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Another cute way that's more obviously correct without translations is to consider a square with sides of length a+b. You get an interior square of area c^2 and 4 right triangles with legs of size a and b.

This is totally wrong; the examples rely on compilers doing copy elision together with return value optimization so that the copy becomes unnecessary (even if a copy is expensive, it's fine - it never needs to happen). They do not use copy on write containers (indeed, they return modified versions of input variables).

One such system was Pathfinder, which (I believe) used a relatively simple Bayes net to diagnose within certain categories of disease.

It was able to outperform pathologists in the area it was designed for because (or so I've been told) it didn't face the cognitive biases that human doctors have (like the inability to reason with probabilities, the accessibility bias, etc).

Math 55 isn't nice because of how much math it covers (you could take equivalent classes that cover the same material, just split up, at the same or higher level). It's nice because of the bonds it forges between the students, who are usually the top mathematical talent at Harvard. I'd suspect that it's these bonds that help the students throughout the rest of their mathematics education rather than their incoming ability or what the class teaches.

If you look at the problem sets, they're very hard (especially given that the students are all freshmen - a few of whom haven't ever done advanced mathematics before), but not unreasonably so (not really even beyond the top math majors of most top schools, I'd wager). Having made friends in a trial by fire like the 55 a/b series though, is a key to surviving later ones.

I like to think that, like how the "Book of Life" is interpreted in Christian Symbology, where the list of good and bad deeds of a persons life has been recorded for a later judgment, there's a "Book of Time" where, at some point, you have to account for all the bizarre, time-consuming activities that at one point in your life, you decided were worthwhile.

This person will have a lot to answer for one day.

The just world fallacy isn't bad because of how it changes your motivation or happiness or anything like that. It's bad because of how it causes you to act towards those around you.

People don't respond to homelessness when they've convinced themselves that homeless people deserve it. "the world sucking is no reason for you to change your attitude one way or the other" is of course absurd. If the world sucks, there's a reason to change it.

This article has so much crazy that I almost don't know how to respond to it.

C++ coddles programmers and Ruby doesn't. Really? That sounds like a sensible thing to say?

C++ avoided reflection because it would be misused by programmers? Only a profound misunderstanding of the design goals of C++, or having never actually used it, could inspire such a claim.

ActiveRecord is a Rails innovation that took decades to realize? What? Why would you think this?