kenster07

Price is ALWAYS an issue.

Care to elaborate?

You can replace "In America" with "In Any Country."

I'm not surprised. Their time-tested strategy of blatant vendor lock-in is being disrupted by competitors providing the same kind of software for free - google docs, firefox/chrome, linux.

After the upcoming "adjustments," they should be able to survive at a somewhat healthy level, but they will have to accept lower revenue and margin as a persistent reality.

I think what he saying is that large cable corporations are significantly wealthier than most local governments, and the stats would agree.

You act as though Javascript will take over the programming world -- I can confidently say that it won't

No?

If that were to happen, it would be a problem with the programmers more than anyone else.

One can do a great many things with disciplined Javascript, and I shudder to think what Twitter was trying to do on their front-end that caused a 5x increase in load time compared to server-side template-rendering.

That being said, I would very much welcome a high-performance alternative to Javascript that also runs in any browser -- something in the spirit of C or Java, which could be embedded in Javascript and vice versa.

Just because someone is brilliant does not mean they are a good educator.

Linkbait title.

This author still thinks about economics in terms from over a 100 years ago.

Many technological advancement allow us to produce more efficiently, i.e. produce the same amount of output with less input cost, including labor. When we get to the point when we can produce all the output we need with virtually no input cost, and by the hands of an increasingly small % of the population, I'm not sure modern economic theory has anything to say about such a situation, because it is built on many implicit assumptions about the scarcity of resources which may not be true forever.

Working hard and working efficiently are not mutually exclusive. I would expect a false dichotomy like this to be posted on mtv news, but definitely not here.

The question is, how much do exams reflect real world work scenarios?

A commenter on a blog that has been posted on the internet for public consumption?

1) Leaving sf in any part, due to your perception of the reaction of random women at bars, to your profession, blows me away. There are plenty of people in the city who also admire your profession, including many single women. And quite frankly, there are more important things in life anyway.

2) People who feel 'guilty' about getting decent salaries are missing the big picture. You are now an allocator of wealth. You can help that mom and pop shop pay its rent, if you are so inclined. Abandoning that privelege and responsibility is also a baffling reaction.

You never know.

I think the frailty of the human ego is more likely to manufacture scarcity than anything else.

This is just describes another transitional point in human history. In any given year, we can produce the same output with less labor. As this effect compounds, take this pattern to its extreme -- producing all the output the world could ever need with virtually no human labor. In such a scenario, what is the meaning of a wage? What does it mean for a person to produce "value?" How would humanity, whose genome has been shaped under the chisel of scarcity, adapt to a system where such a thing did not exist?

In this thought experiment, I believe it becomes evident that the laws of economics, as we understand them, are NOT timeless. Modern economics has gone on a tangent, creating a system of analysis and theory that only works for this microcosm in our existence. It is only as our economy approaches the scenario described above that the true laws of human economics can become evident.

Before I can read this article, I think someone should explain the assumption that the middle class is "shackled" in the first place.

How is this different from Bower.js?

I, for one, was taught about the peril of hubris, by my parents and teachers. Not everyone was so fortunate.

There was an article posted to Hacker News about the gender difference in learning yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971356

It made clear that boys and girls are motivated by different factors when learning. So I have a problem when I read this article and the first line is:

"There's an unfounded gender stereotype that says women aren't as good at maths as men."

Someone may have taught this writer that opening up with something "controversial" makes for good prose, but I think it just undermines the purpose of the article. There are plenty of statistics that show that technical fields, including math, are heavily male-dominated. Why would someone post something in hacker news that basically implies that this history is not real?

This gender gap certainly may not be because of latent gender differences in potential math skill. But if on average, women tend to be less interested in math, they will reach their mathematical potential less often. And based on the article I linked above, there are at least statistical differences between the motives of male and female students.

-This article strikes a chord with me. I remember I was placed a year ahead in math, in Algebra I Honors, and the class was so easy that I would bring little toys into class and play with them while still getting A's. The teacher, a female, sent me back to Pre-algebra as a result. In hindsight, that reaction was so patently absurd. If anything, she should have tested whether I should have advanced to Geometry Honors.

-I don't think anyone is surprised that the article claims that boys perform better under conditions which simulate actual adult workplace conditions.

-A bigger issue is really the education system targeting the median student. That means those students with the highest potential have to fight against the system to reach it -- if they ever reach it at all. And holding back the brightest people, when the economy is advanced by that small percent of bright people, sounds horribly ineffective.

This educational system is an artificial structure imposed on people with disparate learning capabilities, trying to fit every peg under the sun into a square hole, and I think we've missed out on a lot of value because of that.

Hopefully, as automation increases, this is something we'll be able to improve upon.

I disagree with the premise. "Organic" search will not exist, barring a radically new business model. Any search engine with the resources to produce good search results must carry auction-based advertising in order to fund the quality of their results.

Good luck finding that business model, and being able to reap the profits from it.

I, for one, am very appreciative of this course, and the professor for taking the time to do it. Doing the first week's assignment, I've already learned a lot about programming for NP-hard problems.

The problem isn't the lack of need for forced labor -- it is the unemployment it creates.

In the future, even this small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers (to which I belong) may not be needed either, as computers will become self-deterministic.

What will be the real long-term solution when the value of a person to society can no longer even be roughly approximated by his income?

I like the idea of using the interview as a screening process, just to make sure the candidate didn't lie on their resume, and that they are a socially competent person who can survive in a team environment, or better yet, improve the team.

But, you should also carefully examine the past code that the candidate has written (that he can legally disclose) and also design a programming test for candidates to complete.

This is the problem with selling education primarily as a means to gain monetary wealth. You'll get lots of people who just want that piece of paper at the end -- and this effect will be increased in countries where monetary wealth is relatively uncommon.

1) Stephen Covey often talked about the "personality ethic" over the "character ethic." The set of ethics a society chooses will determine its future in the long-term. Charades cannot last forever.

2) The article didn't hesitate to conflate the events at this one school with the character of the entire country, which, given the disparate scale of the two, seems to be poor journalism. But then again, such articles have come to be expected nowadays.

Re: John Carmack -- the author conflating an aptitude for producing a great end result, with the ability to communicate how the programmer got there.

They are different skills, varying in levels of importance depending on the context.

Raw IQ should only be one of several components to consider. There are many proxies for determining raw IQ, but the proxies themselves should not be the end goal.

Remember that writing maintainable code is also about communicating an idea -- knowing how to pick the right word to describe a variable or function -- knowing how to document your code succinctly, are critical and have a significant effect on a company's bottom line in the long-run.

Furthermore, you want to hire someone who will not negatively affect the productivity of his coworkers with his attitude. He must be able to work productively in a team setting.