rtperson

If your algorithmic skills are good enough to ace the problems in that book, you can probably get a job at one of the big three software companies (Google, MS, Amazon). The vast majority of programming jobs are enterprise development work (think endless CRUD apps) that require nowhere near that level of skill.

He's not proscribing a solution.

The word you want is "prescribe." To "proscribe" means to make forbidden or illegal. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

I liked this article, but, to use journalist lingo, he "buries the lede" a little.

"It’s also tough because since breaking the news to our current set of 3 customers, I’ve received very positive feedback..."

A grand total of three customers. This isn't like Google Wave going away. Or, then again, maybe it is. After all, he had three more customers than they did.

I'm not sure if English is your first language, but the writing in this article is actually very good. I don't have any problem believing that people are willing to pay Somers for his writing. (And $10K is, by magazine standards, a princely sum.)

> I especially find Maven unreliable in combination with eclipse.

Well there's your problem right there. Use Maven with Netbeans, and the integration between the two is so slick you'll wonder why you didn't use it to begin with. My biggest complaint in Netbeans now is that it doesn't have equally slick support for SBT and Gradle, but that's just because I've been spoiled.

I thought the usual exit plan for models was to use their beauty and talent to attract a wealthy husband. That said, I did know one who used her modelling money to put herself through med school, but that woman was a bit of an outlier in the brains department.

I have the flip side of this story. I was good friends with two musicians in the early nineties. I went to their rehearsals, hung out with their friends, and saw most of their gigs when they played out in clubs. Videos, demo tapes, meetings with managers. They spent the better part of a decade trying to make it, and while they became absolutely phenomenal musicians, they never became famous -- for the simple reason that the music industry is full of amazing musicians, only a few of whom will ever become stars.

And this isn't just the case in music. I've been privileged to know several very big writers -- people who can sustain large houses and art collections on the strength of what they've written. But for every one "star" I know literally dozens of hard-working writers for whom the career has simply not clicked. The heartbreaking thing, in both writing and music, are watching the ones who almost make it, who pour all of themselves into a project and who, for whatever reason, just don't break through for their audience.

There's a thing called "sunk cost fallacy," where you've put so much of yourself into your chosen vocation that you literally can't imagine quitting. But the sad reality for most of us -- and why inspiring stories like Ang Lee's can be more damaging than helpful -- is that knowing when to quit can put you ahead of the game.

> in fact, [Good Will Hunting] seems intensely concerned with the insufficiency of Will’s education; his lack of formal education is implicated in his inability to engage in supposedly normal social and professional behavior.

Um, actually no. The character's "inability to engage" is very clearly rooted in his having grown up in an atmosphere of severe emotional and physical abuse. I'm wondering what movie this guy watched that he missed that.

I completely agree. I was just pointing out that sexism of this nature had gone on for years without apparent protest. I was not defending the practice.

> it is not a accepted selling point of professionals. Rather, it will get you in serious trouble in many professional environments.

Not to defend Sqoot at all, but... um... booth babes? Every large trade show has them. They are there specifically to excite the hormones of the male professionals in attendance. Their use is as sexist as it is effective.

Had Sqoot quietly hired a bunch of models to serve beer to the attendants, and had they had the sense not to publicly high-five themselves for doing so, there would have been no controversy. The reason Sqoot landed in the soup is because they wore their sexism on their sleeves, and handled their communications like obnoxious rubes rather than responsible business owners. Their crime was lack of finesse.

I worked at Goldman briefly in the 90s, and I remember being pleasantly surprised at how little cynicism, and how much genuine enthusiasm for helping others I found there. It was a bank, sure, in the business of making money, but there was always this sense -- emanating from the top -- that money was not its sole purpose. I can see where this writer was coming from, and I agree with him that if this bank has lost its unique culture, then it has lost touch with what made it successful in the first place.

> But are you really saying that these claims cover a standard linked list?

That's exactly what I'm saying. For all the patent's talk of primary, tertiary, and secondary pointers, the "invention" here is a standard linked list with sentinels. If I hired a patent attorney to write patents against the programs I wrote for my freshman-year data structures course, the results would be much the same.

Very clearly my ass. From the patent:

> The present invention overcomes the disadvantages and limitations of the prior art by providing a system and method for traversing a list using auxiliary pointers that indicate the next item in a sequence.

The "invention" here is called a sentinel, and have been used in conjunction with linked lists since time immemorial. For "prior art" I would refer you to CLRS.

Go ahead and downvote me. Please.

I apologize for doing so. I think my idea of holding your own patent was not for the ability to counter-sue, but (and I am quite obviously not a lawyer) so you have a legal basis to petition for dismissal of the patent troll's suit. If there were any effective way to savage non-practicing entities, I'm sure we'd have fewer trolls out there.

It would be a weak form of defensive patent aggregation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll#Defenses), but it would still be better than nothing.

My larger point is that, by vocally opting out of the patent game, the author of the original article has practically painted a bullseye on himself. Averring yourself to be above the fray seems to me to be a sure-fire way to be victimized yourself.

Again, the error you're making is mistaking patent law with the insane way patent law is actually enforced. Listen to "When Patents Attack," and you'll understand that non-practicing entities have been very successful lately in filling their pockets at the expense of the genuinely productive.

Patents are also not supposed to overlap each other. However -- and again this was made startlingly clear by NPR -- they do, and by the tens of thousands.

You're making the mistake of believing yourself to be in a world where reasonableness prevails.

> In the end, I doubt owning a patent on something will have any impact on our ultimate success or failure.

