dan-k

With reduce you don't even need to use the & notation, it has that syntactic sugar built in, so you can just do this:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].reduce(:+)

It's not an opinion, and it's only a partisan analysis in the US, and that's the point. The question isn't whether Israel is in the right, as that's a ridiculous question to begin with in a 50-year conflict - both sides have done many reprehensible things to each other, and are going to have to deal with that before there will be peace. But it's completely objective that the standards by which the UN judges other nations would put Israel firmly in the category of rogue state. It's objective that there are over 200 UN resolutions regarding Israel, and that over 80% of the UN recognizes the West Bank as occupied territory, and that Israel's settlements are illegal under that definition, etc. What should be done about Israel in light of that is a separate question that the US has played a huge role in shaping the discussion about, but from a factual standpoint it's not really possible to dispute that Israel does not cooperate with the rest of the world the way non-rogue states are generally expected to.

This article is poorly thought out and has little-to-no conception of the difference between theory and reality. For example, many things cannot be made in smaller pieces and then assembled, so size could become a huge barrier to adopting 3D printing for something like, say, construction. Not to mention the energy that such a machine would use. 3D printing will lead to lots of changes in design and democratization of production, I'm sure, but there's still a bigger picture that's completely absent from this article's consideration.

There are a lot of good tidbits in here, but I think perhaps this is the opposite side of the message than what most hackers need to hear right now. Hackers have gotten very good at challenging the mainstream of society and "disrupting" industries - sometimes without adequate regard for the consequences. There's a very delicate balance that needs to be struck between ridding ourselves of inconveniences and considering the legitimate reasons why those inconveniences still exist in many aspects of life. It's not as though humanity hasn't learned something from the last few thousand years of trying to understand the world.

Of course, I suppose that balancing act could be considered going against the grain of the subculture. It's all relative to your environment, I guess...

One more: "Whether your learning a foreign language..." should be you're.

Well, until the Credit Card Act of 2009. Now you have to be 21 to get a credit card unless you can demonstrate significant means to pay it off or have a cosigner. I managed to sneak through the last year before this went into effect, but considering all the issues my friends have just with their student loans, I'm sure it's saved people a lot of misery, even if the nanny-state aspect of it still rankles me a little...

While I agree that this ruling in favor of EA is correct, I find it telling that this is the only time I've heard recently of a court reversing the trend of granting outrageous intellectual property rights, and it's in favor of the massive company in the entertainment industry. But I'm probably just being paranoid; it's not like the US is a plutocracy in disguise...

That's the exact opposite position from what Kay said:

"...what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.... You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system..."

Essentially he's saying that the way we think of browsers is holding the web back. We could have collaborative WYSIWYG editing of Wikipedia or blogs, for example, but instead we're stuck with just reading documents.

Perhaps it would be correct to say that the web was designed for reading documents, but it shouldn't have been (at least according to Kay).

Indeed, and that might result in better relations with the other members of the group, in turn resulting in more productivity, leading to greater accomplishments and benefits later on. It's been thousands of years since short-term greed was the ideal way to do things, basically since humans organized into real civilizations, but it's hard to get people not to be greedy, so we just design our economy around it instead (i.e. capitalism).

Just because something takes focus, passion, and effort doesn't mean there's not luck involved. Basically every major success story comes out of the intersection of those qualities; either one, on its own, typically just gives moderate "success" (e.g. comfortable middle class life), which is really not worth discussing in this context since it's more just the norm in life (at least in the modern western world).

It's really even deeper than that, though. Even having the chance to apply yourself involves a lot of luck. Many people simply don't have the mental capacity to go to Princeton, through nothing they ever did except being born to parents with certain genetics. Many others are born with outstanding abilities that no one ever knows about because they had the misfortune to be born in sub-Saharan Africa.

By all means, be proud of the work you put in to your success. But acting like the rest of the world had nothing to do with it won't make you many friends.

Not interfering at bad times is part of the quality of interaction that you can tip on. Furthermore, how fast he brings the food out is far more dependent on the kitchen staff than him, so penalizing him for it doesn't make any sense.

Smoke signals? 100 years is approximately the amount of time between the telephone and the internet. The telegraph was around for about 50 years before that. Science has done well, but it's not like the twentieth century magically emerged straight from the stone age.

Nicholas Carr is a good introduction, but he just touches the surface of this sort of thinking. A lot of his thought is like a popular version of stuff by Neil Postman and Albert Borgmann, though I'm not actually sure how much he's been directly influenced by them. To be fair, most of their work was done before the internet became widespread, so Carr's exploration of the online aspect of the impact of technology is quite welcome, but I think it also may lead some people to think that it's a problem unique to the internet, which is unfortunate. The internet is just a specific case where the issues are more pronounced, but all of these sorts of criticisms are really getting at the sort of thing warned against by Brave New World. There are those of us who think that we're rushing headlong towards the scenario that Huxley depicted because we're so freaked out by 1984 and the like that we're blinded to other, more insidious threats. Incidentally, a lot of these sorts of criticisms all trace back to Heidegger's thought. If you've got a solid foundation in philosophy, "The Question Concerning Technology" is a fascinating read.

P.S. I apologize if anyone finds this post a little too esoteric or off-topic. I just have strong feelings about the way technology is used; I think that those who work to advance technology need to have a good understanding of the ethical considerations related to their work, and that most of the time this is lacking.

As a replacement for the university, I think this is actually moving in exactly the wrong direction. We've already tried more centralized education (e.g. standardized testing), and it doesn't work. The quality of education any given student receives is proportional to the level to which that education can be personalized to match their interests, abilities, learning styles, etc. Decreasing faculty-student ratios means decreasing personalization. It's just a losing proposition all around.

This sort of system seems more like a replacement for the textbook to me. Traditional textbooks serve the purpose of giving both the instructor and students in a class access to the knowledge of the experts on a subject. This is simply a more interactive way of getting that expert information. Then the personalized part of the education can kick in and not have to worry about helping students memorize basic facts.

Those are all valid ways of conceptualizing those sets, but I don't think it changes the point I was making. The real number 3 doesn't need to be "converted" to a complex number to be added to 2+i. 3 is always both a real number and a complex number, which may be represented as either 3 or 3+0*i, and either way gives 5+i when added to 2+i. All the latter notation really does is clarifies what domain you're currently working in, and even so, I've never seen anyone write it out explicitly.

Type conversion is more like if you had the written number 3 and a picture of the point 5 on a number line and someone told you to add them. Naturally, you would write 5 as a number first, because you don't have a useful way to add a number and a picture. But this doesn't change the results of adding the quantities 3 and 5; it's purely an artifact of the way the information was presented to you.

Actually, from a math perspective, it's kind of nonsensical to talk about type conversion at all. That is, 3, 3.0, and 3/1 are purely notational differences, and all three represent exactly the same object. Since math is theoretically infinite precision, the way you write a number has no impact on the way operations like division act on it, making whether it belongs to Z, or just Q or R a moot point. Now, if you restrict your problem domain to Z, then that affects the operations you're able to do to a number and remain in that domain. That's more like what happens with types in programming; we restrict our domain by default because leaving the integers changes the computer's representation of the number in a way that affects its behavior.

I'd be surprised if they do more than mention that epsilon-delta stuff exists. Most AP calc classes have very little epsilon-delta work. We spent maybe two or three days on it in mine, certainly not enough time to write a full proof, and that was more than most people I've talked to who did it at different high schools. If my experience is at all representative, that rigorous of a development of calculus isn't normal until upper-level classes, when you're heading towards analysis.

A few of the ideas seem interesting, but I would have hoped for a lot less vague marketing language full of buzzwords from this sort of company...

These lines of thinking that involve rejecting an entire set of propositions about something always end up devolving into something like Russell's paradox if you take them to their natural conclusion. In this case, being in a state of true nothingness would preclude the possibility of considering nothingness an ideal state to be in, as that is in itself an individuating characteristic. It's the same problem that arises with pure moral relativism, which is itself an absolute moral position.

I'd be willing to bet that human nature is as complicated as the system of natural numbers; perhaps we keep butting our heads into walls like this because we're trying to find answers that would violate Godel's incompleteness theorems...

It seems to me like basing patentability on time constraints actually imposes a distinction between hardware and software, regardless of how you feel about their logical interchangeability. For example, an algorithm for real time graphics processing would be just as impractical to run on ENIAC as it would be to do with pencil and paper, but there's no reason you couldn't port the software. So if the validity of the patent is based on its usefulness in a real-time application, it would have to be something like "running algorithm x using computer system y to achieve the desired result in z length of time." Including both the software and hardware used would be the only way to ensure that the time constraint was actually met. I think it's obvious that very few (if any) software patents could meet that criterion.

I'm not sure the post really says anything about when such "true understanding" is necessary. That's a whole different can of worms.

I think that hints at what I would consider a more useful criterion for true understanding: being able to apply something in new ways. Any programmer can learn to implement a linked list by being beaten over the head with it in a data structures class until it seems obvious. Someone who truly understands it will be able to pull out concepts like pointers from it and reuse them when confronted with another problem, like making a hash table that can handle collisions.

The big problem that keeps coming up with software patents is the fact that most of them are bogus, because of being trivial or unoriginal. Barring cases of malicious intent by patent examiners, which are a completely separate issue from the viability of the patent system itself, the reason for that is that the patent examiners don't understand what constitutes non-obvious work in software. In fact, I would guess that now there are very few fields in which it's feasible for someone who's not already familiar with the field to make that judgment in any reasonable amount of time. Since the criteria for patent validity are based on how the work would be viewed by average people in the field, maybe we should put patent-granting into the hands of people in each field, who are actually qualified to evaluate such work. Just have the central patent office keep records and oversee devolved organizations for each discipline, who actually control which patents are granted and what the terms of patents in that field are. That way, not only can bogus patents be avoided, but fields with radically different environments won't be hampered by patent terms designed for other areas (e.g. software patents could have a much shorter duration than others).

I actually would say it's relatively good as hacks go. It does a pretty good job of keeping the end goals in mind while dealing with some really tough obstacles. For one, it's browser agnostic, which makes the system much more manageable for all involved. In addition, it doesn't rely on people using the same copy of the same browser each time they sign in for any significant part of its functionality, and minimizes security risks if multiple people use the same browser. There's no way a browser-based solution could address any of those problems in the foreseeable future, if ever, and that not only would create huge headaches for developers, but would also alienate significant portions of users who still use public systems for at least some of their internet access.

Completely aside from that, I'm not sure I see why you think browser support would be so much better of a solution, aside from having a more uniform interface. Combating phishing is primarily an issue of being intelligent about what sites you give your information to. Any decent form-based authentication system will send the data in an encrypted form, which will be as secure as data encrypted by the browser's built-in authentication system. Just having the browser as a middleman doesn't help if your data gets sent to or intercepted by the wrong people, and Firefox, at least, already has a good system for warning users about malicious sites.

To me this article sounds more like evidence of an unhealthy sense of entitlement social media users are developing than a good argument against Google's policy. Not that there's anything wrong with the points the author makes about anonymity. I doubt anyone who's spent much time dealing with social media, including the Google+ team, would question the fact that anonymity provides a valuable service to society in many ways. However, that's completely irrelevant when it comes to the decision of what a particular social network (or any other kind of network, for that matter) should adopt as its identification policy. That's an issue that's about the type of community the team working on that particular product wants to have. Unless people were somehow forced to sign up for a specific service, the argument has no legs to stand on.

All it takes to see the problem with the author's logic is simple principles of supply and demand. If there is actually a significant demand for anonymity online that's not being met by the current services, another one will come along to fill that gap. In that case, the needs of those people are met, and they have no reason to be mad at Google. Otherwise, there wasn't significant demand in the first place, which justifies Google's decision not to accommodate it.

So, really what we see here is nothing more than someone whining because they are discovering that they have to use Google's service on Google's terms, rather than their own, which runs contrary to their sense of entitlement. In fact, they are the ones acting like there's a universal context; it's just that their universal context is one where they can be anonymous wherever they want without worrying about the consequences.

I really like that you included minimizing overspecialization. Academics is getting so hyper-compartmentalized that overspecialization is not only ignored in most disciplines, but it's even encouraged in many (computer science included). That's one of the reasons I'm starting to rethink my longstanding plans of going to grad school after finishing college next year. People who focus all of their waking lives on one thing will tend to get more attention for how quickly they progress in it than the rest of us, but that's not really good for that much beyond press coverage or your name in a record book. Truly revolutionary accomplishments require much more than an uncanny dedication to memorizing algorithms or chemical names, but those are precisely the sort of traits that will move you quickly through formal education (or get you that coveted expert status from the 10,000-hour rule). Though I certainly won't bash someone with three college degrees by 16, especially without knowing more about them personally, even Andrew Hsu shows evidence of that, with all of the degrees being in biochem-related fields. I strongly suspect that the next discovery that completely alters our paradigms of thought and/or creates a new field of study will come from someone with a broader background, who can synthesize expertise from many fields into insights that everyone else overlooks.

I find it interesting how he contrasts being disciplined with keeping up motivation and focus. I think the truth is actually the polar opposite of this; maintaining motivation and focus is most of what constitutes "discipline." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most "disciplined" people you know use at least a couple of these techniques.

Perhaps the key to this is that the techniques trick people into being disciplined without realizing it, because otherwise it feels like a chore.