kmak

Seems like kickstarters are mostly okay with the risks.. it is inherent in the site, after all, but man, it doesn't seem necessary to be mean about things..

Some variation of this happens in HK, where everybody wants to learn English (because they can't learn as well from their peers, unlike other subject) and English lecture/tutoring places pops up all over the place, and the top teachers teaches, via video conferencing, hundreds of pupils at once. I'm told the top teachers gets paid in the millions.

If you have no moves, you lose. (You only have a king left and can't move anywhere with it) I actually learned this first, so imagine my confusion when I played western Chess and someone told me now it's a tie!

I run "algorithmist.com" and was getting quite a bit of spam with using only recaptcha. I was looking for something mathy.. I ended up giving mathcaptcha a go first and it seems to work well to stop the spam, but I was ready to create my q/a with algorithm questions, with the benefit that if you can't answer basic algo questions, you shouldn't edit the wiki anyways!

Survivor bias in full power here.

Thank the contributors, I only maintain the site! ;) Of course you can thank the site by paying it forward!

That said, UVa's problems are better defined nowadays. Tough problems are actually tough, instead of trying to trick people!

http://train.usaco.org/usacogate

It walks you through the algorithms, though you need one of the languages.

There's some terse list at

http://www.algorithmist.com/

that might help. (Disclosure: I started Algorithmist)

I think it's important for students to have critical self-feedback alone. The problem with tests (generally) is that it's feedback for the student (which is good) but also feedback for the teacher, with grades with implications. So basically you have to get everything the first time, and to pace and time that is tricky.

I do like your approach, as it does not penalize you for trying hard, even if you reach deadends, or made some assumptions that can be sniffed out easily by a test. My physics professor did a variation of this sort, where the final consists of all the topics, and your previous test grades gets overwritten by the final if the final grade is higher.

I have a few friends who are in business school and the sole reason they went back (undergrad business in Stern) was to network a little bit and make connections. In terms of class and learning, they knew going in that there was not much to offer.

The Switcher story:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

I suppose it depends on the way you're framing it. If it gets to 7% as desired, it is 40% more!

The best camera is on you have in your hand at the time. I don't see a problem with letting people use whatever they have -- the technology will presumably get better if it is what is demanded by the market.

A little, I started projects when I was 16 (some silly web game) that might not be too PC, and the code is awful, and I've rewritten the code twice!

Running back comment is somewhat amusing, if only because a recent article on ESPN said that Chris Johnson's total yardage is down because he's always aiming for the HR, thus lowering his average yardage, trying to find and create space that aren't available.

I guess sometimes you got to take what they give you, but for YC they aim only for the HR, so it's not that relevant.

Basketball is probably the best export. Baseball is semi-popular, but it has to deal with cricket, which is similar enough but not quite. I'm a huge fan of baseball and its history (Babe Ruth is nickname for an American back then!) but they took it out of the Olympics though maybe World Baseball Classic can make it worthwhile.

I don't debate library usage (reuse!), but I teach mostly theory, with code snippets to present algorithms concisely.

There are many tools to solve a problem, and I want to educate on a different layer. For instance, in sorting alone there are many sorting algorithms, I don't expect someone to interrupt me with "just use quicksort!" when I'm teaching bubblesort. There are lessons to learn in both, but it's a bit presumptuous (or at least, there are less smug ways) to assume ignorance, and not intention.

I feel for you -- whenever I try to write about basic algorithms (sorting, etc) I always get comments that you can do it in library. Yes, obviously, but I'm teaching an algorithm, not how to use a library!

I also had wrote some stuff that I ping alive once in awhile, except that if I don't, it'll tweet and send random emails to friends, complaining about the temperature.

My idea was way less practical in that it is really more of a prank..

I think Feynman's quote is meant that you should not learn only the name of things and pretend to understand what they are.

There's also another anecdote written by Feynman where he describes creating his own notation for trig, or maybe calc. At some point he had to abandon it because no one else understood him. The anecdote is not as quotable, but it correlates with what you said -- it gives you the ability to talk about it with other people, so Feynman is not ignorant of this.

One of my advisors liked to bring up this quote:

The first time a teacher teaches something, the teacher learns. The second time a teacher teaches something, the students learn. After that nobody learns!

I think the term "luck" is too overloaded. Tons of people do actually use the term "luck" as a clutch, as in it's bad luck that a pot of gold did not fall onto their lap. In that sense, I agree with the article. However, it probably swings too far in the other direction.

For me, it's understanding the probabilities, persist, and "luck" is everything that is out of your control. Even something as "simple" or at least fundamentally human as finding someone you happen to love is subjected to these outside forces that I call "luck", but who's to judge?

Dismissing this concept of "luck" makes it too hard for empathy -- it's almost saying that people are poor because they don't work hard.

I'm a relatively lucky guy myself, and I'm constantly surrounded by people who are smarter and harder working, but sometimes things just don't swing their way, just a little bit. Maybe I'm selling myself short, and while I put in my share of hard work, I can't honestly say I attribute everything to luck. I took advantage of my luck, but it's too easy to attribute everything to skill.

It might be easier to motivate yourself to work hard with the assumption that luck doesn't exist, and to persist, and to give all you got, but I feel you don't need to discard the concept to do it.

There are no sunk cost in life. Even if you got really good at something, if you really want to do something else, you can drop them and start today!

This was mentioned in "Predictably Irrational", essentially, this is exactly what you don't want to do, changing a decision from social to being economical. Unfortunately, you can't change it back easily.

I believe the example given was that of a daycare center. It used to be looked down upon when you pick up your kids late, and parents try to avoid it as much as possible. The center then added a penalty of some small monetary amount. This allows the parents to rationalize this as an economic decision, and many more chose to pay the fine. Even after they took the fine out again, they were unable to get the lateness rate down.

I think it's just an easy way to justify hiring -- if the hire turns out to be awful, you can say, "hey, he/she had 10 years of experience!"

I'm paraphrasing someone, but I can't find the quote right now. Basically:

If a fruit grows in a blight, you don't give credit to the blight.

You need them in one of the earlier puzzles.

I'm working on the language math. Seems to take quite a bit of time just looking things up!

I've been bit by this before -- in my case it was math.h and hypot. It was quite frustrating to debug something that I assumed would be correct, so did not look at.

I've read a variation on this where you commit money to a charity you hate, to motivate yourself toward your goal, or literally your enemies win.

It is also probably true that, in a risk sense, there are many more attractive options, considering that cost of living in NYC is not cheap at all.

Also, there are plenty of other startups in the finance sector, though perhaps not in the HN sense, that pays relatively well off the bat, with high upside.

People did the math, that's all.