mwhuang2

Right, the key difference is that children are below the age of consent. I was just comparing how both were given unfair negative stereotypes for having an orientation different from the norm.

Interesting perspective. I've always thought of pedophilia as being just another orientation, not necessarily tied to sexual abuse. That'd be like assuming a straight male has perverted tendencies towards all women. Homosexuality was perhaps also treated with these kinds of unfair assumptions before becoming accepted by mainstream society. People have a narrow range of perceived normalcy, anything beyond which is seen as deviant, but that range is evolving constantly.

How much is your rent? I know you don't want to accept money, but I may be able to send a donation.

I recommend the book "Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major" by Aaron Clarey for a brutally honest, if exaggerated, take on higher education and employment.

I'm from a Chinese family. Many of my friends and I were raised with this mindset. They went off to attend elite colleges, but I couldn't stomach the endless hoop jumping and toxic achievement culture, so I just did my own thing and went off to my local state school. While I've had some ups and downs, my life experiences were unique and I prefer not to form regrets about the past.

Good to hear that engineering is less dependent on institutional prestige. As someone who doesn't attend a name-brand university, I hope to be evaluated more for my skills than for the school I went to.

Sure, I'll share. After my rejections, I kind of fell apart during senior year of high school. I was extremely depressed and ended up almost failing all of my classes. In the end, I barely made it to graduation and was more relieved than happy about finishing.

Post-graduation, I went straight to college and tried to put the past behind me. I started off pretty strong, but it was clear that I still lacked maturity, and my grades took a nosedive during my second semester.

I ended up being disqualified from my scholarships, so I left school for a year to figure things out. I worked full-time and took courses at community college to keep myself busy. It took a lot of effort and introspection, but I finally transferred back to college and started working on my computer science degree.

Now I'm doing much better, having grown a lot as a person. I've also landed two internships since then and gotten involved with plenty of extracurriculars and social activities on the side. My path wasn't as smooth as it could've been, but I don't regret much about my experiences. Failing at a young age taught me to shrug off shortcomings and made me a stronger person for the future.

Growing up, it felt like I was raised with the sole purpose of attending an elite college. I took AP classes, did SAT prep, and signed up for all the right extracurriculars, but my heart was never in it, and I couldn't force myself through in the end.

I ended up getting rejected from all but my safeties when applying to colleges. It felt like I was dead inside; I'd go through my daily motions, but I basically lost my interest in living for a while.

Wonderful message. I agree 100% with Pichai's stance on diversity.

It's like a newspaper for techies. The community is also polite and intellectual, and I feel more comfortable here than on other sites.

It just seems like trouble. I like to keep a low profile and minimize the drama in my life.

I translated a piano score from Haydn using Alda a while back:

https://github.com/mwhuang2/Haydn

Nice to see new features being added. I might do some more pieces in the future.

Brian Chesky (Airbnb) attended Rhode Island School of Design.

Both my parents were programmers. It was useful because they could help each other with learning and career advancement.

Personally, I'd prefer a non-programmer girlfriend. I like variety and I think it's really important to be exposed to different kinds of people.

I was a student at an SAT prep center during high school and worked there for a year during college. The strategy we recommended for essays was to build a chart with one book, one quote, one historical event, etc. The best choices were broadly applicable across different essay topics.

Students would then write multiple practice essays referencing the same sources over and over. In 25 minutes, there's no time to come up with something original. It's better to have a go-to set of sources that you can mold to fit the essay topic at hand.

I feel it's too idealistic to think that every passion can be profitable. College students can't all major in Netflix and video games. I've had a number of skilled hobbies over the years, but software engineering is the first one that's actually a viable career choice.

A good alternative might be to look at where the demand is and where your interests lie, and try to find the best intersection of the two.

Is it really that bad? Social media is just noise to me. Checking online may seem tempting, but almost nothing I see adds any real value to my life.

They sell a culture/lifestyle rather than just a product.

Extra schooling only delays reality and leads to more debt. What really matters is simple supply and demand - whether people have the skills that others are willing to pay for.

I developed a fixed mindset from a young age because I was constantly told that I was smart, which caused me to expect school to always be easy. When I got to college-level work, I failed hard and had to struggle to reinvent my thinking.

I always disliked those comments. That's just cowardice.

I assumed people would infer my gender from the wording of my post.

I'm a hardcore fan of My Little Pony. Gender stereotypes mean nothing to me.

I applied mostly to Ivies and similarly competitive colleges. They get plenty of applicants with near-perfect test scores and GPAs, so my poor grades made me a subpar candidate.

My peers in high school were overachievers who seemed to have everything figured out. I had no idea what I was doing and often had close to failing grades, despite scoring high on standardized tests (2390 SAT + 800 SAT II Math).

I got rejected from almost every college I applied to and ended up dropping out after a year when I actually did go. I worked two jobs and took community college classes for a year before returning to university.

I'm definitely more focused and mature now. I think people shouldn't feel the need to conform to the "normal" path of going off to college right away. There's really no single correct way to go through life. I needed time to figure things out for myself instead of adhering to a system I wasn't comfortable in.

Thanks, just wanted to know if this was worthwhile as opposed to a full-on software engineering internship.

I'd be careful about having that mindset. Studies have shown that people conform to their stereotype e.g. Asian females taking a math test performed better when reminded they were Asian and worse when reminded they were female, because the stereotype is that Asians are better at math and females are worse at it (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/1/80.abstract).

I personally feel that few traits are truly immutable, and that a lot of it is really just in your head. People who conform to a belief end up becoming what they think, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“There’s something in the upbringing that makes Asians shy,"

At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's meant as satire.

I hadn't actually looked at Lilypond until just now. Seems like it has a lot of extra features (clefs, time signatures, lyrics, etc.) that Alda doesn't have yet. Maybe I'll look more into it in the future.