nocipher

You fail to provide a compelling defense of your argument. One of the major points of the article was in direct opposition to your first sentence. It was supported by arguing that biology forces women to be more important for reproduction and then showing how this can lead to the circumstances we have today.

Your disagreement is predicated on certain traits not being linked to femininity or masculinity and economic forces. You wave your hand over the entire article and then rail against women's role in the past. The argument is a classic strawman. You failed to invalidate any of the article's points and instead talk about narrow definitions of women's social behaviors as if the entire article had said women are only good in one-on-one relationships. The article merely posits that women have more stake in maintaining a few intimate relationships than a large number of shallow relationships. This point is arguable but, rather than argue against it, you claim that the article insinuates women should /only/ focus on intimate relationships for the survival of our species, and then say this is clearly ridiculous. I agree with your logic here, but it is rather irrelevant to the topic at hand. The discourse is about why women are better/worse/different than men, not whether women should be allowed to live in the "public sphere".

The closing of your argument goes even further afield and tries to elicit empathy from men by attempting to justify women's historically subservient economic position and then forming a weak thought experiment based on outdated female stereotypes. Your penultimate statement is that "women are people" which is followed by the "The old ways were awful." None of this contributes to the discussion nor does it it reveal any interesting insight.

It is not the presence of an internal heuristic that makes an algorithm greedy, it is the choosing of locally optimal solutions. For your claim to hold, you would need to demonstrate that people make locally optimal solutions, at least in the context of this problem.

That is most likely a wrong assumption. Greedy algorithms usually do not find globally optimal solutions, yet the people solving these problems are finding -the- solution. That is enough to suggest that the heuristic people are using is much more complex than merely choosing local optimums.

An infinite family seems to refer to an infinite collection of solutions that are all related in some sense. An isolate or sporadic solution is a solution that is unique and unrelated to other solutions. They are both terms used to categorize solutions.

I disagree. By "math community" I refer specifically to those people who create new mathematics, i.e. mathematicians. That is not at all as inclusive as you argue. Math notation comes from mathematicians and is designed to facilitate communication between people of that profession. The notation is very functional and efficient for its designed task.

To create a new set of symbols and notation designed specifically for those who are not mathematicians is a waste of resources. Professors, whom would be responsible for teaching such a thing, would have to translate all of their concepts from "professional notation" to "novice notation" when lecturing. This involves them learning a totally new set of notation designed for no reason other than teaching. Furthermore, anyone who wanted to pursue mathematics professionally would have to then learn "professional notation".

Aside from these logistical difficulties, I fail to see how a different set of notation would be any clearer or easier to understand than the current notation, which is already widely accepted and considered useful. Essentially, you are arguing that math notation is too difficult and so it should be simplified. That is like saying Faulkner or Joyce is too difficult to read so should be rewritten for those without the ability to comprehend the source document: it sort of misses the point.

The problem is that the mathematical notation, while not perfect, works really well for those adept with its use. It's an efficient shorthand. For explaining things in depth we have pictures and and natural language. I fail to see how creating a new set of symbols would do anything but hinder communication within the math community. If you have any deeper argument to support your position, I'd be interested to hear it.

The best way I've found to read math texts is to take it concept by concept. Line by line is too mechanical. Approach each concept and get a "gist" for what is trying to be accomplished. Once you understand where they are starting from for a given concept, where they are going with it, and have a rough idea of how they'll get there, then you read the details. The details are essentially meaningless if you don't know the bigger picture.

Most math concepts -are- fairly easy to explain and, from the sounds of it, you don't actually want a math book. You want a book that gives you the executive summary or a run-down of specific tools for specific situations. The flaw is not in the books or the teaching, it is what you are expecting from mathematicians.

Math is, in a very general sense, about understanding and reasoning about highly structured objects. Mathematicians have developed methods and notation to achieve that end, not to make it easily digestible by the uninitiated. Rigor is an important part of this. It is what allows mathematicians to be so sure their work is correct and it is often what makes math seem so arcane. It is not always necessary for teaching, but professional mathematicians are often the teachers and the ideas are intimately tied to their rigorous formulations in their head.

For example, continuity is a fairly intuitive concept in calculus, but the rigorous epsilon-delta definition is necessary in proofs. The basic concept, while easy to explain and understand is useless, while the precise formulation, though much more opaque, is ubiquitous in analysis simply because it is an incredible tool... for mathematicians.

