Total_Meltdown

> They were, of course, uniformly non-white, non-Asian girls.

> The poor students weren't poor students because they were female, or because they were non-white, but because they were unintelligent and/or uneducated.

And why is that? If you reject the absurd notion that there's some causative relationship between technical ability/intellect and gender/race, what's the explanation, other than the possibility that those people didn't have the same exposure to the subjects that you did? And that's not even including the confidence factor: Of course a white dude can do this stuff, they do it all the time. Your story seems to suggest we should actually be doing this long before university. I would agree with that.

This part will probably be unpopular, but I'll say it anyway: What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed? If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway? Or me, for that matter - I was part of a similar program in high school[1]. What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship?

[1] http://www.usfirst.org/

The big problem though is that the pathological edge cases of our current system are much better than the extremely pathological normal cases of a system without checks on what people are allowed to do.

I mean, anarcho-capitalism is basically what sovereign nations are at a smaller scale: Factions of humans who make decisions without any real checks on their behavior beyond the environment and the reactions of other factions. And I'm supposed to want a microcosm of global politics in my back yard? No thanks, taxes are fine, please fix the roads so I can get to Chipotle.

The only reason I could see for anyone wanting anything approaching individual sovereignty is if a) they somehow believe that there is no bigger fish in the pond, or b) they're really so naive to have no idea what other people could be capable of doing to them.

Do you accept pull requests?

From Chapter 3, Exhibit 6:

    {
        "title": "Hey Jude" // <-- Missing comma
        "group": "Beatles",
        ...
    }

There isn't a line. We're talking about the human brain, these things are fuzzy. Some things will work better than others, and it'll surely vary between people, and you'll have no idea which are which until you try it. But it seems like the theme is association: Find the common information between the things you're studying.

I totally agree. In these two specific cases, R53 + ELB wasn't going to work for us though, because of reasons. (I don't think I can go into specifics, but they're actual reasons.) Our workaround was reloading the configs (which triggers a DNS cache flush on both Nginx[1] and HAproxy[2]) once every couple of minutes.

I know, I know, I hate it too. We're working on it. Just wanted to share the workaround.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/CommandLine#Loading_a_New_Configuratio...

[2] http://www.mgoff.in/2010/04/18/haproxy-reloading-your-config...

I have run into this at least twice this week alone with both Nginx and HAProxy pointing at Amazon Elastic Load Balancers. Amazon occasionally rotates out IPs for ELBs, so everything's working fine for weeks and then boom, now we're having a bad day.

I'm confused. What part of this is about bluffing or cheating?

Please don't be put off by the harsh tone of this essay. It's important information and based on this post and the resume linked in your HN profile (http://resume.patrickcurl.com/), I think you would benefit from reading it: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

It is open for debate.

The question does not say cut "into thirds," it says "into three pieces." This - http://i.stack.imgur.com/kEjP0.png - is a perfectly reasonable answer which, assuming the rate of cutting is constant, would result in 15 minutes.

It's a bad question.

Edit: That said, I would have given the same answer as the student, because I think that's the most reasonable interpretation, especially considering the illustration. But the keyword there is "interpretation." The question is ambiguous.

(My argument is taken from this answer: http://math.stackexchange.com/a/380007 )

#1 and #2 are in the order I noticed them, and #3 is so the whole post isn't just criticism. There's no deeper meaning than that.

1) How it looks on my monitor: http://i.imgur.com/iSjP8ae.png - might not want to repeat that title image like that.

2) I would really like to see if there are any mentors relevant to my interests before I have to make yet another account on yet another website.

3) I really think mentorship is the best way to really become good at a skill. Hope it goes well for you.

I haven't used the official Twitter app in a long time, so my memory could be failing me, but I'm pretty sure I remember seeing sponsored tweets even on the old version. I thought that was the reason I stopped using it.

They seem OK with downloading to me... http://i.imgur.com/wVZCFLm.png

Edit: And if it was a bug, they've taken their sweet time fixing it. I can still right click -> Save Image As.

There's actually a name for the phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

I am 100% in support of such a plaque.

Oh, good point, I guess there's got to be some kind of semi-intelligent HTTP parsing going on in the background.

I wouldn't be so sure. They're barely even checking what browser you're running.

I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook. My group of friends and I continue to use it because there just isn't any better way for us to stay in touch at scale on a day-to-day basis, and nobody really cares enough to put up with the fragmentation that moving to a different network would cause. So it's in this weird middle ground of being too important to give up outright, but not important enough to bother actually fixing.

