I think the most impressive part is that even though we hear all the time about "X-teen year old invents BLAH" we're like "Great!" but secretly think "BIG Deal! Who can't invent something? How is that challenging, really? Oh look their dad's an electrical engineer that works at XYZ... hmmmm....." but this 16-year-old actually solved something that the best mathematicians on Earth haven't been able to solve for 350 years.
Major kudos kid! Only way that can be topped is if a teen cures cancer, aids or doubles productive lifespan.
Major achievements in medicine are achieved more by sweat than brilliance and never by 16 year old kids because it takes years to carry out such the experiments and 11 year olds don't have the wherewithal let alone the permission to carry out biological experiments on humans. If a 16 year old cures cancer, we won't know it until he's thirty and then we'll wonder about the validity of any claim that he came up with the idea when he was 16.
Agreed. I'd much rather have an analytic solution, or even a formulaic approximation. Sometimes approximations are quite good and come in the form of an upper bound and a lower bound so you can calculate not only about the right answer, but an absolute limit on the error in the answer.
It's quite common to find approximate solutions for problems with no (known) analytic answer that are very accurate for large x and others that are very accurate for small x. As an engineer, I'm reasonably satisfied with such a solution, but there's nothing like an analytic answer that's valid for all ranges of all the variables.
The problem I see with the video game thing is not the fact that it is probably irrelevant and little better than random at best. It's that it's insulting, particularly to anyone over the age of 17 and grossly insulting to people with a few years of real-world experience. It might even be regarded as an age-biased method, which could lead to accusations and lawsuits. It's must better to let any random or possibly irrelevant sorting go on behind closed doors.
Your goal in hiring (and I say this as a hiring manager) is not to hire the very best possible person for the job. That's an impossible goal anyway because you can't judge who the best person is anyway. (It only becomes apparent that the person is great or not so great after they've been on the job for a while and you've had an opportunity to see if they really know their shit, work well with others, etc.) You also have a limited amount of manhours that it makes sense to spend picking a great candidate. So step one is you use any method (preferably one with some slight correlation to the skills or experience the job demands) to thin the herd. At best, the first cut is going to be little better than random.
With a large number of resumes, take any statistically significant number or resumes out of the pile -- thirty or more -- and you can be assured that you have at least one person in the subset who's substantially better than the average of all the resumes in the original set. And that's good enough. Now your job is to find that one or few persons and pick any or all of THEM.
Nope, China has that honor. They surpassed US carbon dioxide emissions years ago and in many other categories they are also the top polluting nation.
The USA still exceeds them in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions.
Way to destroy the pace of innovation in that area, then. Pretty much everyone who used Bitcoinica knew it was risky, especially after the first break-in. Heck, the nature of Bitcoinica involved the possibility of losing all your money if the USD price of Bitcoins moved too much against your position.
You say that as if unbacked, privately controlled currency were a good thing.
There are two things impressive about this. One is the fact that you mention, that the kid did not give up until he had the solution and was smart enough to solve a problem that stumped every mathemetician for 350 years.
The second is that people still try to solve difficult analytic problems at all instead of just turning it into a computing problem.
Well, sort of. But when a whole country, by law is bound to honor them, that lends a layer of credibility that just can't be had from any private organization.
iPhones come with Safari and few people ever install another browser.
Android phones come with a stock browser and few people install another browser.
Opera has little potential to help Facebook crack the smart phone marketing problem.
Besides, now that Facebook is a public company, it can't spend its money willy-nilly like it used to and not have to worry about shareholder suits and financial oversight.
Regulation has a good deal to do with it. Regulations on financial transactions shouldn't allow semi-competent 17 year olds to handle large amounts of other peoples' money, for instance, or to design software for such. They should require that data and transactions be recorded, backed up and auditable and audits should be required. AND insured.
If you let a person not sufficiently insured hold your money, you are a fool.
