I second this. Wilma's eye passed over us, which was my first time ever experiencing the eye wall of a hurricane. I vividly remember watching our house's patio enclosure get destroyed from my parents' bedroom.
I wouldn't stick around for this one if I were still in Florida.
I haven't actually found LLRBs to be simpler to implement, and a couple other sources agree with me. They're pedagogically simpler than standard RB trees, but if your goal is to introduce students to a balanced binary tree, I'd argue that AVLs are easier to teach and implement than either RBs or LLRBs.
You know, I've had people assume I was an inferior software developer solely because I was in a social fraternity and therefore must not have spent any time studying for my exams or working on my problem sets. That's not really a nice prior to have about an individual, sort of how it would be considered quite offensive to assume that a woman were an inferior software developer due to her gender.
Additionally, I'm not going to pretend that Greek life is 100% free of douchebaggery. Some people in fraternities do bad things to other people, or harbor bigoted worldviews. I feel that you grossly overestimate the proportion of people who do. To address the racial and sexual homogeneity point, I'm fairly confident that every single fraternity at my alma mater had individuals of color and homosexual individuals. My own certainly did.
I'd also like to point out the obvious blanket statements you've made about the demographics and attitudes of fraternity members. However, I really don't think anyone or anything can budge your opinion.
Not the original comment author, but I thoroughly enjoyed taking Penn's undergraduate compilers course, which used OCaml to compile a basic OO language with single inheritance and dynamic dispatch. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis341
In my experience, #4 has held up extremely well over time and is the most compelling reason for choosing an ML over another language. Algebraic data types are an absolute joy to work with when dealing with abstract syntax trees. The other points are obviously great to have, but strong language support for ADTs is key, in my opinion.
I'm not certain I agree with #3. It seems to defeat the purpose of a strong type system. Either way, it can be very nice to express meta-level constructs in a matching object-level type. For example, if the language you are writing a compiler for has an int32 datatype, but you use an int64 in the language you're writing the compiler in, you'll need to simulate overflow. It would just be easier and safer to use an int32 in both places.
These days, I'd recommend Menhir over ocamlyacc unless you have a very specific use case that the former breaks on but the latter works on.
Does anyone else have the following issue with the footnote hotlinking on this blog post? When I click the "return" icon on a footnote to jump to the point in the text where the footnote is, I end up several lines below where I should. The sentence with the footnote is concealed by the black WaPo header bar.
I can replicate this behavior in Chrome on Ubuntu, Chrome on El Capitan, and Safari on El Capitan.
I recently graduated from the Wharton / SEAS undergraduate dual-degree program. I can't currently think of any PMs that didn't have a technical background. I completely agree that being able to grok technical concepts is necessary, and that being a good software developer isn't. However, it is pretty difficult for someone to grok technical concepts in a way that can add value to software engineers without some soft of software engineering or computer science background. I haven't been able to think of a better way to pick up the technical context than to actually program. The banking analogy is the stereotype of the "clueless" MBA associate who didn't put in the two years as an analyst, can't build models, and therefore doesn't add much value to his or her analysts.
In other words, I submit that it is significantly easier to fully understand the architecture, as sologoub is referring to, with a technical background.
It seems like your CS minor and Rails experience gave you the necessary background, which supplements the soft skills that PMs also need.
A lot of my friends and peers who were "interested in technology" but did not understand software engineering took jobs as PMMs, venture capital analysts, or investment banking analysts on a TMT desk. I think this makes sense; I can't see them being very good in a PM role.
It wouldn't surprise me if this were somewhat different for MBAs, though.
I've never heard of a guessing reward before. I've heard of guessing penalties, though. Back when I took the AP exams, there was a penalty (negative points awarded) for guessing, whereas leaving a multiple-choice question blank was worth 0 points. (This stopped being the case in 2011.)
I wonder if you would have any luck escalating this to Chesky, Gebbia, et al. The Airbnb founding team really seems to take pg's advice on start-ups seriously. I'm sure that they're huge proponents of delighting their users, which your experience obviously isn't an example of.
Palantir's philanthropy engineering team works with an organization called Community Solutions to help shelter the homeless.[0][1] (Full disclosure, I interned on this team last year.)
The Michael Larson story is absolutely fascinating. The Game Show Network produced a made-for-TV documentary about this called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal that I highly recommend watching. If I remember correctly, they brought in Long and Litras to play a re-created Press Your Luck game, who were both successfully taught how to time the board the way that Larson did. If one knew the board as well as Larson did, it'd be easier to beat than any arcade timing game.
If you're interested in game show cheating scandals, I also highly recommend Major Fraud, a documentary about a cheater on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The summary of that one is an audience signal via coughing.
Off-topic nitpick: I wouldn't quite go that far with regards to your characterization of Hill. Hill entered the Witness Protection Program because he was convinced that Jimmy the Gent was going to kill him, and if I remember correctly, he had to be convinced to do so by the prosecutor of his case.
I don't necessarily have a problem with professional athletes doping in a black box, i.e. free of influencing others. Professionals should be fully aware of the health effects of "riding the bicycle," and it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
I always thought, however, that the big issue with steroids was the role that athletes play in the lives of children and teenagers. It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids. I was under the impression that professional athletes using steroids influences budding athletes to use steroids both directly ("I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids") and indirectly (feeling pressured to use PEDs in order to compete). I seem to remember this being a controversial topic in the news 10-15 years ago.
Steroid use in professional bodybuilding isn't as big of a deal as steroid use in professional sports. While part of that is attributable to the goals of those respective fields, another part is attributable to bodybuilders not being widespread role models in the way that baseball or basketball players are.
The point the poster you responded to was making the point that Zuckerberg may be satisfied with just Facebook, whereas Larry and Sergey choose to pursue other ventures in addition to Google. The poster wasn't making a point about talent or luck.
Even with that, Zuckerberg isn't 100% focusing on the Facebook core product; look at the Connectivity Lab, for example.
I agree, which is why it's especially necessary advice. Your gut instinct upon seeing that blindingly bright flash should be to duck and cover, whether you're outdoors or indoors.
I wish this didn't have to be so important, since it feels like a Cold War relic, but that's just how things seem to be these days.
Watching the videos on the CCTV America link reminded me of some basic (but apparently necessary) safety advice. If you're ever in a situation like this, don't stand by a window filming it! You only have seconds until the blast breaks yours windows (depending on your distance from the epicenter and the explosion strength). From what I understand, the biggest immediate danger is lacerations from flying glass.
Get away from the windows and duck behind something solid.
I wouldn't stick around for this one if I were still in Florida.