How I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of patent trolls out there that would love to use their patents to extract value from your company. When the trolls come knocking (and they will), having a patent of your own may literally be the only defense.

Everyone who wants to understand just how incredibly corrupt the US patent system is needs to do themselves a favor and listen to the "When Patents Attack" episode of NPR's This American Life. Then you'll understand why neatly-reasoned arguments are, in this instance, entirely besides the point.

> we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance

No he did not. He was a corporate vice president of two large insurance companies. The man was no Ned Ryerson.

The writer of this article needs to call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one.

Valuation doesn't work the way this guy thinks it does. If I buy a hammer and use it to build a house that I then sell for 300K dollars, it does not stand to reason ipso facto that my hammer now costs 300K dollars. Yet this is exactly the level of reasoning that goes into his valuation for a university education.

The hammer costs what supply and demand say it should cost. And with universities, you have a case of increasingly plentiful supply for most materials chasing relatively stable demand. So market reality dictates that prices will fall, if not now then eventually.

> We could not test the application because we were told about it on tuesday and it had to be ready on sunday.

Well there's your problem right there. That is not an appropriate timeframe for a new app. The only professional response to such a request is: "It cannot be done. Not if you want this app to work in production. Here's why." Follow up with an explanation of why QA and load testing are crucial. If they press you, make your next follow-up a letter of resignation.

I have had personal involvement in one outsourcing horror story, the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. Suffice it to say that, while what happened at Sapphire is extreme, it's hardly unique.

But let's correctly name the problem here: simple management incompetence. The managers at Sapphire, no doubt feeling bewildered by all this computer-techy stuff, decided to send all their source code and the entire management of their servers to a faraway place. A place where tech problems magically go away on their own. A place where code writes itself, where productivity is doubled for half the cost.

No company, be it in the US, Canada, Europe, China, India, or Madagascar, can afford to think this way any more. Managers can no longer pay someone else to understand technology for them. We are all technical managers now.

This is such a shallow mush of generalities, that it's pretty much worthless as a critique of higher education.

"these benefits cannot completely justify a system where creativity and genuine learning isn't properly rewarded."

Anyone who has ever taught at the college level will quickly realize how wrong that sentence is. Any undergraduate who shows the slightest amount of spark, imagination, initiative, and hard work gets rewarded (as they should) with good grades. The ones who get punished are those who game the system by trying to get the highest mark for the least amount of work. These latter are usually the ones who complain that creativity (i.e., their own rank laziness) is not being "rewarded properly" (because, ummmm..., the school isn't making the next Steve Jobs... or DaVinci, or someone like that...).

You want your creativity crushed and your initiative smothered? Try working in a job. School is an absolute blast compared with what the rest of your life will feel like.

Awesome idea -- I can think of three or four people who would really benefit from this kind of book. One thing: you recommend SciTE for a Windows editor, but the real preference these days is for Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/). I've used both, and while they're largely similar, Notepad++ simply works better on Windows.

On a similar note, it would be great to be able to leave comments like this close to the source. Maybe you could include a system for on-line comments on the site, kind of like what Real World Haskell did (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/getting-started.html).

Great work. I especially like how well you made the case for non-programmers to pick up programming. The introduction is pure gold.

There's a term for these tendencies: the Power Distance Index. (http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/real-reason-outso...) The idea behind PDI is that leaders in some cultures expect, and even to an extent welcome, subordinates who question them. And there are other cultures where leaders expect obedience above all, regardless of any objective measure of correctness.

India is a high-PDI country. If you're taking orders from an Indian manager, for the most part they will expect you to keep your head down, shut up, tow the line, and do what you're told. This also partially explains Westerners' complaints about Indian subordinates: that they don't speak up, don't take responsibility, don't innovate. They have been very thoroughly taught not to. On the other hand, this also explains the at times amazing attention to detail -- if details are all you are allowed to control, you will control the living crap out of them.

I think you're missing an important distinction here: Stallman has not, in fact, died. The writer of the article is talking about a living person. That fundamentally changes what you're allowed, in polite society, to say about him.

Haskell, I assume. Two things really make Haskell shine when it comes to problems like this: 1) higher-order list operations -- you're not iterating through indices, so there is no possibility for off-by-one errors, and 2) immutability -- your code takes a new list with the undesirable elements removed; you can't remove elements of a structure at the same time you're iterating through it.

I always love the problems on SPOJ where they give you the number of cases up front, because in Haskell you can almost always throw out that value. Your map function knows when the list is out of elements.

> waterboarding, hypothermia, near-drowning, psychological torutre, etc

Do yourself a favor and read Judith Herman's book "Trauma and Recovery." You'll quickly understand why your counter-intuitive observation is simply wrong. These things work in special forces training in a way they never could and never will in prisons and hospitals.

The other example is the Enclosure movement in Britain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure_movement), where nobles simply stepped in a seized land that had been for common use, in some cases throwing people out of their homes to do so.

I'd prefer this as well. The richest competitive ecosystem is always preferable. What I was addressing was the assertion that all players "needed" to be balanced. Necessity is not equivalent to preference. I'd prefer that all players be roughly equivalent, but in order to avoid a monopoly I'll settle for two major dominant competitors.

> every player needs to be balanced

Correction: at least two players need to be balanced. iPhone, to my mind, provides just such a balance. Trying to boost every single also-ran product into a position of strategic equity is a waste of time. Right now, RIM is the poster child for the Innovator's Dilemma, and there's little anyone including RIM can do about it.

"I know what to do: let's combat our competitor's overwhelming tactical advantage with faux moral outrage! It's a win-win-win for us!" -- rtperson, just now, sarcastically.