One really interesting idea related to the passing of the Turing test and formation of relationships between humans and AIs:
Our relationships with other humans have become increasingly digital, progressing from face to face communication to letters to the telephone to text / facebook / other social messages. Each step in this progression lowers the bar drastically for AI to start fulfilling peoples' social needs. We can now maintain or even establish a relationship with another human solely using text-based messaging, and I believe that soon we will reach the point where AIs can get 90% of the way there. I don't know when it will happen but I wouldn't bet against it.
Apple has started to embrace tabs within the system, most notably by integrating them into Finder windows in Mavericks. I agree that they should make it a standard type of application and have a standard tab UI that is used in as many apps as possible.
I think this post makes a valid point, and I also think it's important to remember that Objective-C has also been changing incredibly fast during the Apple's meteoric rise and the accompanying developer interest. Swift did not come out as fully baked as some might like, but Apple made the right move releasing it sooner rather than later.
Forcing developers to use a language with as much baggage as ObjC couldn't continue, particularly when compared to the much preferred web languages. ARC and Storyboards were big changes but with the amount of headaches developers have suffered dealing with the App Store, they needed something exceptional to keep old talent and bring in new I believe.
I'm excited to see how fast Swift can be baked, but just judging from HN / Reddit it is earning Apple a lot more developer love than any time in recent memory.
This is a great idea, just got mine! It worked for Paypal back in the day to boost signups. Hopefully between this and the MIT program we'll see more interesting transactions in BTC as opposed to people holding it as a lottery ticket.
I don't think that the Hacker School rules have a goal of lowering standards, but rather of preventing the one-upmanship which is so common among (usually male) programmers. To someone who may be feeling overwhelmed by the learning curve inherent with transitioning from small academic or recreational coding projects to real-world environments such dynamics could be very demoralizing. Anecdotally, men who stay in tech tend to have a high tolerance for it, but it's secondary to the actual practice of coding and people who are feeling less confident don't need to worry about competing in these games. Of course if someone is working on a real-world codebase they have to know what they're doing, but learning from peers does not need to alienate anyone, at least in principle.
Having tried out various of the recent speed reading sites and apps, I honestly don't think they are useful for any dense or difficult material requiring thought to comprehend. I almost always find that challenging text requires nonlinear reading to really get, something not possible with these tools. Perhaps they are useful for fluffy news articles, but not much more.
Does anyone know of any good techniques for improving time to comprehension when reading technical work? I feel like I am very inefficient at getting through math or computer science papers, which obviously resist any kind of normal speed reading.
It's easy to say that the American college admissions game relies on strange and difficult to quantify criteria, especially at top schools. The more interesting aspect is the comparison to the UK and other high quality European universities. As a student at a "prestigious" American college, I find it strange how little the lone wolf mentality is encouraged. In graduate programs, the most successful students are almost always lone wolves in many ways, since leadership ability doesn't get you very far with pure science or truly original ideas.
I wonder what the impact would be if American universities used Oxford / Cambridge as a model instead of whatever they're doing now.
Where are you getting the idea that Blub refers to Lisp? If you read the actual essay, it seems to refer to Java or something similar. The whole metaphor is about why developers don't all use the most powerful languages, and he is clearly saying that Lisp is one of those.
In the United States, student loans are almost impossible to get discharged, even in the case of bankruptcy. That is a large part of why people taking on massive student debt is so oppressive. But the original point I agree with even more due to that fact. People in their late teens and early 20s usually don't know enough about the world and where they want to be in it to sanely commit to the amounts and terms of these loans.
True, but the risk profile for a late-state venture investor and an investor in public markets are very different. Let's say a company's valuation starts at 2 billion and drops to 200 million at some later date. If someone invested 100 million at 2 billion valuation, their losses from that value drop are very different. The private investor with downside protection due to liquidation preference gets their 100 million back, while the investor in public markets would get back only about 10 million. Late stage investments, such as those in Snapchat, are essentially bets that the value of the company at exit will not be below the value of the round in which they are investing.
Our relationships with other humans have become increasingly digital, progressing from face to face communication to letters to the telephone to text / facebook / other social messages. Each step in this progression lowers the bar drastically for AI to start fulfilling peoples' social needs. We can now maintain or even establish a relationship with another human solely using text-based messaging, and I believe that soon we will reach the point where AIs can get 90% of the way there. I don't know when it will happen but I wouldn't bet against it.