antiform

Granted, Scott Adams does have an Economics degree and an MBA, but it is much more convincing (and productive) to attack his arguments rather than his qualifications or credentials.

If it's so important to you personally, what is stopping you from going after it now?

To make things more interesting, the book Black Romance paints Wareham as a pretty unsympathetic character. He pisses people off for seemingly no reason, he cheats on his wife after they had a baby, he lives the stereotypical rock 'n' roll lifestyle, with little to no apologies. However, as a fan of Galaxie 500 and Luna's music, this is nothing new. I've yet to hear anything genuinely positive about Wareham himself, other than the fact that his albums hold up surprisingly well.

The book makes for interesting reading. It is very funny at times, and is filled with some entertaining characters, even if it pushes all the wrong buttons for me on a deeper level. If you want an some idea of the book's content, [http://www.mensvogue.com/arts/music/articles/2008/02/facingt...] contains an autobiographical account of how his relationship with Britta Philips started.

I'm curious about your Ted "Kazinsky" comment. Are you talking about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski? If so, I would like to know why him, of all the brilliant people in recent history? I know he was a precocious mathematician, and very gifted academically, but I could think of a dozen more people with similar—if not better—credentials than him.

Steve Jobs to John Sculley: "Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or would you like a chance to change the world?"

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...]

I'm of the belief that it doesn't really matter for the type of people you are talking about.

If these "lost" people are as talented and ambitious as you claim, they will have no problem succeeding at whatever field in which they choose to apply themselves. If they could "hack circles around [you]," then they will have no problem hacking one of the most peculiar and challenging systems of all, the steps needed to be successful in everyday society.

If they are that capable, then surely putting together a decent college application and getting into a good school or getting a great job would be piece of cake. You might have to bite the bullet and do things like create a resume and apply for jobs or take the SATs, gather the necessary papers, and submit your applications, but sooner or later smart, industrious people will realize that you don't get anywhere by complaining about your situation.

Talented, truly obsessive hackers don't need help from society, because they have the fortitude and resourcefulness to succeed on their own. You can't stop them from learning and working on hard problems. The "career-seekers" can take their safe, well-paid programming jobs at big companies and buy their cookie-cutter house in the suburbs next to all the other "career-seekers," with their white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog. Good for them. But the kinds of hackers you are talking about would not be happy with that kind of lifestyle. They would probably want to be on the bleeding edge, to be a visionary or trendsetter rather than somebody who blindly walks along path paved before them. I believe that if you have a passion as strong as this, the rejection letters from jobs or colleges will lie and fade to ashes, forgotten as you blaze ahead into the life that you forge for yourself.

Also, at least in math, while there is certainly more content than one can learn in a lifetime, with more content being created every day at an increasing rate, many different abstractions have been developed and clever analogies applied in order to simplify new learning.

He's been doing great stuff for a while. I've been a big fan since I first installed Blosxom as my first Perl script on my first webserver with CGI scripting what seems like ages ago. It seems like he would be a great fit with the whole Twitter culture. I'm excited to see what comes out of this.

Ditto. Especially if become capable of using TeX-editing software like Ultra-TeX in Emacs or Vim-LaTeX, with their auto-completion features, you'll be able to write properly typeset text documents in a fraction of the time it takes to write and format them in a WYSIWYG word processor.

Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.

I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.

It's not a race. Don't forget to slow down and enjoy life sometimes. Learn to appreciate friends and family, because the times you spend with them will be the ones that you cherish the most later.

It's hard to escape your environment, strip everything away, and see your life from 10,000 feet. It's hard to see what it's like at the bottom if you're on top and there's dozens of layers between you and the people that actually get their hands dirty. It's even harder if you've done this job for years and have no idea how things have changed since you rose in the corporate structure, if you were even at the bottom to begin with. It's a perennial problem in large groups with hierarchical structure, and GM is one of the largest and most hierarchical groups out there.

What may seem to them as being a "go-getter" and exercising earned corporate privilege just makes them seem even more elitist and out-of-touch to the general public.

It reminds me of the importance of the consigliere in the Italian Mafia (or at least in the fiction surrounding it). You need a close friend that you can trust to tell you what is right rather than what you want to hear. If you don't have a way to back up and see the big picture, you won't be able to see trouble until it's staring you in the face, no matter how dangerous it may be.

