I couldn't agree more. Look at the ai-class.com lectures on probability and compare it with Khan classes and you see a very large gap. The khan class gives you a foundation but it is really just the bottom 30% of what you need to know. Then compare the ai-class.com lectures on NLP with the NLP class at see.stanford.com and you see another large gap. So we need each education site. Each one tends to focus on a different range of the education path and on a different level student. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the same fact taught in a different style.
It is hard to be competitive without funding...
We need a yearly funding drive effort like NPR.
The biggest problem (and strength?) is that we have a lot of duplicate solutions.
We are a large fragmented democracy fighting a well-funding dictatorship with a great PR department.
If only we could elect a leader for 2 years and unite against Apple and MS.
The irony is that we can't beat them without becoming them...
I've interviewed at companies with a 20-something workforce and it is very awkward.
They make it very clear, they only want older employees if they are in the top 5% of the workforce.
You have to be a well-known expert (e.g. owing a github project with a large following, published and selling well in the app store, highly ranked on stackoverflow) to have their respect.
It doesn't matter if I like that or not; the 20-something people make the decisions.
It is evolve and get facebook like jobs or die at a boring company.
My solution, which isn't easy, is to start my own company.
I think the 20-something crowd feels that it is so easy to start a company,
if a 35+ year-old employee hasn't started one then there must be something wrong.
It is a lot like high-school; you have to be hard to get for them to want you.
What is your opinion of the impact of this law?
I suspect it has always been the case that the majority of people believe in creationism.
I wonder if a tendency to hold religious beliefs is an advantageous adaption.
We argue about the incorrectness of a belief in creationism when ironically, it may be society's tendency to hold religious beliefs that have helped our species survive.
We may not need those tendencies anymore but I'm not sure they can safely disappear overnight.
I don't see a need to change someone's belief creationism even though I don't share it.
Science can do amazing things that will change their minds.
Science is so powerful that it seems silly to worry about the misconceptions of the deeply religious.
Democracy means the majority gets to create laws which are a mistake but the system allows us to fix them later when we're culturally evolved to accept it.
Maybe the best way to reduce the belief in creationism is to teach it along side evolution.
This article is also very interesting.
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/
It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling
the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in
small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't
practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.
I just don't get it. China is a major trading partner and holder of american debt.
It would be so much easier to sign a peace treaty.
The biggest issue I think is taiwan so let's work out a deal to integrate taiwan like they did with hong kong.
In exchange for taiwan, we should ask them to strongly motivate north korea to integrate with the south.
There are other issues but I don't think they are big enough to go to war over.
The richer they become the less problems we will have.
1) Move up the management chain. Stop moving up when you can't take the bs. You don't code anymore. You are still paid well. You have to reduce your reliance on technical skills and switch to people skills. It is messy. I find it hard because the goals are harder to understand. People don't act in their best interests and so doing something illogical (e.g. not allowing an employee to build a better solution because the current solution is owned by someone with more influence than you have) is the better choice if you want to keep your job. It is really hard to avoid becoming the dilbert manager when a dilbert manager decides your fate.
2) Move into sales or marketing. Again you have to tone down your technical skills in favor of people skills. If you move into writing white papers you can keep some of the technical skills but you will need to understand people well enough to influence them. It takes getting used to. I didn't like it at first but so far it has been easier than coding, a little boring but I feel my work is useful to the company and customers. If you move into technical presales you typically get a bonus but you also have to travel a bit more.
We are becoming smart enough to control our natural selection process so that the only selection process that remains is one in which humans to kill each other. It is a catch 22. We're getting smart enough to survive anything the nature can throw at us so we only have ourselves to limit our growth. There are other ways that seem more logical but survival of the best killer has always been the dominate method. We want to think that we've evolved past it but our wars indicate otherwise. As mentioned before, Islam and Judaism share a common origin. Our conflicts are silly. It reminds me of when Nixon escalated the bombing into Cambodia because he didn't want to be the first American president to lose war. Several million people died because one person didn't want a sentence written in a book that one day no one will read.
