andreadallera
May our paths never cross in real life.
What disgusts me is the lack of tact and consideration of editors and maybe her parents - the first are ready to exploit the death of a 16 years old girl to make some uniques, the seconds (I really hope that's not the case) are ready to put their child on the cover for some advertising.
Empathy should have nothing to do with your ability to evaluate facts. Empathy has an evil cousin, politically correctness. When politically correctness comes into play, you lose the game. You can't talk about anything with a straight perspective because, you know, somebody might get offended.
A 16 years old kid has died. That is a sad fact by itself. If she was the dumbest kid in Pakistan that wouldn't have made the fact less sad - only, you wouldn't have known it. If she was the poorest kid in Pakistan, same thing. Now, you know that a lot of 16 years old kids die in Pakistan? Most of them with family situations much worse than the one she was in? Do you feel empathy for them? I bet so. That's a good thing, a human thing to feel.
Now, as a thought experiment, let's say she wasn't a Pakistani little girl. Let's say she was a 16 years old boy coming from a rich US family. Even fat and greasy, to add to the image. Let's also add that this one didn't die - he's well off in his NY mansion eating Snickers all day. What would you have thought of the article? "16 years old kid from NY loves messing around with .NET". Wouldn't you have said: who cares? And rightly so?
Empathy drains perspective. Feeling empathy is the noblest thing in the world. At the same time, it doesn't mean that it should suspend your ability to evaluate situations. A big problem with our society and our communication channels is that they routinely employ this effect to steer public opinion where they want it to be. Don't be a sucker - be human, but use your brain.
Whoa, easy. I have expressed my opinion and I have backed it up well I think. No hate for the poor girl, that's just terrible that somebody 16 years old have to die, no matter his or her accomplishments.
On the other hand, what accomplishments are we talking about here? Seriously, I'm really sorry for the poor girl, I really am, but still I can't see the accomplishment she's made.
And, honestly, I don't give a rat's ass about what people will write about me when I'm dead.
So let's not try to have a discussion about it? I've never understood that frame of mind.
Sorry but no. Again, I don't want to belittle her accomplishments - it's certainly a feat for any girl or boy her age to be even able to put a very simple application together, but she came from a very wealthy Pakistani family. Saying that she made it to Redmond out of her own ambition and drive is spitting in the face of all her not so privileged compatriots who are struggling to do the same.
On a personal level, I am deeply sorry for her death. Given time, she might have become a great programmer.
On a more general level, when I see something like this on the news, I can't help but ask myself why exactly somebody has written an article about this particular person. In this case, it doesn't seem to me that she was the prodigy they're talking about. A smart kid with a will to improve herself? Certainly. But think about the context - she came from a very rich Pakistani family. What would you think, as a 16 year old boy from Pakistan, coming from a poor family and working your bones off to make a living, coding at night, of this story? Because, you know, it's very likely that there's somebody like the boy in question in Pakistan.
Scope mixing is the bane of modern communication. You can't use empathy as an excuse to talk about anything. This personal tragedy should have remained personal, not brought up on the news. Just my humble opinion.
I started programming when I was 8, I know a lot of people that started meddling around with computer around the same age, and I was born a decade before her which, in computer years, is like a century. Everything programming related was a hundred times more difficult to accomplish than it is now - I wrote assembly on a C64, because that's all my poor family could afford, with nothing more than a printsheet of the opcodes. And no internet, keep that in mind. And I won't say I'm a prodigy because of that.
I am also an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and I can tell you that the exam was nothing but difficult - basically, it had nothing to do with actual programming and more with knowing what checkbox to flag. I studied for it the evening before the test.
I've seen so many stories like this, most of them not as tragic and not as heartwarming. For example, a heir of a very wealth family that I know has been featured in at least 10 Italian newspapers as "the new Mark Zuckerberg" or "the 20 years-old startupper" or "the genius behind <his startup>", all because his family has deep ties with the editors.
That has taught me never to believe a thing of what I read on something even vaguely institutionalized.
Publishing companies have not that much power. What they publish is decided based on how many references the paper gets and how prominent in the academic society the authors (or the professors backing them) are. They just enjoy their role as "gatekeepers" - basically, they get paid big money to put a barrier at the entrance of the whole system.
If you do something and what you do costs much more than the market value of its output, make sure it's not your job. Hobbies usually fall in this category.
I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say...
See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused than what it took to put together that site. Take your average startup as an example - they're seriously dedicated to outreach, their success depends on it - would you give them even a 1% chance of success if their website looked like that?
The code in watcher.js is weirdly imperative. Are you coming from C/C++?
Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself.
I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the only person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition.
Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in expanding their audience (now they're interested in the opposite) then publishing will change accordingly.
No, it's not. The sentence doesn't even make sense.
> If you can code, you can launch new movements, upend traditional campaign dynamics and pressure candidates in a low-cost, high-tech and highly effective way.
Your power to start a movement online has absolutely nothing to do with if you're a programmer or not.
Honestly, I've stopped reading after this.
I've seen too much to believe that you can be a successful startupper without some kind of external help. And that external help, at least here, it's not something you can gain - it's something you're born with. It's your family, it's the friends of your family, it's the connections your family has, it's the connection you were able to build because you went to an expensive school, paid by your rich family.
Again, I'm not saying that in the US things work the same way. In Italy they certainly do - Startup Chile is/was kind of a failure for the same exact reasons. The commenter has its rights to complain about those guys who had a huge headstart if they act like they didn't.