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eadlamon How I went from failing every interview to a job at Amazon

That's not faking anything, that's just learning.

Their legitimacy and power as a group is based on their reputation for intellectual honesty. If they label a dissenting opinion as discrimination or hate speech, they would need to pair it with a reasonable argument otherwise their reputation would decrease. This is a good thing. This is how groups should engage in politics.

eadlamon Epic Games chief pays $15M to protect 7,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness

Is there anything like Kickstarter where citizens can pool their money to buy up land for conservation?

eadlamon The Brutal Ageism of Tech

Isn't it obvious that adolescent startup founders wouldn't want to hire adults? That would be a complete role reversal of their entirely lifes experience with adults.

I'm also not surprised that investors are biased. As a group, they are just people with money. That feature doesn't preclude them from being unreasonable in the way (one would hope) being an engineer implies a certain level of objective rationality...

What does surprise me is the fear that is apparently spreading among aging engineers. You didn't get where you are by being afraid. Every problem you've ever solved proves your ability to bend systems to your will. You design your own fate. Don't make yourself vulnerable by believing anything else.

</rant>

On a more practical note, if college students had more opportunity to team up with older professionals on small co-owned projects, I think that would go a long way toward bridging the gap. Exposure is key. That's like, behavior therapy 101.

eadlamon Show HN: Tired of doing coding interviews on Skype? We've built this

If this was a website where I could practice solving algorithm problems and people could comment at points during the playback, I would totally sign up.

eadlamon Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer

Well, for one they just acquired eight of the worlds best robotics/AI teams. You don't see Kraft trying to bring the singularity nearer.

eadlamon Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

> 2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared.

If someone inanimated me, I would quite right then and there. Thats some freaky x-men shit.

eadlamon Why You Shouldn't Interrupt a Programmer

Professor Manuel Blum has this to say:

STUDYING: You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html

eadlamon Ethiopian Binary Math

So how do we and that Ethiopian shaman differ?

Paper! Seriously, this was 1960? Even ancient Sumerians were using paper to do math. I don't understand why in 1960 anyone would seriously still be doing math with holes and rocks.

eadlamon Stanford researchers to open source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis

Stanford Ph.D. student Richard Socher appreciates the work Google and others are doing to build neural networks that can understand human language. He just thinks his work is more useful ...

"We’re actually able to put whole sentences and longer phrases into vector spaces without ignoring the order of the words."

Wait, didn't Mikolov et al. (Google) [just figure out][1] how to put entire languages into vector spaces?

[1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4168

eadlamon Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

I have a barely-related anecdote.

I once tried to read two pages at a time (one with each eye) because I heard that the rain man was able to do that. So a grabbed a small paperback and focused one eye on either page (as one would do with a magic-eye picture).

I was able to essentially line up two words at a time in my vision and alternate my focus between the two, but after about 20 minutes I started to get a headache, so I put the book down and went to the couch in the other room. I sat down and looked out my window which has vertical bars on it. My vision suddenly latched on to the vertical bars and began flickering between normal focus and the magic-eye focus. I started feeling dizzy, my heart rate sped up and I started sweating a little. I closed my eyes for some time and was able to relax but still had a strange headache for the rest of the evening.

I felt fine the next day, but then a couple days later I was in a hotel with black and white tiled floors (diner style) and I had a sudden recurrence of my focus uncontrollably reacting to the pattern of the floor. It wasn't as intense as the first time, and it hasn't happened since, but it freaked me out.

eadlamon Scientists Inject Human Brain Cells Into Mice, Make Them Smarter

"Try to ..."

eadlamon Diamonds Are Bullshit

>It doesn't have anything to do with financial security. Look, if your man is spending three months worth of salary on a piece of shiny rock, he is exercising poor financial judgment and that is a signal against future financial security.

You may be interested in signalling theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

eadlamon Neuroscientists successfully control the dreams of rats

Pinky and the Brain?

eadlamon MIT and Harvard announce edX

I would argue that the focus on certificates, degrees, and grades are a competitive disadvantage. Rather than providing useful analytics, they introduce friction in the learning process and a reduced user experience.

An educational system that finds alternatives to these artifacts will have an advantage over those that rely on them.