poet

The Atomic Bomb is the outstanding fact of our time-- not just as a scientific triumph and military weapon but as a symbol of what our so-called civilization has brought us to. As Emerson remarked, "Civilization crowed too soon." How shall we meet the menace of modern scientific war-- not the menace of atomic attack but the menace of the bomb itself, of the ugly fact of its existence? The fission of the atom is an intellectual achievement of the first order.... we can understand what Emerson meant when he declared that "pure intellect is the pure devil". Over the entrance to Plato's Academy at Athens was the inscription, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here." If I could choose a similar inscription for the entrance of all the colleges and universities int he world today I would pick that great sentence of Montaigne's "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness."

WANTED: a force for good as potent as the atom bomb is for evil, a force, preferably, to complete the analogy, that produces a vast result out of a chain reaction of little forces each of apparently negligible amount-- a result, however, not of disintegration and destruction, but of integration and creation.

It its widest manifestation life itself as revealed in the process of organic growth is such a force and it is not chance that the bomb came into existence for the express purpose of defeating that process, as if it recognized in it its natural and opposite enemy. For what is cellular proliferation but a chain reaction of millions of tiny forces each contributing to a tremendously disproportionate total result of integration and creation? This chain reaction of the tiny into the mighty may be observed, though on a smaller scale, in the mental and spiritual life of man even more convincingly and often at a more rapid tempo than in his physical development....

Goddard goes on to explain this mental and spiritual force in detail. I simply cannot do his work justice with with excerpts from the rest of the essay. You'll have to go read it. It may be the most important thing you ever read.

Take classes from people on these lists: http://cte.illinois.edu/teacheval/ices/exc_teach.html. Make sure you go back at least a few years because there are several good teachers who don't teach every semester or were on sabbatical. Prof Bailey comes to mind as someone who was on sabbatical.

When you register for a class go to every single office hour and figure out which TAs know their stuff. Only go to those office hours.

Figure out how much the Professor actually loves the textbook. If he really likes it, problems on homeworks and exams will be of the same theme as the textbook. In classes like that you benefit immensely from taking notes out of the book. Note most textbooks are on reserve at Grainger, no need to buy if you dont want to.

If you haven't taken 241 already, just get through it. The department is still figuring out how to teach that class.... it's not the teachers fault. It just doesn't quite fit right and probably should be two classes.

Use 242 as an opportunity to meet good programmers and continue to work with them afterwords. The actually increase in programming ability from the course itself is questionable. Although again, not the teacher's fault. It's a really hard thing to do.

Get involved in undergraduate research. A great starting point is Lawrence's CS498la (undergraduate research lab). Professors are a lot more tolerant and welcoming than you'd think (but be ready to work hard). Note that research doesn't have to be crazy hardcore theoretical stuff. It can be both cool and relevant (studying some sort of HCI problem on mobile devices?).

Figure out who the competent Math professors are for those classes that are required. I didn't do my research here and got bitten by it. My impression is that there aren't very many good sections for Math.

Take a graduate level course in the subject you are interested in. One of the unique things about top tier programs is that you pretty much can take a course in whatever you want. So for example if dbases are your thing, taking 511 after 411 is the way to go. People who have to scale Rails applications to massive sizes need to know data bases very well... you might as well take the opportunity now to get ahead of the game.

Oh and don't leave freshman physics until your last semester. That was a major fail :P

I don't really have any big secrets, but a lot of people manage to miss most of the above. Apologies if you already know it all. :P

A couple of things unacknowledged in your argument. First, there's the practical implications of cheaters on GPA. Cheaters get higher grades than what is possible without cheating, making the curve in a class lower than what it would be in a completely honest classroom. I'll be the first to champion someone who doesn't care about GPA, but there are concrete affects that a lower GPA has on students. Even though you got a good education, it's still something to think about. Second, there's the fact that the solution you propose is not possible in the current system. The incentive structure is all wrong (read: nonexistent) for undergraduate teaching in universities. Further, the majority of professors don't even have the requisite skills to be good teachers. Even if we did get the incentives right, the talent simply isn't there. To be honest I doubt there are enough people on board with improving undergraduate education to get it done.

I think (2) is the prudent course of action. The majority of cheating that I am aware of is only possible because professors reuse assignments and homework/exam questions from previous years. Solutions are simply passed down each year. One notable exception is in our theory classes, where the faculty make the effort to produce unique homework and exam questions every semester. I believe cheating in the theory classes is far lower as a result and I am extremely thankful that the faculty put forth this effort.

