A wealthy, white, educated, privileged male who is incredibly talented and who won both the birth and tech lottery back in the 90's is now whining about the government taking too much in taxes?

Cry me a fucking river.

There are tens of millions of poor Americans & immigrants working as a permanent class of indentured laborers, while a smaller pool of the middle class are slowly being bled to death, both physically and economically(who's kids are more likely to die in foreign wars, the rich or poor?), by our American culture's inhumane, cruel war mongering fetish.

Yet the rich fucks who have to pay the majority of the taxes, and who already get to keep the majority of the profits for their own lavish life styles feel entitled enough to complain that their slice of the pie isn't big enough? Seeing this appalling attitude of entitlement everywhere makes me so angry, and I wish I could just open these ignorant people's eyes, hearts & minds.

There's a good reason I have little interest in the rambling, detached kooky political and economic opinions of luminaries from the tech world. Stick to hacking code and making entertainment software, and stay out of running the real world.

That's the peril/blessing of embracing open source—given enough time, no matter how good you are, you will end up competing with free and/or a free clone of yourself!

Then let folks just arrange for their own hosting(Heroku could become perfect for this), or host it locally, and install & run it themselves. What if many, many more companies would use a Basecamp-like app if they could run it inside their corporate firewalls?

Basecamp is not rocket science. Its core is a dozen pages give or take, and a bunch of standard CRUD. It does look polished, very well designed and thought out, and is highly usable. It's a showcase example of what a great web app should be. Yet almost all of these unconventional parts that seem like they would need heavy lifting configuration could be automated away.

Sure it's a bit of a dick move to make a white room clone, even though it happens all the time, and is almost the very definition of the majority of popular open source software. However, after several years, once some innovative software becomes mainstream, can it still claim exclusive right to the ephemeral methods of implementation? Once the knowledge of those methods, and the usage patterns are learned and spread throughout a community, the value of the knowledge plummets. Before it became obvious to everybody, sure, it would have been enormously difficult to create Basecamp from scratch. But after everyone has seen Basecamp and used it, it's funny that it now seems obvious that is how it should be done. It's like the software patent issue essentially.

I'd be curious to know the true cost of each Basecamp user in terms of hardware, network and storage cost. What if it's oh say $1.00 on average? Then it would be profitable for some company like Heroku who specializes only in streamlined, small Rails app hosting to butt in and sell hosting for a cheap price like $5. The software is free, the hardware is not, to steal a page from the Apple play book. That would bleed 37signals' profit margins. Isn't it fun to play race to the bottom pricing of software as it crystalizes into a commodity over a few years? Sure a few years ago, Basecamp would be difficult to make. But 2 years from now? I don't know if the assumption holds that 2 years from now it will still be non-trivial to clone Basecamp in such a way we haven't even thought of nor seen on the web. Markets move quickly, especially in software. Everyone knows competition is a bitch, especially when the goal posts keep moving, and while the technology playing field itself undergoes rapid, constant geologic & volcanic upheaval.

The workflow in Basecamp itself is a great template for creating other kinds of web apps outside of project management and address books. Many other kinds of businesses have similar workflows that could be represented in a souped up Basecamp without too many modifications. An open source clone could also serve as a good boiler-plate starter app for developing more customized Basecamp-like apps. What if the value of that is more profitable than selling Basecamp itself?

Mainly I'm talking about the topics in and related to the famous paper What Computers Can't Do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Computers_Cant_Do

Before I get nitpicked for generalizing NLP/ML to all out "Hard AI", I would like to note that almost all of the most trivial language processing tasks we meatsacks perform a billion times per day in our daily lives involve the semantic interpretation of abstract representations. It would be trivial to sit down and begin enumerating specific types of word and association problems that a child could perform, but which no supercomputer with a 1,000 engineers toiling it on could solve in the general sense.

By no means am I saying that everyone in the field should not full court press ahead on the state of the art, as we'll never get there unless we try. I am asking about the extent that real-world NLP/ML use is constrained enough so as to be nearly worthless hokum buzzwords. (i.e. analytics, recommendation engines for pre-conditioned, overtrained and context-free representations, behavioral profiling for ads, statistical models of dynamical systems, etc.)

I hope this doesn't come off as being negative, as I'm really more interested in the question of Hard AI and how it relates to computational linguistics problems we can solve today or in the near future without some kind of unforeseen "singularity" level break through in AI. Or is the general state still as bad as when Minksy demolished perceptrons, causing the "nuclear winter decade" in AI?

I don't have a PhD, just a pure math undergrad with a high motivation to have kept going at it, and this topic itself is so obscure & difficult that it's not often one has the chance to ask someone who knows, so I am very interested in the perspective of present day researchers.

Without fail, every single interviewer in my experience was looking for an answer strictly in terms of whatever language(s) they're using at the company, or whatever language the interviewer is most familiar with. If you stray outside of what they know and what they're looking for, they have no idea what you're talking about.

Polymorphism in Java is slightly different than for Ruby than for C than for Haskell than for yadda, yadda. No matter what, it's always going to be somewhat arbitrary and tied to some kind of language dependent implementation or feature. If your language doesn't even have classes, the answer is different, if your language doesn't have functions, it's different, etc, etc.

