jeeringmole

I don't know this space well, but if I understood the SVForum EMTech talk I attended last week, that's what Ripple is doing.

https://ripple.com/

"Some Risk Model components sent information to the Optimizer in decimals while other components reported information in percentages; therefore the Optimizer had to convert the decimal information to percentages in order to effectively consider all the information on an equal footing. Because proper scaling did not occur, certain decimal information was not converted to percentages and the Optimizer did not give the intended weight to common factor risks."

And the impact: -- AXA Rosenberg had to make clients whole for $217 million in losses, plus pay a $25 million penalty. -- Barr Rosenberg had to pay a $2.5 million penalty and is barred from the securities industry for life. -- AXA Rosenberg's assets under management fell from $70 billion to $29 billion (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/business/ex-axa-rosenberg-...)

Exactly. For more details, go to the source: Carol Dweck. A good starting point is her popular book Mindset. (www.mindsetonline.com) There's also now online growth mindset instruction for middle school students (and older) -- see www.brainology.us.

The idea that writing an idea down reduces stress is one of the cornerstones of Dave Allen's Getting Things Done. He calls the unwritten items that nag at you "open loops". One important follow-on idea that that the ideas must be written down in a "trusted system": if you aren't absolutely confident that you will be able to find it when you go looking (or, better, that it will be brought to your attention when needed whether or not you remember to look at that moment), you won't stop worrying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

hmmm... I just posted the link from the newsletter I received today (http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/62500-java-developer-news...) ... should have been paying attention better in November, I guess

Don't miss this gem:

UCF student Konstantin Ravvin told ABC News he thought UCF’s so-called cheating scandal had been blown out of proportion.

“This is college, everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general,” Ravvin told ABC News. “I just think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some sort of moral lesson.”

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/bshneiderman/nsd/rejectio...

Hmmm....

Edsger Dijkstra described himself as a "humble programmer" in his Turing lecture (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW...). Don Knuth categorizes his contributions in three groups: "As a researcher... As a university professor... And as a programmer..." (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/bio.dvi). Joseph Weizenbaum's New York Times obituary headline called him a "Famed Programmer" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/world/europe/13weizenbaum....). Tony Hoare's description of his work on implementing Algol includes this: "I eventually married Jill, the other programmer who came to work on the same project" (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/3/21782-an-interview-with... -- ACM access required).

Maybe one day if I work very hard and am very lucky people will think I am a programmer, too.

An excellent recent book is Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ The approach is what you might guess from the title, so it addresses both the fun of Lisp and the building of practical applications (including web apps).

Execution is most of what goes in to bringing a product to market successfully. It takes a lot more than a good idea to succeed; secretive dreamers abound, but the vast majority of them never ship.

This is old news:

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. [Howard H. Aiken, as quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater] [from wikiquote]

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. [Thomas Edison, spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper's Monthly (September 1932)] [from wikiquote]

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless. [Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html]

NDAs may have uses in established companies with very specific trade secrets that established competitors would be able to use right away (see, e.g., http://www.mbay.net/~heuer/Spystory/Industry.htm -- though that points out that some people are willing to risk criminal indictments, not just civil suits...). They're not worth the trouble for your cool idea to, say, monitor eBay auctions via Twitter and bid by tweet. Uh-oh, I guess we're not in stealth mode any more, Toto. ;-)

That's some righteous hacking... backing out the vendor from the packet checksum & header... :-)

Yes, but you have to be honest about the amount of information contained in the conspiracy. In the limit, the server could send the entire file as part of the preprocessing step. The compressed version would then be "yeah, that one".

That example is silly and extreme to illustrate the point. In your parenthetical example, the costs to be accounted for include not only the index information but also the catalog of shared files.

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve." Alan Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" (#101) http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html

In the meantime, strike small blows here and there against bad patents by helping examine them:

"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."

http://www.peertopatent.org/

I went straight to graduate school, heeding advice that it would be difficult to give up the comfort of a real salary for a grad student stipend if I went and worked first. I observed in grad school that the students who had done that knew why they were there and what they wanted far better than I did.

Fundamentally, you will only know in retrospect whether or not you made the right decision. On the other hand, the stakes are not as large as they seem: 5 years is 125% of your time as an undergraduate, but only 12.5% of your career. (In other words, you have time to switch courses later, though it may appear now that you don't.)

Finally, the advice I always repeat to people facing difficult decisions. (Anyone who knows where this came from is welcome to tell me. I would attribute it if I knew the source.) .... When you have a difficult and important decision to make, flip a coin. Not because flipping a coin is a good way to make important decisions, but because in the moments while it is spinning in the air you will know which way you want it to land.

Trust yourself, good luck, and congratulations on earning such a plethora of attractive options.

"The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it's next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night)."

From, you guessed it, Paul Graham... (Specifically, footnote #1 of chapter 6 of Hackers and Painters, aka "How to Make Wealth" http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f1n)

"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."

http://www.peertopatent.org/

Read Robert D. Austin's book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations (http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html) for an absolutely devastating analysis of this problem.

Teachers have been complaining that students today aren't what they used to be at least since Plato -- probably even longer...

Douglas Adams wrote "A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting." (in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

I was in school when I first read that line. I showed it to a fairly well-known scientist who immediately put a copy on his office door. The smartest people I have met are also the quickest to admit they don't know.

BS = B_llSh_t

MS = More of the Same

PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper

Ah, yes.... The collectivists controlled the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives and used their power to regulate the credit derivatives market out of existence. How much better things would have been if the Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!

Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.

Resonates with advice from David Patterson and Richard Hamming: http://www.cra.org/Activities/workshops/academic.careers/200... (see pages 22, 33, and 34).

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve." Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming (#101) http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -- Juvenal (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes)

This is a lovely idea, but suffers from a severe bootstrapping problem. How should the firm choose the technical person to hire? Or which consultants to use to recommend a technical person?

I have seen plenty of situations where the technical person onboard is second-rate -- or worse. I have also seen plenty of over-priced second-rate consultants.

IMHO part of the solution will be the eventual emergence of meaningful certifications of technical competence. Although problematic in a number of ways, the IEEE CSDP is probably a good first effort. Other professions are licensed, and have continuing education requirements.

I've always been fond of Salt Spring Dollars (http://www.saltspringdollars.com/).

The words "web" and "start-up" could both be dropped: many companies at many stages in many spaces have fallen under this spell.

In addition to whatever textbook you decide on you should read Bill Kent's "Data and Reality" to widen your awareness of the profound difficulties involved in stuffing messy reality into a collection of bits. See http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=... and http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm.