grot's comments

I am a non-native english speaker too; I guess I bristle at the the reading that this man isn't in control of his english when he writes with obvious proficiency, a reading I suspect, would not at all be in question were his name John Foster Edwards, or Henry Wickham or whatever Anglo-Saxon name you wish to replace his name with.

I see your point though. I think he does use words in ways that native speakers do not use, but in his anecdotes -- I think he's actually playing up his Chineseness for the comic effect, and he's very much aware of what's happening.

I also come from a similar background, and his points also seem poignant to me -- the first, in my reading, is about the lottery of birth; would he or I or you have been successful (with presumably our predisposition to succeed in academia) in China merely 70 years ago? Perhaps not. The second, related, is that we should be grateful for the achievements which might naturally appear as the product of our own labor, and (I think) also to forgive others for the achievements that appear to be the product of their labor.

Though implicit, I think this article actually makes an interesting implication about jealousy. What exactly is there to be jealous of in another person if luck, and randomness plays so much in our fortunes?

This article is also a warning against self-help. So much determines our fortunes besides the advice we can take or the effort we make. The best is what -- rolling with the punches --

I think he meant it. His English is very fluent throughout the article.

all's fair in love and war right?

The argument I find most compelling for learning the memory palace technique is that building a memory palace is a creative act (Yes, like Picasso). One must be creative to construct a memorable palace for something as mundane as a grocery list, and what's vivid works. (Joshua Foer argues just this, persuasively too, in his book "Moonwalking with Einstein").

(begin sort of random tangent) I've tried using the memory palace technique to memorize poetry, and I found the clashing images somewhat disconcerting. On the one hand, there was the imagery of the poem, and on the other, there was the image I had created. Often times, I had to create completely new images, totally unrelated to the substance of the poem, in order to remember it. And well, somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob.

I don't think the author means to justify age discrimination so much as to use it to underscore a point, which is that programming knowledge is something that takes (on the order of) 5 years to acquire rather than 40 years to acquire. Whether this is true, I am not sure. I don't really have enough experience to justify making any claims like that.

I think what he's really saying, to make an analogy, is that a programmer is more like a black smith than like an alchemist. A blacksmith is concerned with his tools and his technique, an alchemist is on a search for truth (or permanence or glory). Now he's also saying that being a blacksmith sort of sucks: your tools get old, you are smelly, it probably hurts more to pound your anvil when you're 50 than when you're 22, etc. Whether you believe that depends on your taste, whether you care about creating a good product or embarking on a potentially (very likely) fruitless search for truth.

It's pretty obvious what hackernews prefers.

Maybe not in his particular case...but as an alumni interviewer, I can tell you that personality and extracurriculars matter a lot.

The thing is, admissions to elite universities is almost never about test scores. Immigrant parents from countries like China and India are used to test scores mattering a lot. In those countries, your absolute score on the National Exam determines not only your placement into a university, but also what fields are available to you for study.

The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.

So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.

It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?

Freud?

That's one of the first hypothesis discussed in the article: our brains aren't getting smaller because we are getting dumber, but because the wiring is becoming more efficient.

I think the most interesting part of the article comes at the end, where the author points out that while brain volume has decreased since prehistoric times, it's recently been on the rise. That trend corresponds well with the availablity of protein in human history. Since farming began, protein has been a privilege of the rich. Only recently has it been widely available, and in such quantities. Hence, modern Americans are something like 3 inches taller than their ancestors 150 years ago.

What about the disutility from alienating everyone else in the coffee line?

Yet another example of how private incentives (to the cashier) trump public good...

When I was learning Galois Theory, I found Keith Conrad's notes really helpful for understanding the details -- http://www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/blurbs/. The subject of this post is mostly covered by the paper titled "Galois correspondence" (For anyone whose interests were piqued by this post.)

Yes, or alternatively I believe

    In [27]: class Foo(object):
    ....:     pass
    ....: 
 
    In [28]: def hello(self):
    ....:     print self
    ....: 

    In [29]: blah = Foo()

    In [30]: blah.hello = hello.__get__(blah, Foo) 

    In [31]: blah.hello()
    <__main__.Foo object at 0x10397f650>

Also, i forgot to add, your code snippet doesn't work. Some magic goes into the self binding.

    In [21]: def hello(self):
    ....:    print self.name
    ....: 
    In [22]: class Foo(object):
    ....:     name = 'blah'
    ....: 
    In [23]: goo = Foo()
    go
    In [24]: goo.hi = hello
    In [25]: goo.hi
    Out[25]: <function hello at 0x103985aa0>
    In [26]: goo.hi()
    TypeError                                 Traceback (most     recent call last)

    TypeError: hello() takes exactly 1 argument (0 given)

you may not have seen it, but it does work:

n [8]: class Foo(object): ...: pass ...:

In [9]: blah = Foo()

In [10]: blah.asdf = lambda x: x

In [11]: blah.asdf(3) Out[11]: 3

In [12]: blah.asdf(5) Out[12]: 5

In javascript you can modify an object

    var foo = Object();
    foo.blah = function(x,y) { ... };

But in python, that doesn't quite work. You can only do

    foo = object()
    foo.blah = lambda x,y: ...
 

lambdas are a bit more limited as they are restricted to one line, and you can't have print statements, which makes complicated expressions rather ugly.

edit: ah, as someone noted, the second code snippet should be something like foo = Foo() where

    class Foo(object):
        pass

tl;dr

Successful man fails 10th grade standardized test, concludes that success is not correlated with being able to do math.

Aside from the obvious logical/statistical falacy of making an overreaching conclusion from a sample size of one, and various other illogical claims("if this guy doesn't need math, why does anyone??") this article assumes that the purpose of education is developing vocational skills.

Why should that be? Kids should learn to appreciate the world, get exposure to different things. There's no reason to make them hunker down at age 5 and start preparing for their future careers. If they don't like math, that's fine. Likewise for history, science, whatever. But it's a shame for anyone to miss out on the beauty inherent in all of these subjects.

An admirable attempt, but -- the formatting and the grammar are distracting detractors from the content.

For anyone who is serious about learning abstract algebra but lacking mathematical background (i.e. an analysis course under the belt), consider the book "Abstract Algebra" by Dummit and Foote. It's at the undergraduate level (so it goes through the motions of rigor that research math texts often omit), and well presented. A more advanced, terse and elegant, text would be Hershtein's Topics in Algebra.

So ads are less annoying now than they were a couple of years ago...

Is it perhaps because they've adapted to the increasingly common practice of adblocker(and browsers which prohibit unprompted javascript popups)? Let's not forget that adblocker is a great thing, if only because it incentivized a move towards less obtrusive ads.

Another thing: ads may be less visibily intrusive but things like tracking cookies are still widely (100%?) used. So if privacy is any sort of a concern, an adblocker is probably still a good thing to have.

A liberal arts education teaches you many useful things: grammar, for example.

Read his opening paragraph again.

"As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial, and one of the more painful ones was the fact that the Dropping out is probably not for you post gave people the impression that I'm against studying the arts, literature or any other non hard science."

Awkward, no? That's because it's a run on sentence.

The things that a liberal arts education teaches you are not always obvious. Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

How many times have you picked up a book, skimmed through it, and never opened it up again? How many times have you actually read a book, and then for some weird reason, forgotten all of its contents very soon after? Formal schooling forces you to reengage with texts again and again. Formal schooling forces you to be critical of yourself and your own work before someone else has a crack at it. All of these things can be accomplished by a very motivated and disciplined individual. But how many of us are actually that motivated and that disciplined?