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queensnakeon For the Love of God, Ask FizzBuzz

> even seemingly "senior-level" people (people with years of programming "experience" on their resume) have shown an inability to do basic coding from scratch.

I wouldn't have believed you a few months ago (and your statement is still stronger than my experience), but I've finally seen people who are so maintenance-bound, that even though they're good at _that_, they've never managed to learn the language (the corners, idioms, and semantics) they've been maintaining. It's probably a sign of heroism that they picked up enough to do so on the fly, but, you wouldn't hire them to write new code.

queensnakeon Eliezer Yudkowsky asks about automation

> There's a cost to automating any task: the time spent designing and testing the system.

Good point, but, once something's automated, it's automated (and cheaper) forever.

queensnakeon Eliezer Yudkowsky asks about automation

"Fewer people in the world" solves a lot of employment problems - we're a dime-a-dozen right now.

queensnakeon How Forensic Linguistics Identified J.K. Rowling

All of the /mentioned/ analyses - those of the first program sound like something you could do in an afternoon, yet it's been worked on for 10 years. I think there are more, and more sophisticated methods than were described.

queensnakeon Top Artificial Intelligence system is as smart as a 4-year-old

Here's one team trying for that: http://www.inria.fr/en/teams/flowers

queensnakeon Why the McWrap Is So Important to McDonald's

Yo people, let them have their ads, don't submit printer-only versions!

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-03/why-the-mcwr...

queensnakeon No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

> imagine how successful it would be if your employer couldn't sell the products you manufactured to anyone outside your state.

Well, but that's imaginary. We have free trade within all 50 states. That's reasonable, for what you get in return - greater equality (wages for the less skilled), happier people.

queensnakeon The future won’t bring new Radioheads. Let’s get used to it.

He does - he says that people younger than him will pay for gadgets and wi-fi, but not music, toward the end. Ie pirating is killing the labels and thus new bands.

queensnakeon Americans are wasting billions a year on name-brand pills

I know that Glucochrome eg is more powerful than its generic knockoffs. Also, this article http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/red-pill-indian-generic-d... talks about how the FDA operates on trust, to the point that foreign generics makers (at least the example given) can and do drive trucks through it.

queensnakeon Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_ou...

queensnakeon Sucks to be an old engineer

Coursera, Udacity etc are killer for this. Sure they're not work experience or academic credit but I've gotten positive comments "It shouldn't be a problem [that I didn't know their tech], you've picked up a lot of stuff". (Thinking about it now, I only assumed it included the Coursera work. But it can't have hurt.)

queensnakeon Go 1.1 performance improvements, part 2

OCaml is instructive, that's another compiled-but-GC'd language. Looking at them they're about the same.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

queensnakeon Go 1.1 performance improvements, part 2

Call me a spoilsport, but it's still slower than Java http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te... . That takes the bloom off the rose for me.

queensnakeon What according to you is the biggest problem with MOOCs?

Udacity has some permanently-on courses, where you go at your own pace. It's wonderful for the ability to binge study, but the lack of schedule might allow you to push it off indefinitely. For my own part that's still an open question, but I loved being able to binge during the easy part.

queensnakeon What according to you is the biggest problem with MOOCs?

Lack of academic credit. Often being /half/ of a class.

queensnakeon Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec

No! Do it like humans do it - use deep learning to let it grok its environment better with less / different sensor data. Also, make it pay attention to history (it may already, I don't know) and give it something like object permanence.

queensnakeon Let your Senator know what you think of the H1B

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/09/senates-comprehensi...

It'd be nice to have a specific bill #, but I'm not sure it has one. Here's a list it's likely to be in anyway:

http://capwiz.com/politicsol/issuesaction/billlist/?issue=26

Not sure it's the best, but it's /a/ way to contact your senator:

http://www.emailyoursenator.com/senators.html

queensnakeon Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

Also, their mindshare: "We're changing the world, 100K under-served people signed up!" vs, 5K who finish and most have at least a Master's already anyway :)

queensnakeon Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

You can totally do that. The courses are 'synchronous' in calendar spans of time, not in lectures being broadcast live.

queensnakeon Why Use Make

'Drake' for that use was on here too, not too long ago. http://blog.factual.com/introducing-drake-a-kind-of-make-for...

queensnakeon How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail

.. so then as part of the settlement, the trolls says 'and withdraw your bounty'. Same thing.

queensnakeon The Buddhist View on Suicide

Herman Hesse said somewhere, that the desire for suicide is really a desire for change. Sounds like the hardcorezen guy rediscovered that.

queensnakeon Matt Cutts goes crazy

oops; sorry, I upvoted this based on the first couple seconds.

queensnakeon What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks

Yet another reason to work at Google. They're anti- both obscure or clever code (see their coding standards), and so far in my own experience, you get the time you need to get the code right. There are periodic 'testing on the toilet' pieces to remind you to refactor ruthlessly as you go, and, on how to bring up and gather support for fixing technical debt, with your team. I haven't seen this at any other place I've worked, quite the opposite. It's a luxury.

queensnakeon Ray Kurzweil joins Google

Maybe Google has a monopoly on all the smartest people anymore, or, is just one-stop shopping for support for the biggest ideas. Ray's worth 27 million and as you said has many of his own companies, he doesn't need a salary.

queensnakeon An office with "library rules"

Here's something concrete you could charge the employers with: hearing loss. I've heard that it's only safe to listen on headphones 1 or so hours a day, not 8 - 10. It's like second-hand smoke, only, it's not cancer, and probably no-one's going to do the study. But I too have thought that it's lawsuit material.

queensnakeon My Education in Machine Learning via Cousera, A Review So Far

You know that a coursera-taught team won a (non-academic) machine-learning competition, right? Knock-on articles about it made the rounds here a few weeks back.

queensnakeon The Quiet Ones

Also, age: you're more easily distracted & thus annoyed at /being/ distracted as you get older.

queensnakeon The Quiet Ones

Enh; I have the best, Bose QC-15s, and they don't do much.

queensnakeon The Quiet Ones

I look forward to the day when workplace noise is treated like second-hand smoke.