I've actually been looking for something like this (specifically the 2D game support in C++) for a long time. What other options are there?

Yes. And in fact, you're the first person in these comments to mention the subject at all.

Well when you think about it pragmatically, I don't have the time - and I'm sure you don't either - to look at every single intellectually stimulating title on the internet. And frankly, when I'm browsing HN, I'm not exactly looking for the epitome of academic integrity. I'm looking for things that I'm interested in, and that I care about. And frankly, portscanning /0 is not something that I care about very often. Researchers setting up illegal botnets are.

Copy matters.

Or to put it in a more socioeconomic context, consider a low-wealth actor that might prefer to avoid toll roads, versus a high-wealth actor that would rather pay a little bit to save some time. Those are the kinds of motivations I was hoping to see in this game.

I don't agree with your implication that finding math easy is somehow a prerequisite for high school programming classes. I found that most of my struggle in mathematics came from lack of any kind of practical application for it. By contrast, I saw programming as building something, which is directly in line with my own sense of fun. I could just as easily have been an engineer or carpenter, it's just computers that I got my hands on first. I would say it's because of this that mathematics are much easier to me when I can apply it somehow to relevant problems that I'm facing in programming.

So I argue that programming courses may actually be a good way to boost the really important stuff - literacy and mathematics. (I think everyone here would agree that literacy is an important part of being a good developer.) It's a real, practical, exciting application of these more abstract ideas.

Your part "b" reminded me of a robotics program I did in High School, FIRST robotics - http://www.usfirst.org/ . It's not an exaggeration to say that my success and passion as a developer comes almost entirely from this program. They give these teams of high school kids a real, unsolved, damn hard robotics problem, and you have six weeks to come up with something. It's far more educational than sitting slack-jawed in a classroom, and fun as hell.

And no, there's no cushion for failure. One year I was in this program we had a robot with a drive system that was completely non-functional (we used a worm gear on the drive motors, so the robot basically couldn't coast at all), and as the programmer, it frustrated me almost to the point of tears to not be able to do anything about it. I tried to write code that would simulate coasting by spooling down the wheels slowly, but I wasn't that good at writing code yet, and it didn't work at all. In the end we lost horribly, and our consolation was to do better the next year, the end.

This is the kind of learning I would like to see more of: Work on real problems with no clear solutions, and learn old problems with clear solutions incidentally as the need arises.

Can we all please get over this ridiculous idea that we are perfectly rational agents in some free-market meritocratic utopia? People are irrational, biased, accident-prone, living things. That alone precludes unbiased judgements of another person's "merit".

I mean, come on. We're programmers. We have jobs because of how much people screw up.

Not true on mobile. I see advertisements for Samsung, Amazon, even Salesforce (what the hell?) right in between all the things I care about, just because my friends like them. Believe me, I can't express how much I don't want to see them. But there they are. I bet if I pull up the Facebook app I can find one sitting there right now.

One: http://i.imgur.com/0FXVv.png

Two: http://i.imgur.com/3Xfbj.png

We'll see them on the website soon enough.

(Disclaimer: I've only been to one school - a state university. Your results may vary.)

I think we've forgotten that higher education is supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career (the return). As a current-student twenty-something, I can remember in high school when the rule was basically: people go to college, losers go to vocational schools, failures go straight to work.

As absurd as it seems now, it's unfortunately what we were fed (though not in so many words). College was never an investment for us, it was just the next phase of school if you weren't so terribly below average that nobody would accept you.

There is a lot of resentment, especially in the liberal arts and sciences type fields, toward higher education. Personally, if I was in charge of any hiring right now, I would look a lot more at practice and experience than at degrees and education. And I don't think I'm alone.

Your "rule of thumb" is a pretty rash generalization. I use Visual Studio because I have a Windows machine, and on this platform it's the best tool for the job I'm doing. I am primarily a C++ developer, both at my day job and on my own projects. I got started using vim, gcc and make. I am perfectly comfortable on a Unix terminal, but I avoid terminals on Windows because - and maybe you've noticed - Windows terminals are dreadful.

Here's a rule of thumb for you: Good developers use the best tool for the job without getting religious about platforms.

Exactly. People - we computer programmer magicians included - understand new things by relating them to other things that they already know. I expect there are readers (or viewers) of the BBC or The Guardian who only know that programmers do things with computers. That is the entire breadth of their knowledge of computer programming. These metaphors help them frame this new information in terms of things they already understand.