I always wanted to know how to divide future revenue (after the divorce) for IP that was started but not completed before the divorce.
I had thought to just give each party a copy of the IP to finish as they see fit.
The alternative is that one party finishes the work and the other party reaps the benefits.
This later case seems unfair.
The problem isn't specific to apple but they are the poster child and a protest there would produce the most press.
With record breaking profits, it would be awesome if apple spent more to improve working conditions in china.
Actually, google said, "Mozilla, can we work with you to make firefox radically better?" and
Mozilla said "no, we have our own ideas and we don't want you telling us what to do!" and
so google created Chrome with the goal of forcing all the vendors to make their browsers better.
Sure javascipt performance improvements have been great but can we get a little type safe, pretty please?
Writing more than 100K lines of javascript without any type checking is so 1970.
I feel that these "problems" with google are common to all successful companies.
When a company has a lot of success in one area, it seems to prefer to find similar innovations in the future.
Google says they want to be more innovative but having worked there I don't see them being able to avoid their blind spot.
For example, when they tried to launch a second-life clone, there were long threads (mostly negative) about it because
that kind of product is so very different from google's successes.
Obviously, "success" is not a bad problem to have but I think the conflict is that google wants to believe it is not blinded by its success.
The Steve Jobs analogy is most interesting because I think Apple's second wave was due to the fact that it wasn't dominant any more
and I suspect their weakness made that it possible for Apple to consider innovation outside its core business model. It also helps that Steve
would tell people what to do and didn't need a committee to set the direction. Google is more like several really smart
committees each charting conflicting courses (e.g. android, gwt, chrome os, dart, etc).
I think google's "problem" is also their greatest strength. Google wants to hire engineers who are pretty much the same A-type personality.
They want the "googley" employee. They are awesome employees but it is fundamentally flawed to think that hiring some many similarly minded people wouldn't make a company blind. You would expect this blindness when the average google employee's views differs from the general population (i.e. "they don't get it").
At this point, some of google's success has to come from acquisitions. Youtube is a good example. They can't get there any other way.
I don't know if the research/conclusion is sound but intuitively
I wonder if this idea explains why it is hard for big companies to innovate.
The larger they get, the harder it is to get 10% of the population to
support a new idea. It would mean that employees trying to promote a new
idea need to first secure support of a least 10% of the population or
find another company to work for if that is not possible. Note, you would
not have to get 10% of the entire company if you only need 10% of your group.
I wonder if this also explains extremist behavior. For example, Breivik is thought
to have killed in hopes that it would garner attention
so more people would read about his ideas. Extremists need to
cause terror if they hope to influence 10% of the population. It
explains why extremists with the least influence are the most violent.
It explains why they may feel their violence is justified. It explains why
extremist bloggers must present a one-side and exaggerated point of view
because a balanced POV would be ineffective.
Google should sell off the RIM hardware side; the patents would still make the deal worthwhile.
Having a software platform that is already trusted by business for employee phones would be a big win.
I'm sure HTC and the others would love to own the hardware side.
I would imagine that sony will be able to fix this eventually and we'll back to the wall garden.
We need hypervisor under sony's hypervisor so that future system updates can't remove the backdoor.
I worked at google for a few years. I don't think google discriminates based on age. The founders feel strongly that intelligence is more important than experience. So they believe that they discriminate based on intelligence.
The problem I had working for google is that the company wants to employ only the "A" personality type engineer. The "googly" engineer accepts no compromise, makes no mistakes and is driven to produce the best solution at any cost. After 20+ years of working in the industry, I'm willing to compromise and to produce a great solution now until I can produce a better one tomorrow. At google, the founders have stated that great is not good enough. I'm an "AB" personality type and that "B" part is not good enough for google.
