All conventional imperative languages? Open your mind. Try Prolog. Try Clojure. Try Verilog.
141 karma · joined February 19, 2014
Now it's racist for a country to provide services to its own citizens that it doesn't provide to the citizens of other countries?
Any college replacement scheme is going to have to perform the same kind of filtering if it's going to be useful, and anything that performs this kind of filtering will be subject to exactly the same controversies the college system is subject to today. This outcome is because disparities in intelligence matter, and as long as we these differences exist and we need jobs with a certain cognitive threshold, we'll need something like college to indicate that certain candidates possess the needed traits.
It's important that it be very hard to lie about these qualifications, because anyone who could, would, due to the clear economic benefits of doing so. The only surefire way to determine whether someone has intellectual chops is to make him or her do something intellectual. That's what college is.
What you end up with ends up looking a lot like a college. Now, we can talk about changing how funding for college works, but that's a separate discussion from changing the fundamental model, which I don't see as a practical goal.
You're talking about trade schools? Good. That's a step in the right direction. It doesn't go far enough though. One unfortunate reality of our existence is that people differ markedly in cognitive skill. These differences are innate and immutable. Not everyone can benefit from an education.
If we pitch education as the way to address to inequality, we're not only going to waste a lot of money on useless education, but we're also going to give these negative-marginal-value people false hope of economic success.
We need to figure out an alternate way of living for people who are intellectually incapable of contributing to a modern technologically advanced economy. A basic income is a good start.
It's become politically fashionable to discount the contributions of individuals, because if we think about differences in talent and follow the implications, we're led to crimethink. There was even an article on HN a little while ago suggesting Einstein didn't really do anything important and that his discoveries were just a product of his time.
Evidence suggests that technical talent is bimodal.
That's not entirely true. Under Linux, with the x32 ABI (see https://lwn.net/Articles/456731/) you have access to the entire register file, but still use 32-bit pointers.
In many ways, it combines the advantages of 32- and 64-bit mode code.
Remember when you could distribute software yourself without getting threatened[1]? Remember when platform vendors didn't take a 30% cut of everything you earned just because they wrote an OS? Not even Microsoft was that evil.
I hope you enjoy the world you've built, hipsters.
[1] See the f.lux Apple distribution debacle
Which specific facts are inappropriate to mention on HN?
Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income, accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.
Try again.
The dream of stamping out inequality is built on the factually incorrect notion that we are all born with equal abilities. It's much easier to explain outcome differences as ability differences than to come up with increasingly unlikely forms of oppression.
As technology improves, low-IQ contributions become increasingly less valuable relative to machines, increasing inequality.
What's wrong with copying part of an API? You yourself admitting that I can do whatever I want with OpenJDK, including copying only part of it. I can then use this copy to make a product that turns a profit. If Oracle will sue me to this practice, then Google, not Oracle, is on the right side here.