_wo6a's comments

I'm sure hobbyists with liberal arts majors and liberal arts majors with computer science minors can both be very good developers and leaders, but to really be "by far the sharpest, best­-performing software developers and technology leaders" I think would still require a CS degree.

I have a BS in CS, but from a program with relatively lax minimum course requirements, particularly in math, from what I've read about other CS programs. (Only Calc II and Discrete Math.)

This allowed me to actually take more non-STEM than STEM courses while still earning a CS degree. If I was required to take higher-level math or more advanced CS subjects, I probably would have failed at the time. Yet I still got aspects of a CS education that I wouldn't have if I just minored in CS, which have provided a good base for exploring higher-level CS topics on my own.

At the same time, the program has everything available for students who want a more rigorous courseload.

So I'd say that except for producing top individual contributors in STEM domain programming (physics simulations, etc.), low-level algorithms, and high-performance system-level programming (which admittedly comprise a large number of software engineering jobs, but probably not the majority), a high-quality CS program where you can still take mostly non-STEM courses, and that doesn't use math courses effectively to weed people out, would on the surface appear to be ideal for the vast majority of software developers and technology leaders.

This is not actually that true. Germany is 7x as dense as the US, but Germany is only 5.9x as dense as the contiguous US.

About a third of the contiguous US has almost no people relative to the rest except for a few population centers (Intermountain West and Great Plains). There are several states with population densities higher than Germany, and quite a few within a factor of three, and naturally those will tend to have more people than the others.

So I'm not sure the median surrounding population density for an individual in the US would be that much different from Germany -- I'd think cultural factors, including public transportation availability, would have at least as much an effect on average distances driven.

So, formalizing the existing arrangement?

They don't impact the ability of the reader to eventually understand the message, but they do decrease the speed at which you can do so if you read any faster than purely phonetically. When your reading begins to involve visual pattern recognition at the word level as well as some degree of pattern recognition of higher-level structures, an error like that is an annoying distraction.

For writing where more time is spent reading it than typing it, it indicates inconsiderateness not to apply the necessary amount of spelling and grammar checking if the writer is unable to produce well-formed writing without specifically attending to its well-formedness. (Although it could also be a status signal to be able to make errors.)

(It's the same reason for code formatting and style rules - they standardize the low level details so readers can focus on the higher-level meaning.)

Any native English speaker who reads much at all (not to mention writes!) and has above a certain level of innate linguistic intelligence will also automatically develop perfect grammar and perfect or near-perfect spelling, so making frequent errors also indicates a certain semi-literacy.

Good article on Ancient Greek IQ: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/

In the linked article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_cattle (an attempt to breed back aurochs), this is amusing:

"Derek Gow, a British conservationist who operates a rare breeds farm at Lifton near Okehampton in Devon, bought a herd of 13 Heck cattle from Belgium in 2009.[15] The herd grew to 20 animals, but in January 2015 it was reported that Gow had had to slaughter most of them due to high levels of aggression, leaving just six."

Side note: quick research seems to indicate that it may not actually be Genghis Khan who is the male-line ancestor of all those men, but a common ancestor of his and the rest of his tribe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khereid

Even if so, I'm not sure if he would actually be an example of the low-investment male mating strategy. He was the ruler of a large empire, so he would be able to invest in his children. Even those who weren't recognized would have advantages from being rumored to be his offspring.

Groups which allow the low-investment strategy are outcompeted because they don't incentivize any males to invest in the group, while the Mongol empire had plenty of conquered people available to the Mongol men who were excluded by elites' polygamy.

For the lazy, murders per death by cop, based on those numbers:

Germany: 83

California: 17

Murders per capita:

Germany: 1/124,000

California: 1/23,000

So California's murder rate is 5.4x Germany's, and its death by cop per murder rate is 4.9x Germany's.

Is it just me, or wouldn't you expect the death by cop rate to be more than a linear function of the murder rate... perhaps even a polynomial function?