I may be wrong, but is it not a standard procedure to rsync files to one backup location that is not directly accessible from the original data and then have a backup of the backup in an offsite location? The backup-backup should contain a pool of data that is no longer on the original drive but is kept for such purposes as this. I may be missing some piece of the puzzle here, but in the scenarios I have been involved in this was the setup and has greatly restricted the ability to lose ANY data. Of course we dealt with small businesses and may not have been subjected to such a large attack.
When you're running a fraud, the last thing you want is secured backups held by a third party. Most of the money is probably in Swiss or Cayman accounts held by Bitcoins owners and nobody can prove they are owed money.
Without seeing the contract under which Fox provides its programming to Dish, there's no way of knowing whether Dish is violating the contract. And if they are violating the terms of the contract, they probably ARE infringing Fox's contract. Anybody think they'll get a judgment in proportion to what music file-sharers get?
I'm not saying he's smart. I'm saying he was smart enough to play to his base.
People learn to pronounce words by hearing them. What he heard growing up in his household and in his education was the standard pronunciation.
Yeah, he made a lot of gaffes, more than any other President I can remember. Clearly he had a thing about picking the wrong word when speaking extemporaneously and sometimes getting his grammar hopelessly tangled. He wasn't a good speaker. He was clearly not the sharpest analyst to say the least.
But he WAS good at making people feel like he was not so much different from them when in fact his upbringing was a LOT different from almost everybody. I think all the evidence points to his choice of how to pronounce nuclear and the Texas drawl as being affected based on his wanting to appeal to the southern and rural Republican base.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the most impressive part is that even though we hear all the time about "X-teen year old invents BLAH" we're like "Great!" but secretly think "BIG Deal! Who can't invent something? How is that challenging, really? Oh look their dad's an electrical engineer that works at XYZ... hmmmm....." but this 16-year-old actually solved something that the best mathematicians on Earth haven't been able to solve for 350 years. Major kudos kid! Only way that can be topped is if a teen cures cancer, aids or doubles productive lifespan.
Major achievements in medicine are achieved more by sweat than brilliance and never by 16 year old kids because it takes years to carry out such the experiments and 11 year olds don't have the wherewithal let alone the permission to carry out biological experiments on humans. If a 16 year old cures cancer, we won't know it until he's thirty and then we'll wonder about the validity of any claim that he came up with the idea when he was 16.
Agreed. I'd much rather have an analytic solution, or even a formulaic approximation. Sometimes approximations are quite good and come in the form of an upper bound and a lower bound so you can calculate not only about the right answer, but an absolute limit on the error in the answer. It's quite common to find approximate solutions for problems with no (known) analytic answer that are very accurate for large x and others that are very accurate for small x. As an engineer, I'm reasonably satisfied with such a solution, but there's nothing like an analytic answer that's valid for all ranges of all the variables.
You could do worse. PPs have all the requisite attributes to be better than average HR people.
The bin method is underrated.
The problem I see with the video game thing is not the fact that it is probably irrelevant and little better than random at best. It's that it's insulting, particularly to anyone over the age of 17 and grossly insulting to people with a few years of real-world experience. It might even be regarded as an age-biased method, which could lead to accusations and lawsuits. It's must better to let any random or possibly irrelevant sorting go on behind closed doors.
Your goal in hiring (and I say this as a hiring manager) is not to hire the very best possible person for the job. That's an impossible goal anyway because you can't judge who the best person is anyway. (It only becomes apparent that the person is great or not so great after they've been on the job for a while and you've had an opportunity to see if they really know their shit, work well with others, etc.) You also have a limited amount of manhours that it makes sense to spend picking a great candidate. So step one is you use any method (preferably one with some slight correlation to the skills or experience the job demands) to thin the herd. At best, the first cut is going to be little better than random.
With a large number of resumes, take any statistically significant number or resumes out of the pile -- thirty or more -- and you can be assured that you have at least one person in the subset who's substantially better than the average of all the resumes in the original set. And that's good enough. Now your job is to find that one or few persons and pick any or all of THEM.
