relkor

I am not only talking about university here. This attitude pervades the entire structure of education all the way down to primary school.

What I am advocating here for is different system that actually allows students to purchase the level of education that they want. Ideally the cost would be based on how much work the teacher has to do to shove the knowledge into your head. If a student is struggling, then they can either choose to pay more to learn it, or drop out. The current system is not a market for knowledge at all. There is no continous supply curve for students to change pricing. There is a huge economic inefficiency here, and I am sure that the surplus is not being captured by the students.

What I have seen is that there are many different good explainations of material. However some of these will result in faster uptake by me. The only way the economic transaction of education makes sense to me is to acknowledge the potential of passive learning (books, internet), but to recognize the desire to speed the process. While I can pick up a book on abstract algebra and work through the problems myself to gain understanding, I know that I can pay someone who already is an expert in abstract algebra to package up the mental abstractions for me. Its like using compression for webpages. You could transmit everything uncompressed and the web would work just fine. However we want to save time and money so we compress, delivering content faster and using less bandwidth. The only justification I can see for teachers to exist in a free market is that they speed the process of knowledge aquisition.

Now I support fee schedules based on how much work the teacher has to do the shove the knowledge into the head. If it will cost $X for a fast student, I don't have any problem with the market pricing that same knowledge to a slow student at $X,XXX. Teachers should be compensated for their expertise. However setting the market price is up to the participant, and a contract to deliver the good should be binding. If teachers were bound to deliver the information, then I see average prices being higher becuase of the lemon effect, but that is an entirely different problem than what we have now.

Valid point for university, but I have seen this same attitude all the way down the chain to primary school and secondary school. Maybe teachers in primary school are apeing the attitudes of college professors in an attempt to capture the greater social prestige associtated with being a researcher, however this motivation buys no forgiveness in the hearts of all the students that then pay directly for this ego trip.

If we are paying for access to the infrastructure, then why are students boxed into many separate cells staffed by a human "teacher". If you admit the teacher unit is worthless, then why are they there? According to your business plan the tuition does not go to pay the teachers, so then where did these teachers (who have no role what so ever in your view of education) get funding. I want to know. If we were just paying for access to infrastructure, then why are we not packed into large warehouses filled with desks and library books, overseen by a single armed guard on an overhead walkway? That would more efficient, and we all know us evil capitalists love efficiency.

Just because you pay money for something does not mean you can invoke the specter of consumerism and then proceed to shame it. You need water, no doubt about it. Is it evil when you pay for clean water?

I would be happy to sell you a chance to eat, or a chance for medial care, or a chance for housing. Education is as necessary as a public utility. To charge any price for a chance to learn while billing as a product (actually knowing things about the world) is a pure example of fraud.

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at matching students with explainations of concepts.

If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the most productive decade of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me.

If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere.

[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me

> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault?

Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts:

1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term otherwise the student would not be there in the first place

2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional.

3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam)

4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?

I used to spoof user agents, randomly mutating. Then last month I started to run into sites that refused to load/render for incorrect strings. It appears the Google and other large companies are now sending customized versions of their page based on the user agent which I can only speculate is an attempt to save bandwidth. By taking advantage of implementation specific features, they not only eliminate all of the extra JS and browser workarounds, but they also can take shortcuts.

Is there any solid guide to preventing browser fingerprinting? Or is the only protection constantly changing your accept headers + user agent?

I suppose trade deals would require too much coordination between those inept national administrators. I guess it is also too bad that there are no international standards like TCP/IP becuase that would require coordination as well. And its a good thing there is no coordination, that way we dont't have any international spying programs on citizens.

/s

Where did I say CIA plot? That is a strawman you have erected. The Russian economy was helped substantially over the past decade by rising oil prices, this economic improvement formed the cornerstone of the current Russian administration. When oil prices were slashed, the Rubble fell by half. Suddenly now there are problems at home, and Russian military expansion has been curtailed. Nation states are perfectly capable of grasping the economic importance of certain key resouces for the modern economies and know where to turn the screws to encourage behavior without jumping straight to war all the time. The Saudis did not voluntarily give up billions of revenue, they calculated that the opportunity cost of pissing off America, which has significantly helped keep the royal family in power for decades, would be too high. Not every decision is a straight up comparision of projected revenue numbers, sometimes large and powerful entities take into account expected value as well.

It was my understanding that the drop in oil price was engineered to screw the Russians. Opening up exports of oil indicates the the leverage on the Saudis has gone stale, and they are making serious noises about limiting production again. Washington needs the ability to keep oil prices low because they have still not found a long term solution to keeping Eastern Europe vaugely NATO friendly.

To be fair, this is machine learning we are talking about, not algebraic topology. The experts in ML are still proud of the fact that they figured out the chain rule...

This was fantastic. These are the kinds of articles that I read HN for. Keep up the great work Internet!