A difference in murder rate of x does not necessarily mean a difference in levels of violence/danger of x.

This is very interesting. I'm currently a little bit of the way through solving some of the problems solved by Relay using an existing open source stack, and I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on how it would compare. I've only skimmed the Relay video, and I haven't created a full React app yet, so forgive me if I get something wrong.

First, for the framework-level handling of fetching all data before rendering, where the data needed by each component is defined in each component, just copy how it's done in react-router's async-data example [1], modified to expect a hash of promises as in [2].

The promises return Backbone-Relational models [3]. You can model arbitrary relations using Backbone-Relational, although many-to-many is apparently kind of hacky (but just needs work to be seamless). It supports parsing REST API responses with nested models and collections as related models. A REST API generator like Flask-Restless [4] creates these responses with a single efficient query.

You have the flexibility to either sync all models before rendering, or render any component without all data already being fetched, and have it automatically re-render when loaded.

Components subscribe and unsubscribe to model events at the proper points in the component lifecycle using react-backbone-component.[5] I missed this and wrote my own version [6] before I found it, but mine is cleaner, slightly more featureful, and presents a simpler API.

Anyway, this requires some work to pull together, but I think it presents a viable alternative that:

- uses existing libraries that do one thing well and allows as much departure from each elements of the architecture as you want

- works with react-router, which is the shit

- works with your existing REST API

Relay looks wonderful, but it's possible to build the abstractions that do pretty much the same thing that support existing REST APIs.

[1] https://github.com/rackt/react-router/blob/master/examples/a...

[2] https://github.com/rackt/react-router/wiki/Announcements

[3] http://backbonerelational.org/

[4] https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[5] https://github.com/magalhas/backbone-react-component

[6] https://gist.github.com/mwhite/f763c189f58de7af5d34

This was great until he started confusing sex with porn.

I used to work at a retail outfit that used the really old-fashioned credit card system involving carbon paper slips and handwritten amounts, which would be entered into a credit card processing system at another location at a later time. We could have essentially charged whatever amount we wanted, and this was fairly apparent to anyone who paid via credit card. And yet, out of every thousand people who go to pay with a credit card, I could probably count on one hand the people who express any serious concern about this fact.

Businesses have an incentive in maintaining their reputation and not getting into trouble with payment processors, and I generally think people assume any business approved by a payment processor is probably sufficiently low-risk to give a credit card.

As a junior at a university outside Boston who has dealt with the same questions, here's my advice:

Personally (this may not be you), I would say drop the lab job unless you're really enjoying it or it's very clearly worth the time. You've got a lot going on for a freshman and you can always explore a lab job again later in your undergraduate career.

I don't worry too much about GPA. You're at a well known school with a good reputation. I don't know what your definition of "do well in school" is, but notwithstanding the unfortunate fact that your school seems to have significantly less grade inflation than similar schools (which is bad when employers are looking at your school and GPA and don't know what the average GPA is, and assume it's higher than it is), I don't believe that having a GPA in, say, the 95th+ percentile is worth the potentially 4-5x more time spent studying than for a GPA in the 50-75th percentile, depending on what classes you take. If you can do something noteworthy as a result of the freed up time, it will be more valuable to employers than a higher GPA. (Looking at your resumé, you are more than on your way already).

There's nothing wrong with neuroscience as a major, but I do advise taking a broad spectrum of classes to expand your horizons. I've learned a huge amount just by exploring the available information about interesting subjects that have only been introduced in my classes. I also extol the merit of taking lots of compsci classes, particularly because they will give you lots of practice programming, which will help you spend less time building your own projects in the long run. They will also expose you to important theoretical computer science ideas that, while not talked about every day in industry, can be indispensable. Taking an algorithms class will make you stop writing grossly inefficient code, for instance.

I'm doing nothing for the next month before I go abroad (besides finding and building my next project) -- let me know if you want to grab lunch or something.

You might want to attend http://developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers.org/.