Google has amazing benefits and so working there is amazingly lucrative. I would work there again if I could but I fear it would end the same. At google, you need the approval of your peers. The "A" personality types are the majority and as such they don't want any other types around.
(There are exceptions if you're charismatic or attractive but that is the same at other companies.)
The government need to get a blessing from the religious right in exchange for a cut (like they did in Saudi Arabia). And then the government needs to select the "right" countries, people, etc to do the work. Clearly no westerns would be allowed to take part publicly. I vote that the work should be given the Palestinians and other really poor Muslim countries. Reducing poverty would prevent the spread of terroristic tendencies.
I agree that for some people web development is not very hard.
Just like for some people programming in assembly language isn't hard.
It sounds like you're just saying that we should pay more for consultants like you
and stop complaining. You'll take care of everything and send us a nice bill.
But web development could be a lot better for everyone including you.
For one thing, Javascript should be made type safe as it is with actionscript.
There are lots of issues we've already solved with other languages and
UI SDKs that have not been applied to Web App Development.
Web App Development is stuck in the past. It was defined by people at
Netscape who were innovating very quickly and didn't take the time to
get it right. Now we have to live with their choices more than 10 years
later; no tree control, no pop up menus, no grid control, no tab control,
no split panel, no layout managers, WTF! Thank god there is dojo and
other toolkits but they are a hack and those features would be much
better if they were built into the browser.
It is so frustrating to have people like you telling everyone not to worry about
the difficulty of Web App Development because you think it is fine. The
real issue is that many more developers suffer while you profit from their pain.
Of course you want it to stay as hard as it currently is. You're like the big oil
company telling us not to worry about lead in the gasoline because we shouldn't
pay more at the pump.
It doesn't bother you to rewrite someone else's poorly written website but it
is a waste of everyone's time and money none the less.
Following your line of reasoning, nothing would ever be made better because
someone thinks it is ok the way it is.
Some one commits a crime, does time and the tax payer pays an enormous bill.
In many cases, the person gets to hang out doing nothing;
That doesn't sound like punishment especially when the person
was living a very dangerous life outside. For the very poor, prison can be
much better than their home environment.
I think we should require companies that outsource manufacturing to china
to use prisoner labor instead such that the prisoner is able to pay
the cost of incarceration. In return, the prisoner should be allowed to work for additional
income which can be used to buy get better conditions (less crowding,
better health-care, better food and education). Prisons could turn inmates into
productive workers at almost no cost to the public.
Why are we sending billions to china to make plastic toys at the same time
we're spending billions for prisoners to do nothing; it is incredibly wasteful
for the taxpayer.
I think Firefox and others should make a bigger effort to improve the browser programming environment.
This means improving the javascript language to support strong typing and real classes/methods/inheritance.
It means adding more UI controls to html so that it is easier to write applications.
Reducing developer/QA costs means more time and money can be spent on application features.
There is a big focus on making the javascript interpreter faster but more effort is needed to
make javascript a better language.
I don't think authors of Javascript understood that it would be used to build the complex web applications we see today.
Most other languages (Java, C#, etc) and UI SDKs (Swing, SWT, MFC, Flash/Flex etc) are much more powerful.
Html-5 is a good step. I don't think we really need innovation, we just need modernization
to match capabilities we already have in other languages and UI SDKs.
(This may be off topic, in which case, please ignore.)
I was wondering if rgb should be converted to linear before
computing color distances? And, what is the better way to
compute color distances (since the euclidean distance of
rgb values seems like a really bad choice).
Everyone is paying to filter the spam but maybe
ISPs should pay to find the spammers. At some
(probably low) cost, you can induce people to
find the spammers. After all, the spammer has to have
a way to collect money from his/her targets.
Also, I wish ISPs would find the people who respond to
spam and give them email accounts at a site that the
spammers can freely target. These people are the real
cause of spam.
I didn't RTFA but I've wondered if dreams are similar.
When faced with a similar situation, do people use their dream
experiences to help make a quicker decision.
