swatow

"Why do you want to do that" might be appropriate when actually working, but not in an interview.

1) Questions that rely too much on background knowledge. Knowing the exact properties or implementation of the more complex algorithms in the canon of undergraduate CS knowledge is not a particularly useful skill in itself.

2) Questions that have some trick that you either get or don't get. These aren't always terrible, but they give a big advantage to someone who has seen the question before.

So what is a good algorithm based question?

1) Implementing something basic but non-trivial, like N-Queens with backtracking. Basically, something anyone should be able to do.

2) Something that mixes in domain knowledge. E.g. problems calculating probabilities than can be solved with dynamic programming.

3) Pure domain knowledge, but in programming form. E.g. how to implement k-means clustering.

Probably, but this argument is mainly a strawman to avoid debating actual classical economics. The classical viewpoint is that no job would exist if it didn't serve some useful purpose, and requiring people to find a job instead of getting welfare, is a way of preventing people using other people's tax dollars for their sustenance, instead of getting it by performing some useful task for someone else.

This whole article is a ridiculous strawman. People don't advocate hard work for its own sake (or if they do, this viewpoint isn't politically influential). They promote hard work for what it brings, that is, whatever the worker produced.

Graeber's essay is wrong. There are no "bullshit jobs". From the employer's point of view, why would they hire someone if hiring that person wasn't profitable? Does he really think businesses put the ideology of everyone having a job over profit?

Not everyone is the same. In my experience, employers are quite discerning when it comes to individual's talents, and pay accordingly. I think your statement is a kind of false egalitarianism. You pretend that skill level is fairly flat, and that lots of people should be earning a lot more. And yet the market doesn't reflect that, so you make up a story where the market doesn't really function, and people are willfully taking below market salaries.

If a person can make the unsupported claim that gender differences do not stem from biologically hardwired tendencies, then a person should be able the unsupported claim that gender differences do stem from biologically hardwired tendencies.

Also, not being able to make "unsupported" claims is a vicious cycle. If you can't say X, then any academic study is going to phrase their conclusions very careful regarding X (or possible selectively publish - I've seen this). And then X is going to be "unsupported".

College education currently involves exposing students to sophisticated (progressive) propaganda, which they lack the skills to challenge.

Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad when it comes to a the broad liberal arts education. But it could be a lot better. A good start would be

1) Adding more mainstream economics (and confronting Marxists economists who have left the economics departments but continue to preach Marxism from other departments).

2) Removing censorship of non-progressive opinions. This means people should be allowed to say that different races have different IQs, that it's not ok to be gay, and that gender differences stem from biologically hardwired tendencies. People censor all of these things, then wonder why there are no moderate right wingers. The fact is moderate right wingers get fired. All that remains of the right after it's intellectuals have been eliminated or forced to pretend to be more moderate than they are, is the populist right.

Apple has created a UI toolkit to enable researchers to directly get data from participants via an app. All control is in the hands of the researcher creating the app.

And the app will be used for traditional research studies, the only difference is that participants enter data via their app.

On the other hand, most of mathematics can be done in first order logic (FOL).

As for English, I'm not much of a linguist but I believe the closest equivalent to the above for English (and other natural languages) would be Categorical Grammar or maybe Montague grammar.

Here is an article that discusses the controversy over force based vs consent based definitions of rape.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117630/jed-rubenfeld-rape...

But most people don't subscribe to your consent based definition of rape. I think the majority of people would lean towards the force based definition of rape. You personally might think that rape should be defined as sex without consent, but that's a different matter.

True, there has been some movement towards consent based laws in the US, but many states still retain the requirement of force (which could be expanded to include threats and physical restraint).

If rape is defined to be a crime or class of crimes, it's completely unreasonable to selectively ask people to be very specific about which crimes they mean. In the US I don't believe there is any such crime as rape by threatening to fire someone, or if there is it is not a serious crime.

The demand for these services mostly comes from the West, and there is a big advantage to local workers. So assuming there is a large supply of skilled data scientists in India and Ukraine, but not the demand, then they can't charge higher wages.

Furthermore, if these barriers could be broken down, and there was no longer an advantage to being local, then we would expect the price of Western and other workers to equalize, but the final wage would be somewhere in between the current Indian wage and the current Western wage.