bryanwb

Most liberal arts colleges are elaborate play centers for post adolescents that also offer classes. My own Alma mater, Washington & Lee, esp. matches that. I am not sympathetic.

I had great classes but I could have gotten the same education without the fluff. I bet without the fluff the cost would have been half or even cheaper.

that book is garbage

I am 4 classes into the program and enjoying it a lot. The surprising thing for me is that a single class seems to consume about 15 hours per week. I have heard that the harder classes, such as AI, IHPC, ML, GA, take 20-25 hours/week. I don't remember my undergrad courses being so demanding but I did not attend a top tier school.

All that said, perhaps for the sharper students these classes demand much less time than they do for me.

Raahul, how do you like the omscs program? i am in it as well but worry that it is easier than the on campus MS. Even though I suspect it is easier, I still find the workload very heavy.

I recommend contacting them directly by the contact email on the site. It is an amazing team and I am sure they will be very responsive.

They were brothers

We had to show results in a short period of time and focus on the top priorities of the parents and teachers which boiled down to belong their kids not fail out of school in the early grades. You can focus on nurturing autodidacts but you will never have more than a handful of anecdotal successes in the short run at best. And you need more than anecdotes to keep educational projects alive. Further, educators run the school. If you want an educational project to be successful, You live and die by their support.

Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop.

It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this process was often underestimated.

To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids were struggling.

I worked on the one laptop per child project for three years of my life. I co-founded olpc Nepal and its succeeding organization OLE Nepal together with rabi karmacharya who is referenced in the article. I was also co editor of olpc news for a time. It was a great experience if not altogether successful. The most problematic aspect of olpc IMHO was that it was dominated by male autodidacts who looked down on professional educators. Ole Nepal from the very beginning worked very closely with Nepali educators.

Rabi continues to do great work and I am rooting for him. You can find out more about OLE Nepal here http://www.olenepal.org/

bullshit, the removal of natural sciences and math from liberal arts reflects today's math-phobia and fear of doing hard things.

Several things irk me about this article

First, the proposed educational experiences sound like more silly adventures for kids with money (or debt) to burn. You could learn more about life and yourself by working at McDonald's for a year.

Second, it fucking annoys the shit out of me that when articles like this talk about "the liberal arts" they really mean humanities. I have yet to meet someone who espouses the merits of a liberal arts education who realizes that it technically includes math and the natural sciences. How many English majors takes statistics? How many History majors take discrete math or more than the most basic math requirements needed to graduate? Bet it is less than 1%.

I am all for a liberal arts education as long as it has equal helpings of math and the natural sciences along w/ English, philosophy, etc.

Have you really "learned to think" from your humanities education if you have no understanding of calculus, probability, statistics, or physics? If you have never learned how to design and conduct an experiment?

A "good" university education is simple and not sexy. High quality courses taught by passionate teachers. Nothing else. No student unions, no sports teams, no academic or emotional counseling, no beautiful buildings, no study abroad or fucking trips to Alaska. Which basically describes university studies in central Europe and Israel.

Not very sexy so no NYT articles about it.

I actually attended a pricey "liberal arts" college where I majored in computer science. I am currently in the OMSCS program at Georgia Tech and the quality of education I am receiving through it is much better at less than a tenth of the cost. We have better discussions on Slack than I did sitting in seminars w/ a bunch of rich kids 20 years ago. No picturesque campus to stroll through though :)

My own experience doing all three.

This is exactly my experience.

that's true of any exercise that involves a group

I agree w/ you on both the snatches and the kipping pullups. they both have too high a risk to reward imo.

i also agree that many coaches are terrible.

It is not disingenuous. Many crossfit exercises are complex as you correctly observe and require a good bit of practice before you can do them w/ any substantial weight.

A layman should not do them w/out instruction and a good coach will not let laymen do regular workouts until they have mastered the basics.

A good coach also observes a new student's abilities and advises them how to scale the movement properly as they progress. A bad coach does not.

for the same reasons, you should never attempt Olympic weightlifting movements w/out a coach, i.e. snatch and clean+jerk. In fact, I feel pretty strongly you should not learn how to squat or deadlift w/out a coach or personal trainer.

Actions like this are an annoying distraction. Crossfit HQ is kind of a nuthouse. The Crossfit program is truly wonderful as long as you always use proper form. If you can't use proper form on a rep, don't do the rep. It's that simple. I have been doing Crossfit for a year and haven't seen any significant injuries. But my gym emphasizes proper form over numbers. Some gyms ensure people use proper form, some don't. Crossfit (done properly) is leagues better for your overall health than weightlifting, running, bicycling, you name it. It is not necessarily more fun however.

tks for the great explanation!

can you elaborate on how io_uring bypasses the kernel?

interesting paper but where is the code? I am not familiar w/ DPDK but how would the control path of demikernel configure a dpdk device so that it can service multiple applications. perhaps this isn't necessary for DPDK?

It is hard to take this paper seriously if it is just a thought experiment and they haven't actually implemented Demikernel. In figure 3 there is a list of the syscalls but that isn't enough to convince me that they have actually implemented Demikernel.

I have really, really enjoyed building my personal site (https://hotair.tech) in Gatsbyjs. I am not sure of how steep the learning curve is as I started using it w/ the intent to learn React and GraphQL. It strikes a good balance of being both a productive framework and letting you use the full features of GraphQL and React.

I much prefer it over my previous experience w/ Jekyll.

This is super helpful. would you mind posting your prodigy configuration? It seems like an excellent tool to run tasks like `yarn develop`

If you have any special config for indium, I would love to see that too.

The point is that you can indicate whether an operation was successful or not by wrapping that value w/ a Success or Failure, rather returning a boolean, status code, and some subset of information about the operation.

shameless plug, if you like this you may also like my library tryme which ports the Either and Maybe monads to Python http://tryme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Meg is running this company into the ground. Carly helped kick off the process

Does it seem odd to anyone else that this plan seems to pretend northern NJ doesn't exist? It would make much more sense to me to make the "triboro" a full-circle rather than a half-circle. If you look at underground map of London you don't see any half-circles.

I also ran a startup in Kathmandu (OLE Nepal). It was super fun, exhilarating, and ultimately not as successful as I hoped. May you have better luck!

Sadly, Nepal has made zero political progress since I arrived there in 2006 :(

totally! however US and Canada are big w/ relatively small populations. People can move around, they can adjust. India doesn't have the same luxury

this is great but at the same time terrifying. India thus far has committed to power its growth using coal-fired plants. We in the west have definitely committed our sins in this regard, however India is particularly vulnerable to the changes caused by global warming

This article is spot on about working for the UN. It matches my own experience. The various organizations are sadly, for a number of reasons, becoming less relevant and more sclerotic.

I don't fault the UN for not paying interns. There are lots of kids who think it is glamorous and are willing to take unpaid posts just like in the music industry, the U.S. Congress, and a number of other industries. If the UN had to pay interns they simply wouldn't take them on in the first place.

The UN is much more poisonous than screwed than working for the US Gov. I worked for the USG for 5 years (Dept of State) and had an excellent experience. Govt bureaucracies are actually much more efficient than the UN as they have voters to hold them accountable. Accountability for UN agencies is practically nil.