screwperman

I'm actually looking for somehing a lot simpler: vi/Emacs keybindings and a better mouseless browsing experience in general.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm looking for such features in Chrome.

Ah, my bad.

I really do like HN, I think for the most part it has been beneficial to the community. But for the love of god, I wish half of the comments on Coding Horror submissions here would stop being the same old ad hominem attacks on Jeff's writing style. At least the HN community could add something substantive to Jeff's arguments.

Wow, Princeton's admissions process seems to be more thorough than I could have imagined. However, you seem to be referring to those expensive international schools where most Indian applicants come from. Typical Indian schools like the one I used to attend are quite different: only 5 (out of 120) of us from this year's graduating class have applied to American universities (though I know that at least 2 students in the past 4 years were accepted by Princeton).

Nevertheless, it's quite insightful.

I'm aware that there was a discussion about the other extreme on HN a month ago -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257 -- but I need to vent off a little. Forgive me if I go off on a tangent.

I've recently graduated from a high school in India and I haven't spent a day thinking about how idiotic the education system is here. I wish I could have been a part of a culture that encouraged well-roundedness and recognized passionate kids, rather than one that exclusively rewarded academic performance. Having spent some time at an elementary school both in the US and in India, I can assure you that there is a great disparity in pedagogy even at that level.

My school wouldn't give a rat's ass about those who didn't get awesome grades. And doing so required one to allocate a disproportionate amount of time to rote learning. I would always rather spend time hacking (and perhaps slacking), like I have being doing ever since I was 8.

It's hilarious to see what gets passed for extracurricular activities here. All "club presidents" are just required to set up a 15 minute inter-house quiz containing 10 or so questions.

For four straight years, I was never picked by my teachers to be president/secretary of the computer club, even though I was known by my peers as "the comp guy", and had won competitions, etc., etc.. Some four random sycophants who got better grades than we were chosen instead. The shit really hit the fan last year, and my parents decided to talk to the principal about this. The principal was overly defensive, and said the faculty was looking for "leadership qualities" (for conducting a stupid quiz, yeah right). Of course, they never did anything in the first place to create these "leadership qualities". A month later, during a parent-teacher meeting, my parents and I were taken to the principal, who blamed my parents for making me a complete introvert. She couldn't see that possibly the school's fault, considering that I had been there for 11 years. And whenever I've won some sort of a competition, teachers would tell me "you're wasting my time, and shouldn't have any hobbies at this young an age". I've qualified for my country's training camp for the IOI this year, and I'm fairly confident I will get a medal. Will any Indian college notice this? Nope. Hell, even my school won't notice that.

Thankfully, I have parents who can afford to send me to a college in the US. I've been accepted by some decent but not-so-selective public universities, but I don't think the really good schools will admit me, because I have mediocre grades and no "leadership qualities", and I respect their decision: in this discussion, brandnewlow has reassured that the admissions process, despite a few idiosyncrasies, is pretty good. Plus, there isn't really much of a cut-throat competition for getting admission. Hell, I learned a lot just by applying. For instance, writing a few essays, showing them to others for advice on how to improve them, and repeatedly editing and proofreading them were things I had never done before.

Sorry for this terribly incoherent rant.

Most programmers have the habit of using asymmetric bounds i.e. lower bound included, upper bound excluded.

"reminded me of Feynmans comparison of Princeton versus CalTech.."

Pardon me for being pedantic, but I believe he was comparing MIT and Princeton.

MIT regular admission decisions are coming out on 3/14 1:59:26 PM Eastern Time.

I come from India, a country that does really well in the IPhO and the IChO. Most finalists coming from here treat these olympiads as training for entrance examinations.

It is no surprise that Indians do not show this stellar a performance in the IMO: the math sections of entrance examinations have little in common with IMO problems (exclusively multiple-choice, heavy on calculus; no Euclidean geometry and number theory).

The IOI situation is quite embarrassing. I've been invited to the national training camp. Most of my fellow competitors don't know jack about algorithms. They aren't even aware of some basic STL functions. Some wrote an O(n^2) sorting algorithm in the qualifying rounds, others memorized a quicksort implementation. But they seem to be good problem solvers, or perhaps a little mathematically-inclined; one of the problems for qualifying involved coming up with a recurrence in two variables and then optimizing the program with DP. Nevertheless, people should expect a lot more from a large country recognized as an "IT hub".

Thanks.

Allow me to gloat a little:

Just a couple of days ago, I gave a ten minute presentation on computational complexity as part of a high school English assignment (sic) to my classmates who mostly had hardly any programming experience at all. I based it on Knuth's paper on The Complexity of Songs: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_compl...

My classmates told me this was the best presentation they ever attended, but that's possibly because I used many pointless gimmicks such as walking around the entire room tearing a dictionary in half to explain a binary search (giving away the halves as souvenirs), making self-deprecating remarks on how boring it is and showing a picture of a friend sleeping, starting to sing like a crack addict, etc., etc..

However, whenever I asked questions, I did get immediate answers such as "this is a logarithmic relationship." So I guess I succeeded in explaining the topic.

I need to submit a writeup on the talk, and I guess it will take me a few minutes to finish typing it out. I'm not sure how many of you will want to read an explanation of big O notation written by a high school student who can't even solve the simplest of recurrence relations, but I could upload my slides and talk transcription here if you want me to...

EDIT: Ok, here it is. I am aware of the numerous blatant technical errors I have made, so please be nice :). I've also shamelessly stolen stuff from 4 or 5 places, but all those were meant for people familiar with the subject matter.

Transcription: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7539835/The-Complexity-of-Songs

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/guestacae495/the-complexity-of-son...