I guess my history is almost opposite while achieving similar results. However, I get bunched in the same group and expected to feel privileged and guilty.
I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions.
Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record".
Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans.
Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools:
People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad.
The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher.
After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates.
So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool.
Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled.
It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well.
The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better.
I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience:
The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation.
Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.
I was responding to a post about design, so this reply was about design.
Yeah, it's a subjective opinion. Something looking good is also an opinion.
What I mean by non-functional is that the attempt at design was non-functional on my browser resulting in dead space and unattractive design.
Since this book is about programming, it already sets a precedent for potentially pretty but non-universally-working solutions. Something I personally try to avoid as much as possible.
Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.
Honestly, this all wouldn't normally bother me as there are tons of books whose online sites have OK at best design. And maybe it's a great book, but complimenting it on design specifically seems wrong.
I also stopped using after 0.3 and tried it recently again to speed up some NLP code in Python3 and it hasn't been faster than Python3. Back then I didn't like the poor support for pyjulia, slow string processing, people using unicode symbols as variables, module import system, lack of libraries for more obscure NLP algos, and startup time. I know these aren't major issues for the core users of Julia, but these were my concerns.
The way I wrote the current code in Python was abusing sets and dicts a lot to take advantage of those fast data structs. Rewriting in Julia was fun because it was different and because multiple dispatch is fun.
However, it was roughly the same speed as Python. Ended up sprinkling some Cython on top of Python and resulted in 10x speedup. Didn't take much time to add types/pass pointers instead of strings to functions. I am not at all familiar with C++/Cython.
I think even if they speed strings/dicts up by a lot, there seem to be lots of breaking changes between releases so I wouldn't try it for something big.
I think if Julia is to succeed in the near future in the same way Python is successful for data science, it needs to be more usable for general tasks. Things like web servers, fast JSON parsing, maybe static binaries or easy parallelism. Basically, some more selling points. So far, for me personally Python is faster and easier to read for most of the things I write. At least given comparable amount of work.
I disagree with the company/individual distinction premise but even if you ignore individual contributions it's fairly even. Doesn't seem like a distinctly partisan issue.
Thiel was attacked nonstop and people were organizing to stop using PayPal which he is only tangentially affiliated with.
Uber CEO had to stop his collaboration as Lyft started catching up for the first time in a long time.
Elon also faced a lot of heat and had to qualify his statements. Negative reactions towards him were counteracted by his accomplishments and clean energy contributions.
I think people should collaborate but in a clandestine fashion.
Inviting Trump to Bay area would unleash all the rage against Trump towards the startup community. I'm just afraid it would be a bigger "throw stones at Google buses"
I think it's worse. It might provide some low quality entertainment as a TV replacement, which just takes up people's time. It might be in that person's interest at the time but not in the interest of society in general.
I feel sorry for her, and her story is probably an example of sexism at the workplace. That is when her boss says that Martin's style is feminine and that that is bad.
However, the linked Martin's story is not a good test of sexism, because the one customer example is anecdotal and sometimes if you pretend to swap customer reps, you end up with a better experience because the customer feels like they are "starting over".
The week-long experiment is also a bad example because it is not a double blind test. Martin could have acted differently than he normally does knowing that he signs as a female.
And even if they did do a double-blind test, another reason for more rude replies directed at female employees could be that social expectations are different. That is the same word choice by people of different genders/sexes can imply different things. This is not necessarily "bad".
How would you implement graphemes compatibility if you can have unlimited number of code points combine into a grapheme? Designing an efficient storage solution for such text seems like a nightmare.
Any time you define an upper limit, someone will come up with more emojis that will require larger number of code points per grapheme.
Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because
a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone
We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc
B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.
The whole point is changing it in such a way that everyone "wants" to do these in-demand jobs. Chinese students aren't unhappy with their job choices.
Edit:
I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.
I think treating (1) by lowering requirements is bad because now people will stereotype that that person got there on ez mode.
(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.
The nature of the work in all of these fields is different. My point is that women are not less qualified, but just less interested in a career of doing the kind of work software engineers do. It is very very different from applied math and statistics.
Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part.
women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different.
stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced.
pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.
I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions.
Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record".
Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans.
Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools:
People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad.
The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher.
After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates.
So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool.
Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled.
It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well.
The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better.
I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience:
The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation.
Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.