kenster07

"Today if you are not a founder, you’re not worthwhile."

I lost interest in the article after this sentence.

How much does one need to understand how a car's engine works to drive a car?

I believe there is some relevance to a deep understanding of algorithms, that relevance being a function of the job. But in situations where the relevance is CLEARLY low for the job, they serve as nothing more than projections of the egos of CS grads, and reduce the value of their company.

Adding to my original post, every process is managed by Erlang's VM. Whereas in many languages, concurrency constructs are mapped to OS threads, Erlang has virtual threads that it manages for you. If the VM detects a multicore processor, it will know how to -automatically- map its virtual threads to take advantage of them.

Also, the actor-based style of programming tends to model real-world interactions more cleanly than OO code, leading to potentially clearer and more maintainable code.

Without morality, ANY social system, not just a market economy, will have problems, since many moral constructs directly lead to social stability. Some basic examples:

1) Thou shalt not steal, cheat, murder, etc... 2) Notions of karma -- i.e. everything you do unto others will come back to you.

It is built with concurrency in mind, from the ground up, making it much easier to write concurrent programs than when using the traditional languages that you've listed.

1) Every process in Erlang manages its own memory and has its own GC. This means that GC'ing one process will not stop the world.

2) Erlang has multicore compatibility baked in, through its process-based model.

3) Erlang enforces pure message-passing at a language level, so there is no shared state. This allows concurrent programs to be written much more easily than in languages where one has to manage shared state.

4) Referential transparency - to the programmer, one can use virtually the same code to pass a message on a remote Erlang process and an Erlang process on the same machine.

5) Fault-tolerant and self-healing mechanisms built in.

This is not an exhaustive list -- it just gives you an idea.

Lots of broad generalizations without any stats. I have gamed in the past in guilds with female members, and none of them have been treated particularly poorly.

The anonymity of the internet will always bring out the worst in some, and that is a much more powerful factor than being a gamer.

Is SFGate a tabloid?

Step 1: Cherry-pick most extreme comments possible and imply that they represent the average opinion.

Step 2: Make numerous anecdotal assertions without any effort to back them in statistics.

Step 3: Instigate mudslinging by displaying cherry-pickings to other side.

Step 4: Feedback into Step 1.

"Since we don't understand the macroeconomic system that is causing these issues, let's just blame a random group of people who are doing well in said system."

In computer science or math terms, the market economy is incredibly simple to understand:

1) People are encouraged to locally optimize -- i.e. optimize their own happiness. But as any psychologist would point out, lots of people have no idea how to do that. Kind of a problem.

2) Local optimization rarely achieves the global optimum.

There is hope yet for the patent system in America.

I do not see this as a problem with Thrun, but as a problem with the current educational system. If MOOC's carried a fraction of the "academic credibility" that college degrees did, Udacity would be a home run already. This will require a cultural shift, and companies like Udacity are sowing the seeds.

As Warren Buffet has said, the courses he took at Wharton barely differed in quality from the ones he took at Nebraska. Our culture is so obsessed with shallow accolades that it is slow to recognize a humongous opportunity right underneath its very nose.

There is absolutely no reason that MOOC's cannot teach many college-level courses as good as or better than their real life counterparts. Unfortunately, the motivation of students largely stems from the aforementioned shallow accolades.

As a filtering mechanism for professional skills, I think the current academic system has some flaws which MOOC addresses nicely, perhaps not as a complete replacement, but a powerful complement. But the reality is, academia should be used to filter academics, and in many industries, a degree represents nothing more than 4 years that could have been spent learning the actual profession and adding value to the economy.

Love of complexity is a programming disease.

I was going to post my take on this matter...but something struck me when reading the replies. The quality and thoughtfulness of the discussion here is so good compared to the utter crap that is regurgitated on TV and most newspapers. I'm happy that discussions of this level can be found on the internet, and that computer systems enable them.

Find a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life.

I don't mind working long hours so long as I am actually gaining useful knowledge which I can leverage later to get many times those hours back.

So if they aren't apparently trying to maximize their personal profits as measured in dollars, then they are failures. That's quite a harsh generalization.

If one were to analyze this concretely instead of with a bunch of platitudes, you want to find the optimal intersection between the productivity a language grants you for the task you are trying to accomplish, the amount of developer time required to maintain it, and the hardware required to support it.

1) Productivity - The speed at which you can create a respectable prototype. This is not just a matter of your team having mastered the language -- some languages are more specialized than others. For example, it will be orders of a magnitude easier (i.e. will require less dev time) to build a distributed system in a language with built-in actor support (i.e. Go, Scala, Erlang, etc.) than it would be to do so in say, PHP.

2) Maintainability (in terms of dev time) - The languages and its predominant frameworks will dictate how difficult it is to maintain a codebase. For example, many programmers will attest that statically typed codebases are easier to grok and maintain than dynamically typed. Dynamically typed code requires more edge case testing, and statically typed code allows an entire class of bugs to be compiled at runtime.

3) Hardware - Languages have different performance characteristics. Some languages will require $x / unit of web traffic. Others will require $y / unit. This translates into the # of servers required to support your app, which may diverge at a polynomial rate or worse over time. This is unlikely to be a big factor in the early goings, but it can matter a lot when / if you achieve success, so can be a worthy tiebreaker -- because it is highly unlikely you will be switching languages entirely once your company is in the groove, so the choice you make early on will stay with your company for a lifetime.

This is a great substitute for employers without adequate intuition about their candidates and/or the willingness to actually go through a candidates' references and public projects.

That is only one definition of fairness. Another definition of fairness would declare: "No Mr. Multi-millionaire, you really don't need a 5th Ferrari, just because you won the genetic lottery." I see the merit to both sides, because I can see myself on both sides. But nonetheless, your proposal would be an improvement, because right now, the system we have is neither fair nor sustainable.

Boosting aggregate demand will not solve the unemployment issue when you consider that one person with automation can produce enough goods to satisfy the demand more than one person.

Of course. But compared to actually spending money directly on goods that are produced by the average person, they may as well be stuffing it under their mattress.

Yes, that is a good thing. The bad part is that they aren't using the other 99.99..% of their wealth, essentially taking everyone else's labor and ending the cycle of trade that would otherwise help keep an economy going.

And that's not to mention broader macroeconomic issues which are more worthy of essays than HN comments.

*presuming that you went to an undergraduate institution where the variance in student intelligence is large enough to detect an appreciable difference between the avg intelligence in these two majors.

You have a point. Sometimes, I forget that there are actually people out there who pursue careers where they know they won't enjoy the journey.

What I mean is that people who enjoy programming probably tend to be smart. I haven't done any statistical surveys, but the motivational feedback loop for learning programming rewards intelligence.

Okay, but any specific suggestions on how to do that?

Exactly. I would feel much more comfortable testing the job's requisite domain-specific knowledge directly.

"...a smart person eager to learn is a breeze compared to teaching problem solving to someone who memorized the reference manual."

I would guess that there is actually significant overlap between these two groups.

Worse yet, the standard education indirectly discourages independent thought. It is difficult to reconcile the standardization of education with the wide diversity of students. There is simply no way everyone's intellect can flourish under a one-size-fits-all system.

This "elephant" is a racist opinion of your own making. Parents want to send their kids to a school where their peers will influence them to be good students. And as anyone who has gone to a largely "non-ethnic" school can attest, the racial makeup of the student body is far from a guarantee.

I appreciate that, and if the story is true, I hope the perpetrator suffers the consequences.

But we are not the jury here, as fun as it may be. We should not try to ruin someone's life in such a fickle forum.