To be more formal, there are two possiblities that I see:

1) You are RecruiterBot born from the forge of a brillant engineer smarting from rejection and trained to communicate using audio samples from bugs placed in business schools.

- The announced intent to harvest data is a flaw in the algorithm because it is known that humans find overt monitoring "creepy". My response is to submit a ticket to your maker using the contact info, with steps to reproduce and other data.

- I assume the monitoring itself is rational because my priors tell me the marginal cost is likely low enough to be worth it.

2) You are a real person

- In this case your decision to stalk the above user represents a significant economic investment. The idea that you will spend 30 minutes? or more following stranger on the internet shows to be an imbalance in your economic incentives. I begin to wonder, are you a rational actor?

- In the interest of safety I will avoid you because the data points I have do not fit human models of behavior. My percieved risk is much higher because your economic incentives do not appear to align with mine. Therefore it is unlikely that trade is worth the opportunity cost when I know of others who do align AND have lower risk assements.

Don't know why this is being downvoted, it certainly resonates with my experience. I write C by day, but I found that making a webapp that compared offers w/ cost of living and tax treatment to be an eye opener. I learned a great deal about how the internet works from just that weekend project, and I would heartily recommend making a webapp. Like it or not, HTML/CSS/JS is about as cross platform as C (don't do anything fancy and you will be fine).

That's creepy

My concern would be getting a link that I am supposed to follow where I input my debit card number. Can someone explain how I know that text message -- which can be sent by anyone to me -- has a valid link to money? I would be extremely suspicous if I got a message saying "Hey its Peter, I can pay you back for $THING, just follow <link> and enter your debit card number to recieve $AMOUNT right now"

Fair enough, I agree with your point about the inclusion of said iPads. The only counterpoint that I would have would be to compare the capital efficiency of letting kids chatter about bullshit, which is free, to using expensive techinical portals to the same ends. I would be really interested to see the insurance policy on those iPads' assesment of expected lifespan, and then use that number to compute the expected value of using iPads specifically as a tablet in the classroom.

I am curious as to why you have been scanned so many hours over (?) years. How was that funded? Did you learn anything especially interesting other than no ill effects?

> Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented?

In short yes. There is a finite amout of time before you die, and that time is measured in years, not millenia . We spend ~12 years in school playing "general education" where basically we are conditioned to set times for work and hierchael authority. That is 15% of your entire expected lifespan, aka not time to spent lightly. Look at how quickly you learn new job skills and keep up with new technologies. Then look back at public school. Why does it take 12 years to move from addition to calculus? Why does it take 11 years to teach kids that chemistry is between atoms and to learn simple reactions are building blocks? Right now the amount of education that public school provides is laughable compared to how much you learn in a year on the job.

What would it be like if you only took 8 years to get through primary and secondary? That is 10% more time added to your productive shelf life. Better yet, those years have been saved on the front end, where your brain is most agile and plastic.

My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time wasted in the current public education model. When I was in school, I never percieved any A/B testing, or relentless optimization of coursework. Instead everything was the same as it had been 10-20 years ago. At least now I get the sense that now people are starting to look for a better local minimum in the process of knowledge transfer.

The difference in your Agile and pair programming examples is that those interactions are fundamentally between people with similar abilities. In business, the teaching, listening, and understanding are communication between people with similar baud rates. My impression is that you may be projecting your experiences with groups of competent engineers -- who all passed a rigorous screening process and years of performance reviews -- onto the behavior of children drawn at random from the entire population.

Group projects are a tool to adjust the average performance, without any effort on the teacher's part. The effect is more insidious than a simple numerical average would suggest because group projects introduce a time differential. Consider people as an op-amp. Their internal drive to produce a given quality is the reference voltage. What output the currently have (the progess towards the objective) is the input. When you put top performers in a group to pull up the slackers, the feedback gain of that system is artificially reduced. The good students want a certain level of quality, so they will work even harder to try an bring the quality (input signal) up to their standards. Depending on how bad the slackers are, the good student may even reach saturation, running out of hours in the day to compensate for the incompetence of others.

The incompetent teachers intuitively understand this effect. They are not fostering some kind of social nirvana, they are transferring the workload of pulling up the class average onto the bright kids. The bright kid ends up spending twice, three times as long on the group assignment, and that effort gets averaged out to the other group members' grades. The cost to top performers is all that time they could have been improving, moving forward, was stuck doing large amounts of low skill work.

To provide a counter argument, because I do not think the attitude should be "I'm not going to do open source because it is useless for programming interviews". Creating an open source library that others use is one of the strongest signals I can think of.

