degree / GPA, and start worrying about what kids can do, what they know, and how they think.
I thought it sounded like a pretty elegant (if potentially divisive) solution, maybe worth serious consideration.
My "most," in other words, includes less than his.
Agreed, though: an example of your service in action is the first thing I'd want to see (after reading the nice, simple explanation of what it does).
I'd argue that every innovation involves mixing two (or more) things to produce a third. So calling it "typical" is a gross understatement.
If you don't find the game compelling, it's not because the combinatorial (a + b = c) form of innovation is somehow uninteresting, but because the elements are.
I agree that (space invaders) + physics = (moderately more engaging version of space invaders).
I liken the difference between Python and Java to internships at small and large companies, respectively. In the small company, you can do meaningful work in any department—you can be the cook, accountant, and network engineer in the same day, just as you can parse XML, send automated e-mails, and invert large matrices in Python with plug-and-play modules. At a small company everything's transparent, and on a scale you can understand; there's no organization for organization's sake, no vapid meetings or processes, just problems that need to be solved and the tools you need to solve them.
It is only when the small company grows, when the founders can't interview every new employee and the clients aren't recognizable by name, when managers and engineers are disjoint groups, that one needs all the stuff they teach you at business school. To round out the conceit: the Java curriculum is that stuff. And to a kid just learning to program, it's cruft.
Pop quiz: what's a morphism of functors?
Is there anyone else who does that?