While we're talking about currency, why hasn't anybody in the US(to my knowledge) made a payment processor that works by generating transaction numbers, and then sending those numbers instead of sending people payment authentication credentials?
Let's say George wants to give Sally $5.
1. George logs into his PayCo. account. He clicks generate transaction, amount $5. The server returns a very long randomly generated key.
2. He copy-pastes that key into Sally's pay-info server.
3. Sally sends that key to PayCo.'s server, money changes hands, and the key is no longer valid.
This "rebranding" is obnoxious. If I was kid I'd be pissed. Kids can tell when you're bs'ing them. They're exposed to enough propaganda already.
The path to healthy food isn't in telling kids what to do, but exposing them to something better. Look at what Japanese kids eat. I _know_ kids would prefer salmon-roe onigiri and fried rice to potato chips and twinkies.
No, no it wouldn't. It would be more effective to stop subsidizing unhealthy food. The long-term effects of such legislation are almost guaranteed to be a net-negative because of edge cases. There are already way too many laws. You should always look first at what can be removed, rather than what can be added.
When you actually read this what do you do? You work inside-out to understand it. You figure out what 'data-set' is, then you figure out what '(lambda (x) ...) does to it, and so on.
You (or me at least) also write the code inside-out. You start with the data, and an idea of how to transform it, and you work your way towards that transformation.
Depending on where you live, the hottest hours of the day are usually between 12 - 5. Maybe it's instinctual for predators to not want to do stuff during those hours?
"Let’s begin with the Perry Preschool Experiment, which consisted of 123 low income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan."
and three sentences later...
"The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times."
The above passage contains the only numbers I could find (cited paper's behind a paywall).
Those numbers mean _nothing_.
123 people
20 % more likely to graduate = 67 graduated, 56 did not 67 - 56
The author suggests that 11 people graduated high school because of pre-school. He/she could have said "11 more people graduated high school than did not", but he/she didn't. Tried to obfuscate it.
"19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times."
They obviously tried to find something that reinforced their point instead of looking at reality. They didn't say "19 percent fewer arrests", they said "less likely... more than 5 times". Because the real difference in mean arrests is probably much smaller.
Again the study is behind a paywall so I can't read it, but I suspect they're not even wrong.
I lived in Japan for two months. I've been to China for a week. I'm fluent in Japanese and I've taken a Mandarin class.
There is no doubt in my mind that English is the superior language and we'd all be better off if the Chinese would learn English rather than the other way around.*
* We'd probably be better off still if we all learned Esperanto, oh well.
Bill Gates was well-connected from the birth. You can't learn to have a rich lawyer as a father.
Microsoft didn't build an OS for IBM. The group that actually built the OS probably turned down IBM's offer because they couldn't get away with what Microsoft did.
There's very little admirable about what Bill Gates did to get where he is, and unless you have connections like him you probably shouldn't try to succeed doing similar things.
And yes, I know "How to Win Friends and Influence People", etc. etc. There are plenty of people who are much, much smarter than Bill Gates who tried to do similar things and failed, or weren't nearly as successful because they weren't born into it.
Bill Gates dad is the co-founder of one of the largest law firms in Seattle, and his mom knew IBM's CEO. Being well connected is not a skill*. If somebody with fewer connections tried to pull off what he did it'd probably bite'm in the ass.
If conveying that information in your voice is useful, it's also very useful to be able to fake it. I lifted weights in high school, went wakeboarding with people and (briefly) went to an MMA gym. I've met skinny people with deep voices and ripped people with high voices and vice versa. I wasn't able to find a link to the original study, but I think they're completely wrong, and the correlation is nonexistent or negligible.
Single quoting lets you pass a list without evaluating it.
(car (eval '(a b c))) vs. (car (a b c))
Do the same thing.
Have you read SICP? Somewhere in the 1st-3rd chapter there's an explanation of first-order evaluation that scheme uses. Once you know how scheme evals sexps, it makes sense that quote skips some of the steps of evaluation.
I strongly recommend the SICP/Little Schemer/Seasoned Schemer if you haven't heard of them.
“With the Internet it has exploded, but a lot of chief and command officers didn’t understand and chose to put their resources in things like burglary or homicides.”
This is probably the most egregious example of justifying something "for the children". I'd much rather the police department put resources into catching murders. Murder is worse.
I don't think the law should have anything to do with this. He didn't do anything hard. He was only able to get away with what he did because Harvard was to lazy to verify his documents. Harvard charges $33k/semester, at that price they can afford to take the time to verify _every_ applicant's information.
I always thought that a pair of video-glasses would be great for coding -- Any HNers here who've used a Heads-Up-Display? Do you think they're good enough for coding yet?
I don't think grades/school should be used for employment at all.* Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal.
1. Most programmers in the US go through 16 years of school. The final 8 have an effect on where you end up. Of the first four(high school) only about 1/3 of your time is spent on math/science* * . Of the final 4(at the two colleges I attended) only about 2.5 years are spent on math science. Of that 2.5 years only about 1.5 are computer-science specific.
This means you're determining somebody's programming competence based on information (What college and grades)
that is less than half(48%) based on math/science proficiency and less than quarter(19%) based on computer science.
2. They're subjective. Especially liberal arts(i.e. MOST of school).* * *
3.It's incredibly expensive. Computer science and math cost next to nothing, but for some reason I'm supposed to give some school 60k over 4 years to spend about a quarter of my time studying what I'm interested in.
4.If you test out of a class it doesn't count for grades. If I work very hard and do 16 weeks of calculus in 3 and take a test, I get credit. If do nothing and just ace the class I get an A to pad my transcript. This creates a DIRECT incentive to do less.* * * *
* I am absolutely all for hearing about research/coding/contests I don't think schools opinions should matter at all.
* * I mention high school grades because high school grades determine which school you go to.
* * * Yes, math and science in high school/college can be and frequently are subjective as well. Teachers give credit for effort/showing work on problems/homework/etc. etc.. My high school algebra grade was a C despite getting 90+% right on exams because I didn't do the homework and the teacher wasn't satisfied with my explanations.