I suppose the closest thing to a right answer would be to define it in pure mathematical terms using Turing machine notation, so as to make it universal. However I have no idea if such an answer even exists. If anyone has seen such a thing, please do share it.

A better version I would ask would be: define polymorphism using x86 AT&T assembly. or: define what polymorphism represents

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

—Michel de Montaigne

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

—Thomas Edison

If we as a society are contributing money and other collective resources to make higher education possible, yet more than half of the young people dropout, then it's pretty clear that most of them do not have the "abilities" to succeed at higher ed. However, it is far more likely that higher-ed itself is structured completely wrong. If the system fails most people, then most people are not failures, but rather it is the system itself that is the failure.

Granted it is highly debatable what "abilities" refer to, and what "success" entails. Both are mostly arbitrary markers which will be wildly different for everybody.

I tend to view things from a different perspective—I'm a cheerleader for the notion of the classical Liberal Arts education, and learning for the sake of becoming a Better Fucking Human Being, not for the purposes of some phony job in a phony society performing whatever phony crap those in power have commanded.

By disengaging education from mere financial concerns, my biggest problem with all of this is not that we have thousands of massively underemployed people, but that we have the social expectation that the most educated deserve to be the big shots, manage everything, do little real work, and collect most of the profit just for showing up. Sorry, in this society, you only get those entitlements by luck of birth, inheritance or marriage. Just going to fucking college and earning a piece of paper does not automatically grant it to you.

Entitlement is really what this article is about, but the author can't just come out and say it, because that would piss off his audience even more than his Bell-Curve innuendo. (Don't even get me started on why some of the most entitled people are incapable of acknowledging it, and pretend otherwise). Many academics are outraged that their so-called highest achievements don't guarantee a high status role in society outside of academia. But the truth is that the value of education and learning is insignificant if you're measuring it by economic metrics. And society at large worships wealth and fame. Just because you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust doesn't mean you deserve jack shit from society. Even though there is no way in hell anyone could read Proust and not be enriched and transformed as a person in incalculable ways.

This whole article and debate is really an Apples-versus-Oranges false dichotomy, and I'm not sure why I got suckered into writing this long reply. :P

tldr; Being really smart and highly educated should have little to no correlation to your social & financial status in society.

— Isaac Newton

In many respects, math has a totally unfair advantage over every other subject you could possibly study in college because it can be learned almost without needing any other people. Well, living people that is, as you do need the books of long deceased thinkers. (I'd say this also applies to philosophy, and hardly anything else). You just need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time alone in contemplation reading.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

— Blaise Pascal

There's also a very limited social component layer such as you would find in medicine, law, politics, economics, et al. To become a doctor, or any kind of "professional", sure, it requires a massive social apparatus on top of a high degree of actual learning. You have to have connections, know the right people, say the right and popular things to them, be supported and credentialed by the leadership and their agenda, and basically imposture one's self into mimicking whatever behaviors and traits are specific to and dominant in whatever professional field you're studying. Eventually your identity morphs into this set of learned behaviors, and it's almost entirely built upon your position in some type of social hierarchy.

Not so with math. You either know some theorem and the proof, or you don't. How much you know and how advanced you are is entirely dependent upon what you have worked through on your own. What new stuff you can create only comes from what old stuff you already know. None of this has anything to do with interacting with people. Sure, you can benefit by talking to other mathematicians, attending lectures, conferences, teaching others, etc, but at the end of the day, at some point, you still have to sit down and learn the material by yourself. And if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how much of a social butterfly you are—you can't be a mathematician.

No man is an island, but I imagine a Robinson Crusoe type figure would have no such problems becoming a mathematician on a desert island, given enough math books(and some kind of Internet connection).

Anyway, if you're trying to make me regret choosing mathematics as one of my examples, y'all have won. I see no molecular biologists have popped up to advocate for self-taught molecular biology.

I've read that the last Universal mathematicians we've had were Chebyshev and Poincare, who could claim to know "all of math", and who were active in research in nearly every sub-field. It's been over 50 years since their time, and much like the fabled Renaissance Man, that frontier is now closed.

Let us compare: Founded by a charismatic visionary, check. Highly aesthetic products, check. Fulfilling dreams of fantasy and the future, check. Communities of cult followers, check. Popularity driven by youth culture, check. Spare no expense nor detail to achieve perfection in design, check. I could keep going...

If the average cop salary is set at some X amount higher than non-cops, then they are Y percent less likely to be on the take. If our police are a lot less corrupt, then overall, society pays more, but in theory receives an equal yet intangible benefit from better law enforcement in general.

However, it is unreasonable to be giving near 100% raises over 2 year periods like we see in this data. In these cases, they are obviously gaming the system to increase their pension payouts. This is an unintended consequence of basing pension payouts on the salary of a person's last year of employment.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, it's very difficult to become a highway patrol officer. Just getting into the academy is hard to do. But apparently once you're in, you're set for life with a decent salary and these last-year-pay-raise games to make sure you have an unreasonably large pension as well. Artificially limiting the supply of officers in this way allows them to spread their budget over fewer people at the expensive of a smaller force.

In this system, Californians lose out not only on tax dollars that go to artificially inflated pensions, but with a smaller number of on-duty officers as well. If anything, this sounds like corruption to me.