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It sounds like an honest conversation. I agree with you on the first point. The Indian education system is quite good to enable kids to focus on getting a job. It's a bit too focussed on how to get good grades, which ultimately results in a rat race. Not saying that competition is bad but I never enjoyed or actually learned anything even after completing 16 years of education there include a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering.

I haven't studied anything in Australian unis yet. I might do that in future. But I've seen some of my friend's kids studying in public schools here and am envious. I wish my school days were like that. Schools here are not focussed on exams at all, rather they encourage students to explain things that they're learning to other students. They've presentations on the concepts they learn, do practical tasks, do a variety of creative crafts and last but not the least encouraged to do sports and music as well. Now, can I blame my country of birth India for it? Of course not. India was quite poor economically and my schools barely had doors and windows, let alone desks. BWT, this was back in 1999. Teachers barely cared and most of them were abusive and beat the shit out of us. I can only wish that I had better opportunities but I can't go back in time. My MIT programme is quite hard as the home work assignments force me to think. They're never tediously long to work out. Based on the feedback I've gotten from my colleagues, Australian unis are a mixed bag. It all depends on the programme you choose. Some unis have very good engineering programmes, whereas some are more research focussed. But most of them have very good infrastructure.

Lastly, I agree with on the last point. I've been in the industry since 16 years and have met my fair share of incompetent people. To be honest I've been incompetent at some skills at every job I've worked at.

But when I talked about those incompetent people, I was talking about people who weren't even willing to learn and sometimes even pulled rank to threaten their subordinates into making poor decisions. Nobody here claimed that the Australian system or any other system for that matter is without sin! Every system has flaws and as long as we're willing to accept that, there is still scope for improvement.

I agree with you on generalising based on what immediate colleagues are capable of or not. Indians in general have done quite well on the world stage. To answer your question from an Australian perspective, the interview processes here generally don't include many technical questions. Don't get me wrong. Some companies are almost like American companies and ask the candidates to even take home some tasks and come back with a solution.

But other enterprise companies generally have a look at the candidate's resume and hire them based on how they are able to answer questions related to their resume. It's sad to see such statements and also sad to see some incompetent people holding high position in many organisations. But it's not particular to Indians. I've come across such people from almost every background. I'm not very knowledgeable either. But I'm able to do my job well. :)

Edit: Having been living in Australia since several years now, I can understand AussieWog93's comment. I've also lived in India to know that such conversations are quite common in India too. It's just that Australians are willing to share it without hesitation. haha.. Don't be offended.

Anyway, my original point (which I didn't actually get to) was that SAT/ACT scores are quite important as they kind of give the person an idea whether they'll be able to handle the homework and academic rigour at an institution like MIT. But as the original blog posts says, it's not the end of the world if someone can't crack it. At that age I don't think anyone is mature enough to even understand the meaning or depth of scientific knowledge they'd receive at MIT. So one can always pursue it later with the prevalence of online education these days, if one were so inclined. :)

Barring the racist part, I can imagine some of the situations that might have led to such conversations. My wife was working for the Covid vaccine deployment programme for one of the Australian states as a consultant from a respected company. The two guys employed by the state's government dept were utter clueless about almost everything. One was in charge of project management and the other was an architect. The architect didn't even know how to use a filter on an Excel spreadsheet! The level of incompetence was just unfathomable. Don't want to name the state as it might might lead to the two individuals!

But at the same time my wife and her team mates (A diverse team consisting of Caucasians, Indians and Filipinos (all Australians)) did deliver the project and helped the government at every step. So, I would argue that there are a lot of intelligent people that came out of the Indian education system, but the education system itself did fuck all for their success in life. There are also a lot of people with degrees, boasting very high GPAs, but with no analytical skills whatsoever! It's not only limited to Indian people in general. But the education system is indeed quite bad.

The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and not under stress. Good luck, man!

I have a few quartz watches. I have a bunch of stuff from Apple as well but never could live with an Apple watch. For some weird reason I've always thought that I need to know the time reliably if I even get lost somewhere. I live in the city and there is almost 0% probability of that happening. hahahha..

So I went with a Garmin Instinct Solar watch that lasts nearly a month even with basic tracking. With all those smart features turned off it can theoretically run forever just with solar power. :)

Fair enough. I totally understand. I'm employed full time as a data analyst and I still can't afford an Omega. But it's the engineering behind the manual movement that fascinates me.

Just like the mechanical/automotive engineering behind petrol/diesel engines fascinate me more compared to electric motors on EVs. I'd still own an EV as that's the future but I'll always appreciate those mechanical gasoline powered engines. I get you analogy! :)

Yes, I know. :)

Yes, exactly my thoughts. You're right, a bunch of these appeared on Ebay the next day with 1000% mark up.

Yes, but Swatch watches are beautiful without the Omega branding. :) I own an Irony model that I bought in 2007 and it's quite beautiful just with the Swatch logo.

Omega is owned by the Swatch group.

Apparently there was a huge queue outside the Swatch store here in Melbourne and they sold out all of those "Omega" models in less than 7 minutes. As far as I can tell, this is just another Swatch with quartz movement. Does anyone know why this is so popular apart from the Omega branding?