Every time I hear of something like this, I remind myself to always be aware of the echo chamber that may be surrounding my own life and its affairs. What I think is real could very possibly be wishful fantasy.

I generally agree with what you're saying, and it's amusing how she proceeds to do something that is essentially what she is criticizing Gladwell for doing himself, but I give benefit of the doubt to the critic, because there is a remarkable difference in medium. It's a book review, not a complete refutation. She has about a dozen paragraphs to summarize and critique 300+ pages. Is there enough space to complete address even one of the cases brought up in the book? I think not.

I've read the book. It's entertaining, but I don't think it's as well-developed as Blink or The Tipping Point. I think Gladwell is a good writer who serves a previously unfilled role as a popular popularizer of academic work. However, every time I read his work, I wish that experts of the fields he reports on would also write popular expositions that could be consumed by an audience like that of the New Yorker.

I know that the evidence backing some of what I was reading was sketchy at best. Asian children score higher on math tests because their ancestors labored in rice fields? Please. It doesn't detract from the entertainment value of the book, but I would think twice before believing what I read in the book was indicative of reality.

As for your theory argument, I would have to disagree in many different cases. Suppose that you only chose to include data points that support your argument. Then people have every right to pick an alternate data point, claim that your study is faulty and that you're being irresponsible. This is exactly what many of his detractors are pointing out, and it is a point that is often missed.

The primary argument against the book and the Gladwell style of investigation is that he tends not to include or even discuss studies or points or examples that do not support his argument. This is understandable, since he is attempt to speak to a popular audience and does not have the space to discuss every relevant study if he wants to run through all of his cases, but by doing this, he makes many smart people feel like he is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Proofs are almost never "irreducibly ugly." What has generally happened in the past is that mathematicians have abstracted the "ugly" parts of a proof, so that one only has to refer to a mathematical object (object in the OO sense). Ugly proofs for basic theory are usually the primary motivation for mathematicians to invent new mathematical abstractions. In fact, when some mathematician is said to have "reinvented a field of mathematics," it usually means that he has found a particular abstraction or perspective that allows for a simplification of the given field.

In fact it happens in much the same fashion as you described. It's like writing a python port of a C program. You can abstract out the details until you have essentially reduced the proof to a chain of concepts.

What are you basing this on? Mathematics may lead to highly surprising and nonintuitive answers, but that doesn't mean that mathematical ideas drive people crazy.

While Cantor did take his work seriously and was said to have believed that he was indeed doing God's work, he was probably bipolar. Given the attitude toward mental health at the time, it seems that whether he was a mathematician, merchant, or mason, he would have become "mad."

While Cantor is the classic example of a mathematician gone insane, there was also a number of things besides grappling with concepts of infinity that could have also have been a factor, like always being passed over for professorships and many prominent mathematicians (like Henri Poincare) trying to keep his work out of the canon of mathematics.

I believe you're talking about Persi Diaconis, who's now a Stats professor at Stanford. He's not that old (born in 1945), and while he didn't complete high school, he did have an undergraduate education, but it was taking evening classes at City College of New York.

Unless Tom Murray has significantly changed his opinion in the last few months, I think this is a major oversimplification, if not obfuscation, of his argument. I mean, half the article is devoted to a "Mr. Fish," who as far as I can tell, is just another commentator that has nothing to do with the book. The reviewer clearly dislikes this book (as well as "The Bell Curve"), and I can't help but be put off by the disjointed organization of the article.

For instance, I think this review misses a point of Murray's that I consider important. In an article I read by Murray in the American last month [http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magaz...], his idea seems to be that core knowledge, the kind of things that we as a culture need to know, like basic American history, geography, cultural literacy, science, etc, should be taught at a much earlier age, in the K-8 curriculum, and not wait until college. He said that the average student needs to know much more about the above fields than they know now, and so it should be taught earlier, so that most people don't need a four-year college education in order to have the core knowledge necessary in a modern society.

To play Devil's advocate here, isn't your personal thesis that "long term goal focus" is important for success also based on anecdotal evidence? Or do you have a study that you would like to reference? I don't know too much about education or psychology or any related field, and I'd be very interested in looking at any material that you might have.

Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures? Not sure if that's quite what you're looking for, but it's the first thing that came to mind. It's not exactly "good" in a "for mankind" kind of sense, but apparently it makes boatloads of money.

It's articles like this that make me fall in love with the tech industry all over again.

What I find scarier (or more interesting) is that if all I read were Hacker News, I would have a list that would be exactly the same as the author's.

Perhaps a better question would be what do all these people have in common, other than being successful, accomplished males with reputations for being irreverent?

I would choose whichever one you are most comfortable with, or the one that you want to learn. If you don't know any, just choose one that sounds the most interesting. This is one of those "religious" choices between computer geeks and is of little consequence in the long run. If you hack with other people, you'll get experience with several flavors anyway.

I personally use Debian, and highly recommend it. It's very easy to get started out-of-the-box and there are tons of tutorials on how to get your typical LAMP setup or Rails or anything else set up. Ubuntu's also great, and probably has an even more supportive community than Debian.

Right here. [http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2008/03/19/who-says-czech...]

Maybe Knuth was more of a rebel back in the day, but somehow I can't imagine him having that sort of response.

In Randall Munroe's Authors@Google talk [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24], Don Knuth asks him a question at ~21:30 and at ~25:30 Randall asks Knuth about this very anecdote. Knuth's response is "I've been told this story a number of times...but I was impressed by him more than he was impressed by me."

This is GOLD.

"First Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest costs on goods in transit should be calculated using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frames of trading spacecraft."

and the final line for the kicker:

"Those of us working in this field are still a small band, but we know that the Force is with us."

In Disciplined Minds (a book certainly worth reading, but take with a heavy grain of salt), Jeff Schmidt made an observation about highly educated people and their political tendencies that made me stop and rethink my own personal views.

He believes that while highly educated people are usually considered to be liberal, they are, in practice, a lot more conservative than they seem. Most are usually only liberal when it comes to personal viewpoints on social issues, viewpoints which have little social impact. Many professions which are usually seen as left-leaning, like university professors, are in fact very conservative when it comes to beliefs and values that they act upon in the workplace.

Hear, hear.

Memcached is damn useful, and Perlbal saved me from server meltdown and banning many a time when it was still my favorite language to write the hackish, duct-taped monstrosities I called "web applications."

LiveJournal hasn't been the same since bradfitz stopped working on it, but it was a milestone as far as interactivity on the Internet is concerned.

That was a remarkably well-reasoned and plainspoken summary of some cool facts and trends in "sociobiology." I remember seeing a talk about evolutionary psychology early in my college career and dismissing it as imprecise, speculatory nonsense, but perhaps I judged too quickly. It seems more interesting and credible when the person talking about it doesn't seem like a crackpot. I'll take another look when I get the chance.

Also, on "A scientist would rather use another scien­tist's toothbrush than his termino­logy," I think that goes double for mathematicians. For instance, in complex analysis, "analytic," "holomorphic," "regular," "differentiable," and "complex differentiable" all mean the same thing in the context of functions/maps, with various subfields of mathematics adopting one or the other at various times.

I believe this has been linked before: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167335]

I'd be interested to see the analysis or references to this analysis, if anybody has any links.

I'd be even more interested to see how GPA correlates with people actually getting an interview and getting a position there.

It wasn't too long ago that Google required you to have above a 3.8 GPA to be a serious candidate. I can accept that there isn't too much difference between people in the 3.8~4.0 GPA range, but I'd expect that there would be a significant difference between someone getting a 3.8 and a 3.3 from the same school.

"Mostly" true, but if you accept this statement as-is, it's a little misleading.

The integers (with standard addition/multiplication operators) are indeed a ring, but a ring is a very loose definition that does not reveal say too much about the integers themselves. There are several stronger algebraic structures than integers that don't have division.

The integers themselves are an example of a general algebraic structure called a "domain," (or, more commonly, "integral domain") which is a commutative ring (that is, commutative under multiplication as well), has distinct additive and multiplicative identities, and has the property that if a and b are integers and a*b = 0, then either a or b must be zero.

When mathematicians in the past were studying divisibility in the integers, they have generally studied domains, because they essentially isolate the division property among different operations. Even an integral domain is not the strongest structure you can place on integers. There are even more specific subclasses of integral domains that the integers fall under, but that's best left for a class on algebraic structures and not a comment on HN.