I wonder if deja vu is just the feeling of experiencing something
from a forgotten dream.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. Look at the ai-class.com lectures on probability and compare it with Khan classes and you see a very large gap. The khan class gives you a foundation but it is really just the bottom 30% of what you need to know. Then compare the ai-class.com lectures on NLP with the NLP class at see.stanford.com and you see another large gap. So we need each education site. Each one tends to focus on a different range of the education path and on a different level student. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the same fact taught in a different style.
It is hard to be competitive without funding... We need a yearly funding drive effort like NPR. The biggest problem (and strength?) is that we have a lot of duplicate solutions. We are a large fragmented democracy fighting a well-funding dictatorship with a great PR department. If only we could elect a leader for 2 years and unite against Apple and MS. The irony is that we can't beat them without becoming them...
I've interviewed at companies with a 20-something workforce and it is very awkward. They make it very clear, they only want older employees if they are in the top 5% of the workforce. You have to be a well-known expert (e.g. owing a github project with a large following, published and selling well in the app store, highly ranked on stackoverflow) to have their respect. It doesn't matter if I like that or not; the 20-something people make the decisions. It is evolve and get facebook like jobs or die at a boring company.
My solution, which isn't easy, is to start my own company. I think the 20-something crowd feels that it is so easy to start a company, if a 35+ year-old employee hasn't started one then there must be something wrong. It is a lot like high-school; you have to be hard to get for them to want you.
What is your opinion of the impact of this law? I suspect it has always been the case that the majority of people believe in creationism. I wonder if a tendency to hold religious beliefs is an advantageous adaption. We argue about the incorrectness of a belief in creationism when ironically, it may be society's tendency to hold religious beliefs that have helped our species survive. We may not need those tendencies anymore but I'm not sure they can safely disappear overnight. I don't see a need to change someone's belief creationism even though I don't share it. Science can do amazing things that will change their minds. Science is so powerful that it seems silly to worry about the misconceptions of the deeply religious. Democracy means the majority gets to create laws which are a mistake but the system allows us to fix them later when we're culturally evolved to accept it. Maybe the best way to reduce the belief in creationism is to teach it along side evolution.
There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program
It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones
that Bret Victor talks about.
This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.
Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!
I just don't get it. China is a major trading partner and holder of american debt. It would be so much easier to sign a peace treaty. The biggest issue I think is taiwan so let's work out a deal to integrate taiwan like they did with hong kong. In exchange for taiwan, we should ask them to strongly motivate north korea to integrate with the south. There are other issues but I don't think they are big enough to go to war over. The richer they become the less problems we will have.
1) Move up the management chain. Stop moving up when you can't take the bs. You don't code anymore. You are still paid well. You have to reduce your reliance on technical skills and switch to people skills. It is messy. I find it hard because the goals are harder to understand. People don't act in their best interests and so doing something illogical (e.g. not allowing an employee to build a better solution because the current solution is owned by someone with more influence than you have) is the better choice if you want to keep your job. It is really hard to avoid becoming the dilbert manager when a dilbert manager decides your fate.
2) Move into sales or marketing. Again you have to tone down your technical skills in favor of people skills. If you move into writing white papers you can keep some of the technical skills but you will need to understand people well enough to influence them. It takes getting used to. I didn't like it at first but so far it has been easier than coding, a little boring but I feel my work is useful to the company and customers. If you move into technical presales you typically get a bonus but you also have to travel a bit more.
We are becoming smart enough to control our natural selection process so that the only selection process that remains is one in which humans to kill each other. It is a catch 22. We're getting smart enough to survive anything the nature can throw at us so we only have ourselves to limit our growth. There are other ways that seem more logical but survival of the best killer has always been the dominate method. We want to think that we've evolved past it but our wars indicate otherwise. As mentioned before, Islam and Judaism share a common origin. Our conflicts are silly. It reminds me of when Nixon escalated the bombing into Cambodia because he didn't want to be the first American president to lose war. Several million people died because one person didn't want a sentence written in a book that one day no one will read.
