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A comment on Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++.

Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by devnonymous on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @04:17AM (#9419108)
The relevant excerpt from the speech:

    40 years ago, after doing a math degree, I went on to study computer
    science, on my father’s advice.  He said there is a future in that, and he
    was right.  So for the Smart Nation Programme Office, I have put Minister
    Vivian Balakrishnan in charge, reporting to me.  Vivian is both a hacker
    and a dabbler – He used to be an eye surgeon but since he does not get to
    operate on eyes nowadays, he dabbles in building simple robots, assembling
    watches, wireless devices and programming apps.  His day job is to be the
    Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, and so when he builds
    apps, he uses the real time APIs generated by the Ministry.  That’s called
    user-testing.  I used to enjoy this; it is a long time since I’ve done
    anything.  The last programme I wrote was a Sudoku solver in C++ several
    years ago, so I’m out of date.  My children are in IT, two of them – both
    graduated from MIT.  One of them browsed a book and said, “Here, read
    this”.  It said “Haskell – learn you a Haskell for great good”, and one day
    that will be my retirement reading.
What's amazing is not just the bit about having written C++ code but the fact that he used the term hacker propely and knows what Haskell is. Interesting.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by creamyhorror on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @05:45AM (#9419326)
As a Singaporean, I'm pretty proud of the direction of my government, and I'm pretty surprised by the Haskell/LYAHFGG & C++ namedrops. How did Minister Balakrishnan even find the time to dabble with hardware and programming? These top civil servants are very, very busy!

Great quote about Singapore citizens trusting the government to do their taxes:

"...we introduced electronic tax-filing back in 1998, since ages ago, before anyone else did it, and today, 97% of tax payers file their taxes online. Because we have kept our tax code simple, you do not need to buy Quicken, Intuit or any of such things. Also, because we have automate the collection of information and populate the table for you, you do not need to work quite so hard – it is a little harder to cheat and so 3 in 5 taxpayers do not even bother about filing taxes. They just take in on trust that our Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore has done their sums right. So e-Government works in Singapore."

That said, the 3 verticals of the whole Smart Nation programme (the elderly, transport & data) seem somewhat orthogonal to much of the SV-style explosive-growth consumer apps. Yet those consumer-app areas are where many SV-style fortunes are made and where young tech entrepreneurs want to go - so there's a disconnect between the two directions.

For example, I don't see massive adoption of a new app/device by the elderly happening very easily - they largely (1) don't know English, (2) aren't used to relying on tech so heavily, and (3) won't be able or willing to pay much for it. It tends to be younger people who try new things - and in fact Singaporeans are relatively less adventurous than Americans or other Asian cultures in adopting new apps/services. Things might be different if Singapore were as big as the US, but it isn't. So I wonder how the Smart Nation thing will play out - maybe the biggest customer will be the Singapore government instead of end-users.

(Tangentially, it's personally been a bit frustrating that the VCs that draw on government money seem to prefer e-commerce/B2C apps instead of industry-specific B2B software. The government puts its money where its mouth is, but still relies on VCs to make the picks...and those guys go for hot, mainline trends. So fundraising has been difficult.)

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by jwiley on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @12:11PM (#9421431)
Wonder if you have FoxNews or a similar variant in Singapore? Do they characterize the Prime Minister as a professorial egg-head elitist out of touch with the common man?

If not you have something to look forward to, in the early days of our republic, we generally appreciated educated statesmen. Now we prefer our elected officials to be fun-loving guys next door who see the internet as a system of tubes.

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by l10nf15h on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @01:59PM (#9422230)
Singapore is a one party state with a terrible human rights record. If anyone criticized the government, they would be thrown in prison and/or fined.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by visakanv on Monday May 04, 2015 @12:22PM (#9487118)
Singaporean here, have criticized the govt multiple times, protested govt policy, am doing perfectly fine, thanks!
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by Locnil on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @08:49PM (#9424431)
Not really, not in the same way - most of our anti-government "media" is on the fringe. And even if we did, Fox News would glorify our PM, not criticise him - by American standards, he's a hardline Tea Party Republican, except without the same regard for civil liberties.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by hdhdhshw on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @05:26PM (#9423686)
What is with your political rant? Singapore's prime minister is a free market conservative.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by jwiley on Thursday April 23, 2015 @11:32AM (#9427395)
My rant was about a cultural trend in the US of demonizing politicians for being educated and/or intellectual. FoxNews has worked hard to become a mouth-piece for this viewpoint.

I wasn't commenting on his political views, party, or human rights background, which I know nothing about.

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by visakanv on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:08AM (#9419394)
> How did Minister Balakrishnan even find the time to dabble with hardware and programming? These top civil servants are very, very busy!

He blogs quite a bit about it here: http://vivian.balakrishnan.sg/

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by 2Pacalypse- on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:34AM (#9419462)
How did he even find the time to blog quite a bit about it? That's amazing!
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by saiya-jin on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:43AM (#9419693)
(work) life is about priorities, and if he really wants to give back in this way, he can apparently delegate enough stuff to achieve it. Probably all politicians can, if they wanted...

I wish more (all!) countries would have similar people put into places of real popwer in governments.

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by nitrogen on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @01:06PM (#9421852)
Is the blog itself also delegated? I've seen CEOs send out "personal" notes that were drafted entirely by a PR team.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by Cephlin on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:09AM (#9419569)
It's called not being over worked like a slave.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by visakanv on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:09AM (#9419396)
His son Li Hongyi was a product manager at Google:

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/hongyi-li/30/832/161

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by creamyhorror on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:13AM (#9419412)
Well, since you've opened the box...[edit: oops, I posted the younger son's profile instead of the elder's] his younger brother is quite prolific on Github (and seems to favour Scala):

https://github.com/lihaoyi

[Thanks for the correction raingrove]

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by raingrove on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:26AM (#9419439)
Wrong person. This is the correct profile: https://github.com/fynyky

Nevertheless, his project "reactor.js" is impressive.

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by boothead on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:52AM (#9419515)
I think Dad might be taking a bit of flack until he picks up a Haskell book with these two in the family :-)
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by dheera on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @01:16PM (#9421913)
It's funny you're all surprised. I know him as a fellow classmate at MIT, not as a political figure.

That said I'm glad he's free to pursue his passions as a free-thinking individual and not pressured to do what his ancestors do.

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by shadowsun7 on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:13AM (#9419580)
14th author: http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by reactor on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @08:49AM (#9419964)
http://vivian.balakrishnan.sg/2015/03/13/Open-Source/ Interesting..
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by tacostakohashi on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @01:27PM (#9422000)
Difficult to take seriously with so many gratuitous hashtags that aren't actually links to anything.
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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by ValentineC on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @03:46PM (#9423057)
It seems that whoever was in charge of updating his blog (which is hosted on GitHub Pages [1]) forgot to remove the hashtags from his Facebook Page post [2].

[1] https://github.com/VivianBalakrishnan/VivianBalakrishnan.git...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152609593346207....

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Re:Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++ by peterkelly on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @04:31AM (#9419148)
Starts at 8:40
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