jamesli's comments

I have conducted a few hundred of interviews for software engineers and DBAs in the last three years. I do want to see the passions of the candidates at the professions. It is a big plus in my eyes.

On the other hand, I am not impressed by "unequivocal statement". For seniors positions, I don't ask questions with a fixed answer. I prefer to listen to the candidates's opinions, to analyze the pros and cons of an approach, etc. I consider it low intelligence by any "unequivocal statement" for these questions.

Analytics is useful and important. It is utterly baloney, though, to use still pretty simplistic analytics at current stage to gauge a player for a team sport that requires players to move and have direct body contacts constantly, like basketball and soccer.

For example, defense. There are better analytics than several years ago when rebounds, blocks, and steals were the primary statistics. But basketball is a team sport. The contribution of a player in team defense includes how much space a player can cover, how much a player's presence can direct the offense's ball movement, how uncomfortable a player can make his opponent feel, both physically and psychologically, how good a player is at directing his/her teammates in a defense scheme, how good a player is at anticipating a potential issue and cover it, how much a player can make his/her teammates trust his/her defense so that the teammates can aggressively pressure the opponents, and so on. One has to really understand the game to evaluate a player's defense correctly and fully.

It is the same with offense. A simple example is that Duncan requires more help defense than Barkley. That creates more space for his teammates, thus more opportunities on higher percentage shots, which will translate to more wins. It also help gets teammates more involved, make teammates better, etc.

I really like Barkley, both as a player and as a person. But it is nonsense to compare him to Duncan in regard to the best PF in NBA history.

Enjoy it while you still can :). My children were the same way. Now they are making jokes at my pronunciations and grammars. [English is not my first language.]

> You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader

Besides, good literatures are of multi layers. One might miss some the deeper layers in the first few reads. There are also some subtle points the authors try to convey. They usually requires multi reads for most readers to get them.

My wife reads some classic novels many times. I think I am a very good reader. But she has much deeper understanding than I have, explaining to me what other meanings a plot conveys, why a sentence is constructed this way rather than another, although they sound the same for normal ears, etc. in literatures both in English and in our native languages. She always finds something new each time she re-read a classic.

The top-voted comments for the article in NYT website are horrendous regarding H1B visa.

Location, location, location, to borrow it from real estate market. In places like Bay Area, there is a surplus of excellent talents competing for academic positions. If one can't get one in Standard, Cal, UCDavis, USF, etc, they will fight for the positions in the community colleges. So it is not uncommon to meet excellent professors in community colleges in such places. I know a few who taught in community colleges in Bay Area and eventually got positions in 4-year universities in Midwest. I bet they wouldn't hesitate to come back if they can get a position here.

It could be quite a different story in other places. I lived in a small town in the Midwest before. It has a big university, which one might think would provide some good staffs to the local community colleges. The reality was it was pretty bad. The only students who were interested in learning were middle-aged, who took the classes more for leisure. The teachers were aloof, most of whom were not qualified in teaching in a college, IMHO.

My personal experience makes me think that being minority might be one of the important factors, if not the most important one. Minorities are regularly ignored and interrupted in meetings while the majorities, unless explicitly reminded, don't feel it.

I don't mean the majorities do it intentionally. Some of them, when reminded they are interrupting, apologize sincerely. It could be deep in human's conscience.

It is, for sure.

There are some other points to consider. First, the dataset sizes for most biomedical research are very small. Most advanced statistical methods don't apply. Due to curiosity, I took some advanced stat courses and tried to apply the methods to our lab's data. It didn't provide any significant improvement compared to basic ones, like linear regression, logistic regression, etc.

Second, biomedical research is highly collaborative these days. For some research that generate a large amount of data, either the researchers themselves understand statistics very well, or they collaborate with statisticians very closely. There is a field called biostatistics. Most biostatistics professors are either math or stat major, and many of them are adjoint professors in biomedical departments.

Biomedical research is really tedious and time-consuming. The professors I knew when I was doing biomedical research worked more than 60 hours a day, and they wish they had more time. One young woman professor came to the lab at 8am, left at 6pm, spent some time with her 4 children, and came back to lab at 9pm again, and worked until midnight, on every weekday. She brought her children to the lab on Saturday, and worked the whole day. IMHO, it is better for her to focus all her energy on the biomedical part, which she is best at, and collaborate with statisticians.