I always wanted to know how to divide future revenue (after the divorce) for IP that was started but not completed before the divorce. I had thought to just give each party a copy of the IP to finish as they see fit. The alternative is that one party finishes the work and the other party reaps the benefits. This later case seems unfair.
The problem isn't specific to apple but they are the poster child and a protest there would produce the most press. With record breaking profits, it would be awesome if apple spent more to improve working conditions in china.
Actually, google said, "Mozilla, can we work with you to make firefox radically better?" and Mozilla said "no, we have our own ideas and we don't want you telling us what to do!" and so google created Chrome with the goal of forcing all the vendors to make their browsers better. Sure javascipt performance improvements have been great but can we get a little type safe, pretty please? Writing more than 100K lines of javascript without any type checking is so 1970.
I don't want to rewrite my app for a small market. Just make it easier to build android apps to run on desktop linux.
The our government is broken but no solution can garner enough support to make a difference.
I feel that these "problems" with google are common to all successful companies. When a company has a lot of success in one area, it seems to prefer to find similar innovations in the future. Google says they want to be more innovative but having worked there I don't see them being able to avoid their blind spot. For example, when they tried to launch a second-life clone, there were long threads (mostly negative) about it because that kind of product is so very different from google's successes.
Obviously, "success" is not a bad problem to have but I think the conflict is that google wants to believe it is not blinded by its success. The Steve Jobs analogy is most interesting because I think Apple's second wave was due to the fact that it wasn't dominant any more and I suspect their weakness made that it possible for Apple to consider innovation outside its core business model. It also helps that Steve would tell people what to do and didn't need a committee to set the direction. Google is more like several really smart committees each charting conflicting courses (e.g. android, gwt, chrome os, dart, etc).
I think google's "problem" is also their greatest strength. Google wants to hire engineers who are pretty much the same A-type personality. They want the "googley" employee. They are awesome employees but it is fundamentally flawed to think that hiring some many similarly minded people wouldn't make a company blind. You would expect this blindness when the average google employee's views differs from the general population (i.e. "they don't get it").
At this point, some of google's success has to come from acquisitions. Youtube is a good example. They can't get there any other way.
I don't know if the research/conclusion is sound but intuitively I wonder if this idea explains why it is hard for big companies to innovate. The larger they get, the harder it is to get 10% of the population to support a new idea. It would mean that employees trying to promote a new idea need to first secure support of a least 10% of the population or find another company to work for if that is not possible. Note, you would not have to get 10% of the entire company if you only need 10% of your group.
I wonder if this also explains extremist behavior. For example, Breivik is thought to have killed in hopes that it would garner attention so more people would read about his ideas. Extremists need to cause terror if they hope to influence 10% of the population. It explains why extremists with the least influence are the most violent. It explains why they may feel their violence is justified. It explains why extremist bloggers must present a one-side and exaggerated point of view because a balanced POV would be ineffective.
Google should sell off the RIM hardware side; the patents would still make the deal worthwhile. Having a software platform that is already trusted by business for employee phones would be a big win. I'm sure HTC and the others would love to own the hardware side.
I would imagine that sony will be able to fix this eventually and we'll back to the wall garden. We need hypervisor under sony's hypervisor so that future system updates can't remove the backdoor.
I worked at google for a few years.
I don't think google discriminates based on age.
The founders feel strongly that intelligence is more important than experience.
So they believe that they discriminate based on intelligence.
The problem I had working for google is that the company wants to employ only the "A" personality type engineer.
The "googly" engineer accepts no compromise, makes no mistakes and is driven to produce the best solution at any cost.
After 20+ years of working in the industry, I'm willing to compromise and to produce a great solution now until I can produce a better one tomorrow.
At google, the founders have stated that great is not good enough.
I'm an "AB" personality type and that "B" part is not good enough for google.
