miloshh

You might be able to do a serious graphics or high-performance computing project in Lisp. You will be the first one, and I'll be very interested in how it goes.

But then they show some examples of questions for which you supposedly need these "other skills", and sure enough, they're typical little math puzzles that could be taken straight from an IQ test, or SAT/GRE.

If your point was that researchers unaffiliated with universities have a harder time to get through the peer-review process - I don't think that's true at all. Often I do not even remember if a paper I read in the past came from a university or an industry lab. For example, in computer graphics, one of the most prolific institutions when it comes to publishing papers is Microsoft Research Asia.

However, the argument that getting a Ph.D. is getting harder while its (financial) value is decreasing seems correct to me. That might not actually be a bad thing, and is very much to be expected - the market value of doing cool and interesting things goes down as the value of tedious or dangerous jobs goes up. I think we will see even more of that in the future.

We keep complaining about people maximizing their profits rather than happiness. But then, when some choose to pursue their interests and get PhD's in areas that aren't so hot in the industry, we criticize them for bad career decisions. Maybe everything's OK with the system, after all.

That is a pretty common approach, but what was suggested above (writing first in HLL and then rewriting parts in C++) is, to my knowledge, never done in practice.

The only way you might get away with this approach is if your application is essentially a number of separate scripts that communicate through files. Then you can rewrite the key scripts in C++. But that is never the case for games.

Python is excellent if some good soul has already written a library that does exactly what you need (in C or C++, obviously). The combination of numpy+PyOpenGL+PyCUDA is great for certain kinds of research projects (I have written a volume renderer in it) but probably far from commercial usability.

Haskell has great potential, but the community is too small and too academic to produce the necessary libraries and tools (which is a lot of work with minimal scientific content). The key problem is the absence of an industrial-strength array facility - there are many kinds of arrays in Haskell, all somewhat clunky and incomplete.

D might be a contender, but last time I looked the tools seemed very basic and it did not even support 64-bit systems.

It might be that P=NC, but it is very unlikely, i.e. some problems are probably inherently not parallelizable.

It has been long known that MC can be applied to computing any integral over any domain, so computing the integral of color over a pixel is simply a specialization of a general technique, and should not be patented.

Similarly, in akeefer's post above, storing insurance claims in a relational database is a specialization of the well known process of storing anything in a database, so should not be patented.

Some famous law-suits were about patents that are far less trivial than your bridge example.

For example, Pixar holds a patent on Monte Carlo sampling, and has sued or threatened a number of companies that used any sort of randomization in their rendering algorithms. This despite the fact that Monte Carlo methods have been known and used for many decades before Pixar was started. The issue here is not that the concept of Monte Carlo integration is trivial, but instead that Pixar's contribution to it is so tiny compared to the previous state of the art that it should not give them a "right" to own the whole field.

Similarly, some lawsuits were about compression algorithms if I remeber right. Same issue here - it's not that a given compression algorithm is trivial, it is more the fact that it is probably a tiny increment on the top of existing compression techniques, and anybody that also builds on the known ideas should not be threatened by loosely related patents.

Of course, patents are a problem that should be addressed, but I don't think trying to prove that software patents are somehow different than others is the right way.

If you can get deep enough into a field to sense those ideas in the air (and this is much less work than you need to publish original papers yourself), you might find a goldmine.

1. have bachelor's degrees, 2. register a corporation, 3. start with at least $X in the company account.

The value of X is up to debate, but it should not matter which investors they received the money from. Details can be worked out.

Unfortunately, it seems to be just a reference CPU implemetation, but if the GPU code is ever released, I'd guess it will be here.

Rather, both Americans and immigrants worked hard to build a tech industry that then created jobs. Without the immigrants, the Americans would not have been able to create an industry more significant than, say, the Japanese or Italian tech industry. Thus many jobs would not exist, and the wages would not be higher.

You did not say words like "create", "stolen", "give", and "take", but they are implicit in making your supply/demand argument work.

A dozen years ago was 1997. Do you seriously think this is true?

"With the importation of so many engineers into the US, wages were suppressed..."

You seem to think that white Americans work hard to "create" jobs, which are then "stolen" by hordes of immigrants. In other words, white Americans "give" and immigrants "take". That's just not how it works.

Immigrants in SV are on average smarter and work harder than Americans - not because there's something wrong with Americans, but because these immigrants are a highly biased sample of the world's huge population.

I don't understand why academia has long known the right way to hire, but the software industry keeps missing it. The right way is to let the candidates give a 30-60 minute talk about their previous projects, and then fry them with questions that came up in the talk.

Imagine a famous university wants to hire a top-quality math professor. How about asking him tricky high-school math questions for an hour, to see if he makes a mistake? Or how about cutting it down to 5 minutes, since that's enough to assess the "chemistry"? Or, what about choosing only from a pool of contractors that worked with the university before, rather than letting the best ones to apply? Sound stupid? Well, yes, it is stupid.

Similarly, the type of food people eat reflects their social standing, but the purpose of food clearly isn't to define the social hierarchy.