Biology is enormous, as the author pointed out. Our understanding in biology at present might be less than 1% than the whole knowledge. For most biological research, it doesn't require any advanced knowledge in math beyond basic statistics.

For example, many labs have been studying an important gene and how other genes are functionally related to it for more than 10 years. The research involved are simply tedious, but indispensable, biological experiments. It is a waste of time to study math for this work, because it doesn't apply, except some basic statistics on data analysis.

Disclaimer: I have advanced degrees in both biology and computer science, and has multiple years of biomedical research experience. I have met exceptionally smart people working in both biology, CS, math, and physics. Yes, these smart biologists don't understand advanced topics in math and physics. I believe, however, if they had studied math or physics, they would have been excellent mathematicians or physicists.

I would argue it is extremely simplistic to compare languages to unit systems side by side.

In languages, it is both a way of communication and also a way of thinking, to say the least. Mandarin Chinese is my native language. My English is just ok, but it already gives me a new way of thinking, much more than a different perspective.

Also, there are many words and phrases in one language that you can't find a matched translation in another language, even between languages that are closely related, like English and German.

Different unit systems, on the other hand, can be converted to and from each other without losing anything. There could be some affinity attached to a system one grew up with. It is incomparable to languages, though.

Considering there has been an increasing larger percentage of the population going to college, the statistics might somehow get skewed by the population between age 18~23.

If one is in college, it is natural to assume that she or he is not fully employed, has low income, mostly not married, etc.

"For one thing, the Chinese may be assuming that the postal service is more like theirs — a state-owned entity that has vast amounts of data on its citizens, said James A. Lewis, a cyber-policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies."

State-owned? That is true. "has vast amount of data on its citizens"? Please do some homework before speaking.

It was USSR before. It has been China since 1990's. An imaginary and powerful enemy has to be created. Iraq, Iran, Afganistan are too small for the title.

I suspect there are something else in energy drinks that could have dramatic effects on one's brain.

I usually drink one or two cups of coffee per day. I could drink more. After 7~8 cups of espresso, my hands start uncontrollably shaking, and I feel a little agitated. Those are all the symptoms I feel. Energy drinks is a completely different story. After two cans, I would have a big headache. I experimented a few times [call me crazy :)]. Every time, the headache came. So it was not a fluke, and most probably it was not caused by other factors.

Amazing! This will greatly advance the research in some biomedical fields, like neural and glia development, etc. I wish I had the microscopes when i was doing researches in biomedicine.

Right! What we are trying so hard to hire are not programmers, but good engineers. For candidates who don't have much industry experience, we are looking for potentials. Some crash courses won't grant potentials to candidates. Speaking frankly, we expect the new hires to learn fast, to have a great jump after working with good senior engineers for one year. This one year helps the new hires to connect the dots of their knowledges. That requires a solid background, which can't be acquired by crash courses.

There are genius programmers who don't need a CS or related degree. They are exceptions, though, not norm.

Ah, human nature! Abusing power and vanity, even in extremely ridiculous and harmful way.

More parking capacity in the Bart station. A lot of people decide to drive to the city because they cannot find a parking space in some stations. It is not practical for them to walk or bike to the stations due to a variety of difficulties.

The extra parking space could be achieved either by converting the basic and space-inefficient one floor parking ramp to two floors, or building a new underground one.

Agree it is really sad. The guy who held the permit was entitled, condescending, and insulting. The tall guy in the neighbourhood was very patient and reasonable. I don't understand why the dropbox guys didn't want to play games with the neighbourhood kids. It is a good opportunity to interact with people from different backgrounds.

American society is getting more polarized.

Regarding this specific case, if no other engineers in the team are good at iOS programming and the candidate is aware of that, most probably the candidate would not give answers like that. If the candidate does say things like that in this situation, I would feel negative about it. It doesn't sound an engineer speaking.

As for OP's question, I haven't figured out a good way, either.