Google has amazing benefits and so working there is amazingly lucrative.
I would work there again if I could but I fear it would end the same.
At google, you need the approval of your peers.
The "A" personality types are the majority and as such they don't want any other types around.
(There are exceptions if you're charismatic or attractive but that is the same at other companies.)
The government need to get a blessing from the religious right in exchange for a cut (like they did in Saudi Arabia). And then the government needs to select the "right" countries, people, etc to do the work. Clearly no westerns would be allowed to take part publicly. I vote that the work should be given the Palestinians and other really poor Muslim countries. Reducing poverty would prevent the spread of terroristic tendencies.
I agree that for some people web development is not very hard. Just like for some people programming in assembly language isn't hard. It sounds like you're just saying that we should pay more for consultants like you and stop complaining. You'll take care of everything and send us a nice bill. But web development could be a lot better for everyone including you. For one thing, Javascript should be made type safe as it is with actionscript. There are lots of issues we've already solved with other languages and UI SDKs that have not been applied to Web App Development. Web App Development is stuck in the past. It was defined by people at Netscape who were innovating very quickly and didn't take the time to get it right. Now we have to live with their choices more than 10 years later; no tree control, no pop up menus, no grid control, no tab control, no split panel, no layout managers, WTF! Thank god there is dojo and other toolkits but they are a hack and those features would be much better if they were built into the browser. It is so frustrating to have people like you telling everyone not to worry about the difficulty of Web App Development because you think it is fine. The real issue is that many more developers suffer while you profit from their pain. Of course you want it to stay as hard as it currently is. You're like the big oil company telling us not to worry about lead in the gasoline because we shouldn't pay more at the pump. It doesn't bother you to rewrite someone else's poorly written website but it is a waste of everyone's time and money none the less. Following your line of reasoning, nothing would ever be made better because someone thinks it is ok the way it is.
Some one commits a crime, does time and the tax payer pays an enormous bill. In many cases, the person gets to hang out doing nothing; That doesn't sound like punishment especially when the person was living a very dangerous life outside. For the very poor, prison can be much better than their home environment. I think we should require companies that outsource manufacturing to china to use prisoner labor instead such that the prisoner is able to pay the cost of incarceration. In return, the prisoner should be allowed to work for additional income which can be used to buy get better conditions (less crowding, better health-care, better food and education). Prisons could turn inmates into productive workers at almost no cost to the public. Why are we sending billions to china to make plastic toys at the same time we're spending billions for prisoners to do nothing; it is incredibly wasteful for the taxpayer.
I think Firefox and others should make a bigger effort to improve the browser programming environment. This means improving the javascript language to support strong typing and real classes/methods/inheritance. It means adding more UI controls to html so that it is easier to write applications. Reducing developer/QA costs means more time and money can be spent on application features. There is a big focus on making the javascript interpreter faster but more effort is needed to make javascript a better language. I don't think authors of Javascript understood that it would be used to build the complex web applications we see today. Most other languages (Java, C#, etc) and UI SDKs (Swing, SWT, MFC, Flash/Flex etc) are much more powerful. Html-5 is a good step. I don't think we really need innovation, we just need modernization to match capabilities we already have in other languages and UI SDKs.
(This may be off topic, in which case, please ignore.) I was wondering if rgb should be converted to linear before computing color distances? And, what is the better way to compute color distances (since the euclidean distance of rgb values seems like a really bad choice).
Everyone is paying to filter the spam but maybe ISPs should pay to find the spammers. At some (probably low) cost, you can induce people to find the spammers. After all, the spammer has to have a way to collect money from his/her targets. Also, I wish ISPs would find the people who respond to spam and give them email accounts at a site that the spammers can freely target. These people are the real cause of spam.
I didn't RTFA but I've wondered if dreams are similar. When faced with a similar situation, do people use their dream experiences to help make a quicker decision. I wonder if deja vu is just the feeling of experiencing something from a forgotten dream.