An engineer likely just needs the machinery built on top of the analysis: the derivative and integral. If that's all you need, then pick a book that is focused on applications and a development of general intuition, not a book designed for mathematicians-in-the-making.

I partially believe that CCP will end up being okay after the dust settles just because I have never known of any gaming community to have a truly successful protest. The sad part is that the precedence this sets is antithesis to good customer service.

"Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage..."

You completely ignored the context of the statement. Instead, you created a strawman argument and ignored that other groups such as minorities and athletes are given advantages in the application process, yet a group that is inherently disadvantaged gets no preferential treatment.

You also ignore the paragraph before that which begins: "...SAT scores are hardly a pure measure of merit." You took a lone statement out of context and then hammered it, when, in context, it deserved none of the scrutiny leveled upon it.

I am working on:

- Learning Russian with a friend

- Expanding my background in the core areas of Mathematics

- Reacquainting myself with graphics programming and implementing at least part of a game engine.

- Finding a Thesis topic...

I didn't even know it existed. Thanks for the tip; I'll check it out.

The more fundamental reason, I believe, is that it is often hard to just hack something together in Lisp. This mostly due to the library issues and a lack of users creating good documentation and guides.

For example, a few weeks ago I wanted to start writing a program that analyzed some spreadsheet files, spit back out some relevant information (including graphs), and then served this information up on some specified port. I initially wanted to write this program in Lisp so I began to look at available libraries. For the gui component, my first pick was Qt, for which Lisp actually has bindings. I spent about a week trying to get all the dependencies for it installed unsuccessfully. The documentation essentially says, "You need all these installed," and then gives you a bunch of links to their respective websites. All of the other details were missing.

Specifically, I could not install the smoke bindings for Qt. I searched for any guides or documentation and always found a git/svn repository. Once I had the files, I had no idea what to do with them; where they needed to go or how to compile them, etc. Raw .cpp and .h files that have dependencies do nothing in isolation. Furthermore, there was no support forum or any other place to ask for help.

Finally, I just gave up. It was too much work to just hack together what was supposed to be a fun weekend project. So I moved onto Python, which just worked. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had such frustration.

Calculation is important for understanding math. It should not be the only thing taught, but it should definitely be in the curriculum, and in a substantial amount, at least in the first few years. I think it lays a lot of ground work for further mathematical reasoning. Probably the most compelling reason, though, is that in mathematics you're assumed to have a certain degree of competency with computation. If you can't add or multiply small numbers in your head, you would be out of place among the current crop of mathematicians. While not everyone is trying to be a mathematician, it seems that it's not a good idea to remove something so fundamental that is essentially taken for granted in certain fields.

I fail to see how it changes things in a fundamental way. Having your name on a paper is supposed to mean that you contributed to the results of that paper. This is how you build up your reputation: you publish lots of relevant results.

This is only possible if you continue to work and publish, which in turn makes you a more sought after partner for collaboration. In the same vein, if your contributions are consistently minimal, then you will be less sought after which will lower your frequency of publication. In essence, the current system already correlates rewards with the quality of one's contributions.

Thus, the proposed changes do not affect how one garners reputation. Instead, I think the subtext is that the current body of research papers could be significantly improved, but isn't because there is no system in place to revise them in a distributed manner.

Statistically, you do not need a certain percentage of the population you are surveying to obtain good results. There are other factors used to determine the required sample size to achieve results with a given level of confidence. See the article below if you're interested in the details.

Organizational Research: Determining Appropriate Sample Size in Survey Research http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf

As someone who recently graduated with a bachelor's at a large state university, I find that this article exaggerates most of its points.

"Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck."

This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to half what the author states.

"Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque."

Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential equations course.

The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something, they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can, instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't care about learning.

The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending college will cause you to learn something.

I never thought of it like that. Maybe technology does necessitate rights management.

Even so, copying is trivial and available to everyone. It is not feasible to have the granular control necessary to prevent widespread copying and this is exactly the situation with which we are faced. I argue that the current laws are inadequate for dealing with the situation and, in fact, I think this is self-apparent.

Your argument seems to be that what we are buying is somehow different from what we used to buy. You also seem to have downgraded the act of copying from theft to some lesser repugnant act. Both of these would suggest that we need something different from the current copyright system.