I feel so so stupid right now. I believe I've read about the Arc language in one of the essays written by Paul Graham himself! hahaha.

The exact HN like interface left me confused!

Yes, the programming languages course on Coursera! Yes, you're right, Scala is a lot more prevalent mostly because of Spark. I work on Spark occasionally but mostly use pySpark. But I'm fascinated by the world of functional programming. I think I tried setting up Elixir on my Mac a couple of years ago and it didn't work for some reasons and I almost forgot about it after that. I'm a bit interested in F# as a lot of finance companies use it. It's not that popular. I learned a bit from a Udemy course and I really liked the language even thought I'm not a fan of Microsoft. And it works perfectly on Macs! :)

Thanks mate, I'll have a look.

I thought Elm was very much about web development. And Elixir is too in some ways. Both Scala and F# have a lot going on in the data space. Scala more so than F#. Standard ML is exciting because it's not big. And probably a better choice for understanding the fundamentals but Scala or F3 for something serious? This is just my best guess. Actually that reminds me of a very nice course in Standard ML from the University of Washington on Coursera, but it's not a book.

Thanks mate. I was honestly hoping for some F# resources as I'd started learning it a bit. But would mind glancing over this. Cheers.

A lot of comments have praised SICP on this thread. I'm a data analyst but I don't have a computer science background. I somehow prefer the ML family languages to Lispy parentheses. Could anyone please suggest an SICP equivalent book in Standard ML, Scala, F# etc? Thank you.

I completely agree with you. I don't miss Windows and quite despise the UI. Even the modern one. I've been using Macs since several years and the only thing that comes close to a distant second is Gnome. I'm actually quite surprised to see how many actually like Windows 95!

I get that it's easier to run on low RAM systems. I just don't think Windows95 was the pinnacle of UI design and was minimalistic only because resources were scarce. These days it's actually a lot harder to get low RAM machines. Unless you're working in the embedded space, and a UI like this is pointless there too.

I haven't been using Linux (or Windows) much since several years now. But a stripped down version of Gnome or KDE or MATE are prefect as they were. The Windows UI in its current form or old (95, 98 or 2000) is hardly the best UI choice. The reason I can think of is nostalgic fun experiment. And there is nothing wrong with that. Not everything has to have a practical function. :)

Can anyone think of a reason why to do this? Apart from personal fun project, of course!

I don't know much about the issue. But isn't that a bit extreme? They're Canadian citizens after all, not terrorists. We've had our fair share of anti-vax protestors here in Australia. Many of them were arrested for unruly/criminal behaviour but not for protesting. How is it even legal to freeze their bank accounts? Asking here to learn more about it.

Thanks for posting this.

Thanks for the reply. It's your tool mate and of course by all means work on the features you want. It's a really neat tool, there is not doubt. I'm sure it'll be helpful to a lot of people. I'm data analyst and I often find writing SQL statements from Python using libraries such as sqlalchemy and psycopg2 etc. I've written a few rudimentary functions that connect to my data sources and run PGSQL code and fetch result into a Pandas dataframe before doing further analysis. When I saw your tool I got excited and was trying figure out how to integrate it into my notebooks. hahaha. Cheers.

Sounds awesome. Thanks for posting. It'd be great to be able to import this into a Jupyter notebook or script rather than doing it on the command line. Don't know how useful it is as a command line tool.

I don't think he is healthy just because of eating meat. He is healthy because of a number of factors.

1. He ate good quality food, that includes both meat and vegetables that he grew for consumption. 2. Farming is hard work so he physically quite fit. In fact even at this advanced age he still rides bike around. 3. Portion control: He never eats more than he needs. 4. He is quite stoic and usually doesn't give shit in the face of adversity.

It's important to eat a lot of vegetables along with meat. I don't think eating anything in excess is good for health.

>> Also, keep in mind that animal protein is not necessarily meat, meat would be a subset of animal protein..

Yes, I understand what animal protein means. I also understand that you're possibly a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian for 13 years but I'd to start eating meat again for personal reasons. I think I feel a lot healthier with a meat based diet. Also, I didn't insinuate that vegetarianism is less healthy. I only reported by observation in my family circle. Most of the people who're eating a pure vegetarian diet have serious ailments. And most people who grew up eating meat are comparatively healthier.

Although, in the current times I don't think it matters much. Most of the food produced are full of toxic shit. And it could be the reason for their ailments not just meat or vegetarian diet. Just to clarify, my family is in India. The quality of food has gone down drastically in the recent years.

This is just anecdotal but my grandfather is nearly 90 years old. He has been eating goat meat, chicken, fish and prawns at least 4 days a week his entire life. Although he raised his own goats and fish as a farmer. And he has eaten "organic" food most of his life. He is quite healthy. Whereas many vegetarian members of my family and close family have lots of health issues. Granted many of them are living in the cities and are dependant on processed foods, refined oils and fresh produce laden with chemicals. I know that there are a lot more variables affecting the outcome not just eating animal protein. But I don't doubt this study, although that's confirmation bias for me!

Named after this Scottish car? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Aviation_Scamp

It's really inspiring to see so many people doing such a complex thing as a hobby. They all look really cool