> They were, of course, uniformly non-white, non-Asian girls.
> The poor students weren't poor students because they were female, or because they were non-white, but because they were unintelligent and/or uneducated.
And why is that? If you reject the absurd notion that there's some causative relationship between technical ability/intellect and gender/race, what's the explanation, other than the possibility that those people didn't have the same exposure to the subjects that you did? And that's not even including the confidence factor: Of course a white dude can do this stuff, they do it all the time. Your story seems to suggest we should actually be doing this long before university. I would agree with that.
This part will probably be unpopular, but I'll say it anyway: What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed? If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway? Or me, for that matter - I was part of a similar program in high school[1]. What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship?
> If you reject the absurd notion that there's some causative relationship between technical ability/intellect and gender/race, what's the explanation, other than the possibility that those people didn't have the same exposure to the subjects that you did?
For purposes of admitting students to special programmes, who cares? The only thing the admissions staff should have considered was admitting the most qualified applicants to the programme.
And anyway, you're ignoring the fact that intelligence is in part hereditary. It's not those students' fault that they had poor intelligence any more than it's my fault that I make a poor athlete; admitting them to a competitive academic programme was as foolish as admitting me to the Olympics.
> What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed?
I was better-suited to that program that the ill-suited students admitted ahead of me were.
> If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway?
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Maybe some of those ill-suited students were more innately intelligent than those who were unfairly rejected, and had simply had poor upbringings, but that doesn't matter: they were, at the point of admission, profoundly less-qualified than the rejectees.
And what was the point of admitting them in the first place? They were not helped by it: they had a horrible experience of unmitigated humiliation and failure. They didn't benefit, and others suffered.
All you can do is take everyone on his own merits, as he is. It doesn't matter what sex or colour someone is: if he's the best candidate, take him for the job or the codeathon or whatever; if not, don't.
> What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship?
The big problem though is that the pathological edge cases of our current system are much better than the extremely pathological normal cases of a system without checks on what people are allowed to do.
I mean, anarcho-capitalism is basically what sovereign nations are at a smaller scale: Factions of humans who make decisions without any real checks on their behavior beyond the environment and the reactions of other factions. And I'm supposed to want a microcosm of global politics in my back yard? No thanks, taxes are fine, please fix the roads so I can get to Chipotle.
The only reason I could see for anyone wanting anything approaching individual sovereignty is if a) they somehow believe that there is no bigger fish in the pond, or b) they're really so naive to have no idea what other people could be capable of doing to them.
I'm not the author (but I know him and he doesn't have an HN account--I've also contributed a chapter currently awaiting as a PR). PRs are certainly welcome.
There isn't a line. We're talking about the human brain, these things are fuzzy. Some things will work better than others, and it'll surely vary between people, and you'll have no idea which are which until you try it. But it seems like the theme is association: Find the common information between the things you're studying.
I have run into this at least twice this week alone with both Nginx and HAProxy pointing at Amazon Elastic Load Balancers. Amazon occasionally rotates out IPs for ELBs, so everything's working fine for weeks and then boom, now we're having a bad day.
As a rule, NEVER EVER use CNAME's within AWS on Route53. You should always use their A Alias function. This provides near instant changes when you need to adjust a record. This only works on aws resources, but it is a great feature they built in.
I totally agree. In these two specific cases, R53 + ELB wasn't going to work for us though, because of reasons. (I don't think I can go into specifics, but they're actual reasons.) Our workaround was reloading the configs (which triggers a DNS cache flush on both Nginx[1] and HAproxy[2]) once every couple of minutes.
I know, I know, I hate it too. We're working on it. Just wanted to share the workaround.
The question does not say cut "into thirds," it says "into three pieces." This - http://i.stack.imgur.com/kEjP0.png - is a perfectly reasonable answer which, assuming the rate of cutting is constant, would result in 15 minutes.
It's a bad question.
Edit: That said, I would have given the same answer as the student, because I think that's the most reasonable interpretation, especially considering the illustration. But the keyword there is "interpretation." The question is ambiguous.
You are correct, but you can trisect that piece of wood an infinite number of ways. The logical equilibrium point is 3 even pieces.
The student chose a ratio of 1,1,1; which is the logical equilibrium point. your image shows 1.5,0.75,0.75; which is the second most logical ratio because it is in the form x + 2y = 3 (which can be trisected an infinite number of ways while maintaining that ratio). The third form would be x + y + z = 3; which can also be trisected an infinite number of ways and would be the least intuitive.
i am agreeing with you, i am just trying to show that it is illogical for it to be 'open for debate'.
There is a game theory term for this type of equilibrium, but i forgot its name. Its the same type of equilibrium as "there are three colors and a number, which one is different?" type sesame street problems.
I didn't see the picture at first, and reasoned just as you exposed.
However, the teacher corrects it by writing "4 = 20". This is plainly wrong and with no possible explanation, since following the above reasoning, cutting in 4 pieces would require: 10 + 10 / 2 + (10 / 2) / 2 = 17.5 minutes.
I can cut a piece of wood into thousands of pieces in 5 seconds. I just slice it across the top a few times with my saw, and all the sawdust that comes off counts as separate pieces.
As someone said below, it's only open for debate if you want to be pedantic. The Dr. Sheldon Cooper's among us may debate it, but it's pretty obvious what the question was looking for. There is even an illustration showing the cut, which would take an identical amount of time.
But even with your picture the answer can be 20 seconds. You're assuming the person is starting at the top of the line and cutting all the way through the board to the bottom. But they could just as easily rotate the board 90° and cut across a different axis. Assuming a 1" thick board, this means they're cutting through 1" of wood on each cut, meaning both cuts take the same amount of time.
this was my first thought, but then I realized the teacher gave justification for his answer.
the problem is poorly formulated. The teacher would have been correct if it had said "it took 10 minutes to cut away 2 pieces from a very large board (thus resulting in 2 cuts, 3 pieces total)", whereas the student's answer assumes a single cut, which is more reasonable.
The other issue is, great mentors aren't usually plainly available on a website; the very act of finding their contact info/introduction and making a convincing pitch for "I'm worth meeting with" is a great filter for experts who (unlike YC, for example) don't have the bandwidth for an open application process.
This is so true, but I think a lot of people haven't had the opportunity to find good role-models in life and something like this could be a first step in the right direction.
The brilliant can be left to blaze their own obscure bildungsroman.
I think the previous comment was talking about the mentors not having time to go through an open-application process, not the people looking for mentors.
Thanks for the screenshot .. we'll fix it. And Thanks for your good wishes :). We'll soon try to create something that will help you get a better sense interest areas of the mentor population inside.
I haven't used the official Twitter app in a long time, so my memory could be failing me, but I'm pretty sure I remember seeing sponsored tweets even on the old version. I thought that was the reason I stopped using it.
Indeed. If Facebook is trying to lock users in, a non-patent-encumbered format with a free BSD-licensed reference implementation seems like the wrong way to do it.
> The poor students weren't poor students because they were female, or because they were non-white, but because they were unintelligent and/or uneducated.
And why is that? If you reject the absurd notion that there's some causative relationship between technical ability/intellect and gender/race, what's the explanation, other than the possibility that those people didn't have the same exposure to the subjects that you did? And that's not even including the confidence factor: Of course a white dude can do this stuff, they do it all the time. Your story seems to suggest we should actually be doing this long before university. I would agree with that.
This part will probably be unpopular, but I'll say it anyway: What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed? If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway? Or me, for that matter - I was part of a similar program in high school[1]. What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship?
[1] http://www.usfirst.org/