qianyilong's comments

qianyilong | 11 years ago | on: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

Dang that is true I didn't think of that. good observation.

qianyilong | 11 years ago | on: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.

They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.

In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.

As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.

qianyilong | 11 years ago | on: Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor

The reason you haven't heard of it is that it is a new phrase that he just made up in the article to refer you back to the case of the philosopher selectively applying logic so he can take his neighbors cow and justify it by this being a new cow. It basically means that you are grasping at whatever logic supports your pre-existing desire/belief rather than using logic to determine your desire/beliefs.

qianyilong | 12 years ago | on: Red wine health benefits 'overhyped'

Huh fascinating. Thanks for the link. For everyone that dismisses this article because it requires a login you can create a free account and they will let you in.

qianyilong | 12 years ago | on: The Programming Interview Experiment

I would add that the respect for candidate time is critical. I applied to one place and they requested a similiar coding project but this was just before the christmas holiday and they gave me a deadline of christmas day which just struck me as a little arrogant to think that I am really going to be doing their challenge on christmas.

qianyilong | 12 years ago | on: The Programming Interview Experiment

Since you are trying to optimize the hiring process have you looked into something like video interviewing with HireVue?

Disclaimer I work here so I am already sold on the concept.

qianyilong | 12 years ago | on: Atomic Clocks Make a Quantum Leap in Accuracy

The coolest part it that it improves both stability and accuracy. Cesium is often touted as a good clock but it only has good accuracy. The short-term stability has more noise than something like a Rubidium clock that is very stable on the short-term but inaccurate(relative to cesium anyway) on the long term.

This is cool because it is the best in both dimensions.

qianyilong | 12 years ago | on: Problems versus Exercises

This is why I hated math until Calculus. I enjoyed my calculus class and Loved Linear algebra. The course work started to consist or more problems and less exercises.