I am cognizant of the work required to generate unique assignments each semester. However, as demonstrated by how departments typically handle quals, it is doable if the workload is distributed. It is my sincere hope that this becomes standard practice. It is the easiest and most fair way to handle the cheating problem. The reason why such a system usually doesn't get implemented in practice is because it requires the entire department to commit to undergraduate education, which is quite difficult to achieve at research universities.^

Some other minor additions to the above system that have a good payoff/cost ratio: (1) static analyzers to detect duplicate code submission and (2) higher weights on exams to punish those who share complete answers on homework assignments.

^Don't take this as a condemnation of undergraduate education in the CS department at UIUC. There are incredible teachers here you'll get an excellent education if you make a little effort to avoid professors whose priorities are elsewhere.

What? I never claimed that it did.

It simply (arguably) authorized Congress to pass legislation regulating health care.

Yes, key word arguably.

What we're arguing about is whether Congress should exercise its power under the Commerce Clause to give the executive branch more power over the Internet. The language of the statute determines how much, and what kinds, of power the executive branch would get.

You missed the point of my post and I apologize for expressing myself poorly. The act of passing legislation is irrelevant to whether the executive branch will exercise the powers in question. Even if we pass legislation with an explicit enumeration of powers, the executive branch will still step outside those enumerations and use the Commerce Clause as the legal basis. My point is that the only thing which will actually limit the powers the executive branch takes is legal precedence, which we don't have right now. We wont see true limits on what the executive branch can do until we see some Supreme Court rulings in this area.

Between the debate over cyber security and the debate over healthcare, the Commerce Clause may well prove to be the most significant part of the Constitution for the next decade.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/health/policy/10lawyer.htm...

[2] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-1301

Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm curious if we will see the URL of the submission updated by a moderator.

The mere existence of information that more than just a very few people have access to almost guarantees a leak and eventual publication

Empirically not true. What percentage of classified information has been leaked in the course of history? It's infinitesimally small.

With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage the amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may leak out multiply. Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this effect.

The government can control what technology they allow into secured facilities. Cellphones with cameras are irrelevant when they aren't allowed into secure locations.

what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?.

Obviously not. Do you really think the list that was leaked is the only such list? More detailed lists would obviously be classified at TS.

It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently failing.

The stuff that's been leaked is relatively low level Secret stuff. To claim that recent events prove that the government's ability to protect classified information is failing is ridiculous.

--

Why the standard of debate so low for this particular issue?

Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that your original claim that Amazon rolled over because of Lieberman is false and unsubstantiated.

I think it's pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman's remarks. Rather, Amazon did what they did because they thought it was the right to do: "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy".

I understand you're passionate about this, but let's not conflate what actually happened.

Either release all the information, or withhold it. Don't play sides.

Now that's just illogical, plain and simple. You don't expect Wikileaks to do some verification and sanity checks? You object to the fact that they take a quick look over the documents to make sure they don't leak anything that will get massive amounts of people killed? Wikileaks doesn't edit to play sides, they edit so they can maintain some form of legitimacy as a journalistic entity. From what I've read, two things happen during the editing phase: (1) fact checking and (2) checks to make sure lives aren't put in danger by the leak. No sides are being played; it's simply common sense practices that journalistis have been doing for several centuries.

The following essay on the subject is worth your time: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v006/6.3br....

Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for many narcotics offenses.

Singapore police have the authority to compel both residents and non-residents to submit to random drug analysis.

There are no jury trials in Singapore. Judges hear cases and decide sentencing.

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1017.html#c...

What definition of sexual assault are you using exactly? Your original contention is that the author is trivializing "real" sexual assault by using the phrase "sexual assault" in an inappropriate way, yet in Ohio no such a thing exists. So it's inappropriate according to what definition? What you're actually doing is inventing in your own mind what you think sexual assault should be and then getting angry at the author for violating your contrived definition.

Do you see why it's stupid to be pedantic about the specific phrase "sexual assault"? The author used the phrase sexual assault not to conform to a definition, but because she was touched in a sexual way and felt assaulted. In my opinion such feelings are perfectly reasonable in this situation. I would have felt assaulted had I not been given a warning.

Anyone who is quibbling about terminology in this thread is guilty of the phenomena that happens when nerds meet reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880553.