You can disagree with my initial synopsis of copyright laws, and your point of contention there is likely valid, but my message wasn't that copyright laws were only useful when it was difficult to copy works, but that the laws, as they exist now, do not fit in a world where content is so liquid and decentralized.

By no means am I arguing that, because of this, creators should not have their works protected, but rather that a paradigm shift is necessary to actually reach that end.

People usually try to skirt this issue. The proponents of copyright laws stubbornly call anyone who would infringe a thief while those on the other side of the argument aptly point out the fallacy of such analogies.

The truth of the matter is that copyright law assumed a certain level of difficulty involved in the act of copying another work. To copy a book requires either theft from a publisher or pouring through it, page by page, and manually recreating it. The same is true of old VHS tapes. Some apparatus, not widely available, was required to make copies that could be redistributed. Since real effort was required to produce copies, copyright law could rightfully condemn those who would make copies.

The ubiquity of digital technology has fundamentally changed this. Copying anything is trivial yet copyright law has been left unchanged. These laws are simply inadequate for our modern reality.

An overhaul of the whole system by some smart, competent, and knowledgeable people is necessary. Unfortunately, big media has such stake in the antiquated laws, and such influence in the legislature (in the US, but very likely abroad as well), that such a change probably won't happen for a number of years. So, until then, we are stuck in this lawless landscape where everyone on every side of the argument is wrong.

I'm not sure if it's an oversight or intentional but you didn't mention Lisp, which is, for many "snobs", the language of choice.

I think you misunderstand. Your point is that computer science, as a field, has done many things to attract women and that it has still been unsuccessful. Furthermore, since so much effort has been put forth in this pursuit, the computer science community cannot be held responsible for the gender inequality.

I'm not sure that that is what you are trying to convey, but that is about the clearest argument I can read from what you wrote. If this is indeed your argument, then it sounds like you are in violent agreement with the author of the article. The major difference appears to be that you argue the gender discrepancy is just women's preference whereas the article posits it to be a consequence of gender mores (an admittedly subtle distinction).

If I have misunderstood, I'd be interested in clarification.

The term "hacker" is usually associated with technology and, sometimes, more specifically, with programming, but I don't think that captures the essence of what a hacker is. A hacker is just someone who likes to tinker with things.

The term "things" is intentionally ambiguous because it varies greatly from person to person and includes much more than just technology. Indeed, while hackers usually enjoy playing around with code or electronics, it isn't uncommon for hackers to be well read in completely unrelated subjects such as poetry or martial arts. Such behavior makes sense in light of an inherent playfulness.

It also explains, to a degree at least, the connection to startups. While I'm admittedly ignorant of much of the business world, it seems that startups would be the most "playful" (in sense that startups provide the most room for trial and error). Larger or more established ventures are sort of "on rails." They already have momentum and don't want to jeopardize it so they'll naturally be more hesitant to try new business strategies, especially ones without a proven track record.

Essentially, what defines a hacker is the desire to manipulate ideas and concepts, i.e., an innate intellectual curiosity. Most things on HN fall under that umbrella.

I prefer to write it out with pen and paper. After all, most of what you do when you code is come up with a solution to a problem and then implement it. It's a lot easier to play with your solution when you're still forming it than after you've already typed it up.

Code is also difficult to read. It's much easier to understand a code flow diagram, or something similar, than it is to comprehend the 100 or so lines that the diagram represents.

There is some truth in the article. Coding is easy. It's all the other aspects of software development that are difficult. I know that the biggest hurdle for any programming project I've ever been involved in is deciding what will be the different parts of the system and then how those parts will interact. Once I start writing code, I can program very quickly because I don't have to make hard decisions.

Even so, a few thousand lines of a code a day is a bit much for anything non-trivial. To write that much code in a single day means that person must have done little else besides coding. Unless there was a period of about a week of design before that kind of coding, I'd expect the code to be rather kludgy because everything would be decided immediately. A few thousand lines of code, though, is definitely not something I'd consider average.

A /small/ project that added a new feature to an existing system took about 30 hours for the initial version over a two week time period and about 800 lines of code. Granted, I don't know exactly where my programming abilities lie skill-wise, but I can't imagine someone being 30x or 40x more productive than that as you suggest.

And maybe I'm just new around here, but if was going to argue for the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'd begin by arguing that I am clearly not suffering from the effect myself.

It's always nice when you finally understand "magic".