kenster07

Lots of China-related articles being posted to HN today, from a non-hacker publication.

Is this anything new? Hubris is woven into the fabric of human history. The world-wise won't take long to recognize a smoke blower. To the rest, good luck.

So giving a large swath of your population more education doesn't magically stimulate economic growth. Hm, where have we seen this pattern before?

Due to Fortran's memory model, its performance could potentially be drastically improved by altering the arrays such that the program is accessing consecutive columns rather than rows.

from: r = r + (X(i,k) - X(j,k)) * (X(i,k) - X(j,k))

to: r = r + (X(k,i) - X(k,j)) * (X(k,i) - X(k,j))

The primary goal of the education system should be to prepare students to reach their full potential in the real world. It is not achieving this goal optimally. The best and brightest are often stuck being taught the same material, at the same rate as the median student. We had to spend a year learning Algebra I, for some ungodly reason. How many of us could have learned it in literally one month? How many of us could have finished our entire high school's math curriculum in a year? Why should the A we could have gotten in one month be equated to the A of a person who needed a full school year to learn it?

Food for thought.

I am impressed by the arrogance of some of the commenters here, who seem to believe that they understand the totality and diversity of human nature and cultures.

No. Just no. Academia != real-world work.

If the school system's mandate is to prepare and evaluate students for the workplace, it is not doing a very good job.

The style of work and incentive systems differ greatly between your typical company and university. The differences in incentive systems are obvious, so I won't delve.

But as for the style of work, I recall that in university, professors would ask students to write a computer program on PAPER for exams. Sure, there is some overlap between that and a workplace environment. But at the end of the day, it is not simulating a real-world work environment, where you would be able to run and test your program, debug it, look up little tidbits on Google, and so forth, before checking it in.

This is an irrational model for evaluating a candidate's talent. The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple. Many people's motivations in university diverge from their motives in the professional world. Some people will work much harder when the result is a paycheck every two weeks, or when they have to feed a family, or because they see their work career as distinct from their academic career. But for the sake of argument, let's play along with this naive model.

The university they attended matters almost as much as their GPA, as we all know that professors will tend to curve the difficulty of their course to conform to the quality of the students they are teaching.

And you have an illogical attitude towards 3.9-4.0 students. Almost every student who attends an Ivy-caliber school had a 3.9-4.0 in high school. Surely, you aren't implying that the quality of a CalTech CS graduate is lower than the quality of a UCLA CS graduate, because the CalTech students' one-time GPA was likely a 4.0. And you certainly can't be saying that Ivy-caliber students are sheep who blindly jump through hoops.

Companies should be intelligent enough to hire for what they really need. Hiring an MS just for the sake of the MS is not always the best strategy.

In a research-driven job, someone with a strong research background in CS makes sense.

For a job where you want a top craftsmen and producer of code, it would seem to be much more tangential.

For the latter situation, companies that hire purely based on academic credentials will likely be making suboptimal, if not outright negative EV hiring decisions.

Their lack of understanding of CS fundamentals is probably why they are taking the MS in the first place. I would assume they would have improved by graduation.

This is a bandage to the problem, perhaps even a good bandage, but not a cure.

The issue is so much deeper than this.

On the "physical labor" side of the economy, the college system, in its current form, will not efficiently fill America's production lines with workers. It will not create more craftsmen. It certainly does not cure the average American college graduate of the mentality that they are above being a gardener in their own backyard.

On the knowledge side of the economy, MOOC can potentially add enormous value. The distribution of credentials (aka a degree from an elite university) is being decoupled from the educating of the knowledge workforce. Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school.

Part of this can be explained by the nature of auction-based systems: the more participants there are in an auction, the higher the average price will be at the end of that auction for any given item.

As far as CTR, that could be explained by way too many factors.

So much tiptoeing. The answer is 'yes.' They do.

I had a tougher high school course load, a better GPA, significantly higher SAT I and SAT II scores, and comparable extracirriculars to everyone in my class who got accepted to elite university X.

Thing is, I'm Asian, and they were all more coveted minorities.

The good news is, your university does not determine your future. You do. Once class is out and you're in the real world, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is PRODUCING VALUE.

IQ is worthless in a vacuum -- much like a computer. Though they have magnitudes greater computational power than the smartest human, without humans, they have no purpose.

To the ardent feminists, a simple question -- do you believe the world would be a morally superior place if there was no biological distinction between men and women -- i.e. there was only one gender?

This is a less extreme way of saying that understanding Newtonian physics will make one a superior shooter in basketball.

Understanding CS theory is a way of testing intelligence, sure. But the author betrays his own lack of familiarity with the industry today in implying that it is required knowledge to be an effective developer.

Anyone have a few spare grains of salt?

Nonblocking IO doesn't preclude horizontal scaling.

The Node / EventMachine / Twisted version of nonblocking IO is built on the Reactor Pattern. The common use case is to minimize IO delay. Whenever there is IO, a NodeJS script will cheerfully continue execution of other code, whereas in PHP and other purely synchronous languages, the script would block while waiting for the result. In practice, this has more use cases than just IO, of course. For example, one can send heavy computations to background processes and execute other code while waiting for the result.

So back to the original point, yes, writing nested callbacks can be more difficult to decipher than "flat" code, but the results may very well be worthwhile if you are looking to squeeze maximum performance out of your hardware.

Nested callbacks naturally allows for non-blocking code, which leads to higher request capacity.

In, say, Ruby, you've got EventMachine for something equivalent but it's definitely "bolted" on to the language. Python has Twisted, with which I have no personal experience. In PHP, there are really no options.

Economics is clear when explaining its foundation: Markets are only as efficient as its participants are rational and fully informed. The entirety of modern economics is built upon the presumption that the last two conditions are 100% true.

Does anyone fail to see why this would qualify for a patent?

If only it didn't cost 10's of thousands to have patents re-examined by the Patent Office -- we could put a lot of trolls out of business and destroy a lot of nonsense patents.

I feel exactly the same about smartphone UI.

This a lesser-known way in which the education system is broken. When education is based on the quality of your education compared to other young job seekers, educational inflation will certainly not benefit the average student who can pay to play the game.

Their ultrabooks don't look like MacBook Airs any more than other laptop manufacturers.

Same with the cell phones.

Most tablets basically look the same and function the same to the end user.

Please clarify "arrogantly, blatant copycats." And please don't tell us about rounded corners or tapping a touchscreen.

Agreed. The one-sidedness and irrationality of the story caught my attention immediately.

You haven't explained why someone in this bizarre scenario where they have given their passport to their employer can't simply go to their embassy and have the matter straightened out in a day.

I'm sorry, how and why did your colleagues surrender their passports to a foreign company? Beyond that bizarre plot twist, why didn't your colleagues go to their native country's embassy?

If you're going to invoke racism and judge an entire nation's business practices, you could at least take the care to put together an argument that almost makes sense.

The article makes it clear that these bloggers dealt with Samsung's India subsidiary.

Most programmers are hard-working, relatively honest people. It must be difficult for them to watch people like Shirley pass them on the career ladder.

It's one thing to have people skills, and use it as a lever to add benefit and value to this world. The Shirley's of this world deserve zero sympathy.

That being said, the TechCrunch article wasn't as articulate as it should have been. At the very least, context should have been provided for these pictures.