Nope, China has that honor. They surpassed US carbon dioxide emissions years ago and in many other categories they are also the top polluting nation. The USA still exceeds them in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions.
Way to destroy the pace of innovation in that area, then. Pretty much everyone who used Bitcoinica knew it was risky, especially after the first break-in. Heck, the nature of Bitcoinica involved the possibility of losing all your money if the USD price of Bitcoins moved too much against your position.
You say that as if unbacked, privately controlled currency were a good thing.
There are two things impressive about this. One is the fact that you mention, that the kid did not give up until he had the solution and was smart enough to solve a problem that stumped every mathemetician for 350 years. The second is that people still try to solve difficult analytic problems at all instead of just turning it into a computing problem.
I don't know which surprises me more.
It should have been "Unexplained Outbreak of Sanity Rocks Court"
That's not even close the the same thing. I don't pay anybody money or give anybody credit for free software.
Well, sort of. But when a whole country, by law is bound to honor them, that lends a layer of credibility that just can't be had from any private organization.
And only steal 87k? Amateurs.
Not everybody can be Mark Zuckerburg.
I hope Facebook does not buy Opera. If they're interested in buying Opera, I hope the courts prevents it.
Unless their intention is to open source it.
Just like they open-sourced the rest of their code???
iPhones come with Safari and few people ever install another browser. Android phones come with a stock browser and few people install another browser. Opera has little potential to help Facebook crack the smart phone marketing problem. Besides, now that Facebook is a public company, it can't spend its money willy-nilly like it used to and not have to worry about shareholder suits and financial oversight.
Regulation has a good deal to do with it. Regulations on financial transactions shouldn't allow semi-competent 17 year olds to handle large amounts of other peoples' money, for instance, or to design software for such. They should require that data and transactions be recorded, backed up and auditable and audits should be required. AND insured. If you let a person not sufficiently insured hold your money, you are a fool.
I may be wrong, but is it not a standard procedure to rsync files to one backup location that is not directly accessible from the original data and then have a backup of the backup in an offsite location? The backup-backup should contain a pool of data that is no longer on the original drive but is kept for such purposes as this. I may be missing some piece of the puzzle here, but in the scenarios I have been involved in this was the setup and has greatly restricted the ability to lose ANY data. Of course we dealt with small businesses and may not have been subjected to such a large attack.
When you're running a fraud, the last thing you want is secured backups held by a third party. Most of the money is probably in Swiss or Cayman accounts held by Bitcoins owners and nobody can prove they are owed money.
P.T. Barnum explained it perfectly.
Does anybody not see why money should be a government function and banking should be tightly regulated?
I was counting the soldiers actually deployed to Afghanistan and the costs attributed by the government to the Afghanistan war.
Price fixing.
Without seeing the contract under which Fox provides its programming to Dish, there's no way of knowing whether Dish is violating the contract. And if they are violating the terms of the contract, they probably ARE infringing Fox's contract. Anybody think they'll get a judgment in proportion to what music file-sharers get?
Everybody knows a Corona is 12 ounces.
Can we get it translated from the original Japanese to English by a person who speaks both languages fluently?
I'm not saying he's smart. I'm saying he was smart enough to play to his base. People learn to pronounce words by hearing them. What he heard growing up in his household and in his education was the standard pronunciation. Yeah, he made a lot of gaffes, more than any other President I can remember. Clearly he had a thing about picking the wrong word when speaking extemporaneously and sometimes getting his grammar hopelessly tangled. He wasn't a good speaker. He was clearly not the sharpest analyst to say the least. But he WAS good at making people feel like he was not so much different from them when in fact his upbringing was a LOT different from almost everybody. I think all the evidence points to his choice of how to pronounce nuclear and the Texas drawl as being affected based on his wanting to appeal to the southern and rural Republican base.
And property will quit watching TV. Where's the problem?
I don't even let most ads through my router.