I'm also a college student, but not sure how much authority I have on this matter.
Grades (I think) are only an approximation of your knowledge. Take them with a grain of salt, unless things like financial aid or enrollment hang in the balance. I've gotten F's on a few exams before, but I've also gotten two fantastic internships. Grades won't reflect that.
What kind of things did your professor dock points for? Simple mistakes? Or are they conceptual mistakes? Do you feel that the exam material is relatively important? And did you learn?
I (personally) wouldn't worry about what to feel, but instead took towards a goal (like working at Google!).
> Just making sure I won't be working with idiots.
I think the the interviewer (or company) would probably take this as an insult.
But I do agree with you in that these types of interview questions are pointless. Spitting back an answer verbatim demonstrates nothing.
A neat approach that I've seen people use is to take a you-should-know-this concept such as the merging part of merge sort and put a twist in it, so it isn't a simple spit-the-answer-back, but different enough to require some thought.
"It is unfair to label this poor quality, the author clearly describes a problem with moving a security tool like SSH into the browser."
Yes, I agree. The grandparent does point out a valid problem. However I believe the parent was referring to the sarcastic tone and negativity, which I also believe should be out of place here on Hacker News.
I do not believe that was the point of the article. Extrapolations and technicalities aside, she is showing her perspective of why she is pissed at the cryptoparty community. Personally, I find that somewhat interesting.
> R is currently the lingua franca for academic statisticians. New methods papers, textbooks, and toolkits are much more likely to ship with R libraries and implementations then Matlab or anything else.
Is this the same in industry? I've heard a professor say that SAS is more widely used.
At RIT at least, R and NumPy aren't in the core curriculum. Instead, there is a "Statistical Computing" class which covers SAS. Most students either use Minitab or Excel. Surprisingly (or not), a lot of in-class work is done using a graphing calculator. Of course, that also carries into a lot of the homework.
I wonder, do statisticians actually use graphing calculators to do stats?
I think of my job as essentially that of a statistician (data miner/data scientist/trader/research analyst/whatever you want to call it). I have never used a graphing calculator in my life. If I need to do a quick calculation I open a terminal and boot up R, Python or GHCi, depending on how I'm feeling and how complicated what I need to achieve is.
That's a neat idea. -1 doesn't mean much without a comment explaining why.
I do have a concern, though. If this system is implemented, doesn't that mean that the "new kids" will also have access to this system and may use it to exasperate HN's "new kids" problem?
What about modifying the existing HN guidelines to include comments and promote the guidelines more? For example, cite a downvote with an appropriate quote from the guidelines.
If the current rule applies that says you don't get to down-vote until you reach N karma, the "new kids" don't really get to do much. I for one would value a system that forced a down-vote to be accompanied by some sort of explanation of why. I suppose at less than a year old I am still a "new kid" so I will say in my infancy (a few months old) I had a comment down-voted for reasons that were not obvious to me. I was polite. I didn't say anything negative. Yet I was down voted. When I commented on begin down voted and inquired why, that too was down-voted. Some one was kind enough to explain to me that my original comment was "a generic compliment" and basically useless. It was a pleasant compliment (something the OP seems to be advocating here)... yet still garnered down votes. Ironic, huh?
The tone of that comment came across badly. You pointed out they had made a typo - that was your only feedback. You suggested they might not be a human. You used the word "regret", but you clearly have no regret.
There is no irony as to why you were voted down. It was entirely justified.
I think you may have misread my comment here and are addressing the wrong comment. I was talking about months ago... not in this thread. I understand why I was down voted on the comment you are talking about. Clearly I was being a smart ass... taking the OP's suggestion to the extreme. Some people got it.
But with a clear cut system like the one mentioned above, why shouldn't new members get to downvote as well? The system would clearly convey its intended usage, and in the process bring new members up to speed faster. If you still want to impose a restriction, it definitely shouldn't be karma based.
I find it a bit counter-intuitive. [Assume maximum evil] You're going to allow someone to downvote others based on how quickly and effectively he can troll the hivemind to give him 500-1000 or heck even 5000 karma?
"New" members shouldn't downvote because they might not downvote the right things, or for the right reasons. I do not consider lurkers "new members."
I also disagree with the idea of karma-driven downvote system. However, I wrote the above with the assumption that those who can downvote know HN values and enforce them. As you pointed out, yes the karma-downvote thing doesn't quite accomplish it's goal (assuming the goal is to allow senior members to act as enforcers). It should change. However that wasn't quite the point of my post.
My original point is: if you gonna say smack, gimme a damn good reason why.
Ah yes. You've got a good point. I find it confusing on how to allow downvotes then. Is age of the account a fair measure? Then what about people who've been here without registering, or people who actually have good discretion.
Maybe enforce a stealth downvote. This would be a case where the downvote button is visible but you use heuristics and probabilistic models to determine to whether actually accept the guys' vote or not, and if yes, what weight to assign it.
This is a huge stretch, but will there be any support for noweb?
Whenever I use LaTeX, it's usually for math/physics/stat homework where either computation or graphs are involved. It would be lovely if I could somehow inject (for example)
<<echo=FALSE,fig=TRUE>>=
x <- -5:5
y <- (x - 2)^2 - 5
plot(x, y)
@
That would be really cool -- I use Sweave and R a lot, and I often wish I could do this in writeLaTeX, but I haven't made much progress on it. The server side would be pretty complicated.
Grades (I think) are only an approximation of your knowledge. Take them with a grain of salt, unless things like financial aid or enrollment hang in the balance. I've gotten F's on a few exams before, but I've also gotten two fantastic internships. Grades won't reflect that.
What kind of things did your professor dock points for? Simple mistakes? Or are they conceptual mistakes? Do you feel that the exam material is relatively important? And did you learn?
I (personally) wouldn't worry about what to feel, but instead took towards a goal (like working at Google!).