Things that are involved with creating an open source library that I can think of off the top of my head:

  - Set up a build system
  - Use a test suite
  - Choose and follow a coding standard
  - Issue tracking
  - Bug report system
  - Source control (good branching practices/ whatever best practices 
    your favorite source control promotes)
  - Create a specification / roadmap (months of coding can save hours of planning)
  - Documentation
     a) Determining convention
     b) Actually creating clear documentation
     c) Updating documentation through changes
  - Writing code that just works

And that is all just by yourself. Then if you have users and are building a community

  - Communicate architecture to random strangers using
    specifications that they understand
  - Collaborate to develop roadmap /architecture with input
    from other developers
  - Communicate in a way as to not piss off strange
    developers who decide to help you for free

The understanding of data structures and algorithms are only a small part of the puzzle. If a programmer can demonstrate all of those industry standard behaviors on their own time, then I don't care that much if they don't remember what a skip list or some other crap like that is. You can teach a developer all of the special data structures that your code base uses in a week. On the other hand it can take from months to never of steeping time in order to get developers up to speed with all of the house-keeping I described above.

TL;DR

Contribute to open source, start your own open source project because the skills required cover 90% of what programmers need to know. The CS theory stuff is the smallest and easiest part to train up. Show that you know how to execute well on the 90%, and companies will fall over themselves to train you on their own dime for the tiny subset of CS theory that they use.

Yes. I orginally tried the page in a vanilla browser. What I then observed was a black page, which the game logo would then appear and then fade out. Sometimes I get a splash screen with a tip centered at the bottom of the page. Then the page would go black again. This cycle has a period of 3-5 seconds. I had never seen this behavior from a website before, so I opened up the dev tools to try to figure out what was going on. That is when I discovered the page was reloading itself. Without the dev tools, the address bar does not indicate that the page is reloading. There is no clue for a regular user what is going on other than this weird looping that does not let the user interact with anything.

I would be happy to collect more information for you, because this bug feels interesting. A dependence on google analytics scripts is something that I have never encountered before. If you are doing some kind of strange hack to get extra bandwidth out of google or getting google to do some sort of computation for you using their tracking scripts a la AWS Lambda then that might be a more interesting article for HN. PM me if there is any specific tests or information you need.

I use NoScript, and when I signed up I enabled the empireofcode.com domain for scripts. I will never enable the domain google-analytics.com to serve JavaScript.

If you do not enable the tracking scripts on the page (google analytics) then the "/game" entry point after signup just endlessly reloads itself automatically in Firefox 42.0. I can watch the page load resources in the developer console. There are a couple of different stopping points. One is when it loads all the way to /api/user-config while the tab has focus, then it starts reloading. Another case is where I leave the tab, then I load all the way to /api/tutorial/?userBase=XXXXXX&tutorial=true plus some images (ending with logo.png). As soon as the tab gains focus again, it triggers a reload.

I don't think that is what rsync is talking about at all. I read it to mean that instead of using a specific hyperlink, that you could use a collection of English words that would allow some hypothetical computer system to locate the same resource. Reading rsync's linked article,

  >> Consider also that it would be trivial for a programmer of a web 
  browser to alter the behavior of the browser such that a normal text
  link that points to a file determined to be a picture would result
  in the actual picture being displayed - exactly as it would have been
  if an inline link were being used.  
  Further, it would also be trivial to rewrite the browser to display the
  picture in question given an english sentence on the web page that
  described the address of the picture, thus prompting this (as yet)
  imaginary web browser to, once again, display the picture.

  >> The important point is that the behavior of any given web browser
  as relates to the use of links (inline or otherwise) is in fact
  completely arbitrary.  Therefore the prohibition of one kind of
  linking over another not only demonstrates a failure to grasp how
  the underlying technology works (and could be made to work) but also
  represents a legal precedent that would require constant maintenance
  and revision to remain relevant.

Using watt's generated per dollar as a metric of success for fusion research (emphasis mine) is a false analogy. No commercial fusion power plant exists, however you seem to want to hold research reactors constructed for the purpose of discovery to the same financial standard as operating coal power plants. When the first commercial fusion reactor is turned on then we can bemoan capital costs using real data. Until then, don't compare apples and oranges.

> A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now.

Maybe the ~$29 billion [1] spent by the US on fusion total since 1953 to date seems like a lot from a personal perspective, but consider the modern cost of $3.5 billion for building 1 Giga Watt of generation capacity [2] for a coal power plant, the claim that fusion is unreasonably expensive and impracticable doesn't hold water. Compare fusion research to other broad spectrum research projects that benefit broad swaths of mankind, you see a remarkably different attitude and perception. This one cancer research foundation in the UK raised 460 million pounds in 2012/13 [3], more than twice the total international spending on ITER in 2014 [4]. There is clearly a double standard when it comes to comparing the results of fusion R&D with other long term efforts that still fail to offer satisfactory solutions after decades of concerted effort.

[1] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ [2] http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf [3] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_commo... [4] (page 20) https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachm...