Yeah - so the fair thing to do is to make him homeless when he is 80, right? Dude, does it ever occur to you that some rules are wrong and humans making decisions might be wrong? You are responding to the wrong sentiment.
I remember reading that Texas and California have the highest solar energy production potential in the states, and with the recent spikes in demand, I believe Texas will move closer to utilizing it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120916045134/http://www.nrel.g...)
I have been thinking about it too. I think you definitely need people who are more algorithmically inclined in software, but you also need people who can "engineer".
My current take is that the tech industry is so young that we are still struggling with proper definitions of titles and division of labor.
In my experience, after school I could do all the hard mathy/algo/data structure things, but I had no idea what REST even meant. So all startups instantly rejected me, while FAANG was very excited to have me. I felt like a huge imposter also, because if I were smart, how come I didn't know all the cool stuff that people at hackathons know.
My 2 cents: The author presumably goes to Princeton - the ivy league is in general a tough place to "start learning" things, especially STEM. Few of the staff would teach you the basics of anything, mostly because you are attending a research college, where teaching is the professors' side gig.
I went to an ivy league school, and a large portion of the people in the CS program did competitive programming/knew number theory and discrete math from high school etc. All the problems we got as homework were really intense - I'd consistently do more than 60-70 hours of studying outside of classes to keep up. Mind you, for me CS was/is like crack - I feel like I'd have put in even more time if I didn't need to sleep or want to hang out with my friends.
There are some intro classes, of course, but the quality of those varies a lot.
Edit: I don't mean to discourage people with this post. I was actually one of the few people who didn't have much of a CS/quanty background in my CS classes. My advisor told me to have a backup major in case I fail the tougher required classes, but I made it through.
These are great links. I am not sure we are necessarily glossing over these details. The logistics of war/major construction/other big projects are actually heavily studied, and I'd dare say are interesting to the general public - see this book for example: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great. I'd call it history inspired fiction, but the author goes into a lot of detail about what it could have taken to motivate various peoples to join you for war, what goes into feeding said people etc.
I do agree that for some reason this information is more difficult to obtain - I want to blame popular movie directors who are obsessed with the lone genius trope, that however doesn't reflect reality well.
Interesting discussion/poem though - perhaps if we did a better job at reflecting the importance of all the moving pieces of the machine we'd have a better a priori idea of what it takes to create something big.
The attitude in this thread is the exact opposite of constructive. It is a great library that the person is giving you for free. Yes it can be improved, yes it you should not use it everywhere, but can you at least appreciate the execution and the fact that there is a real person behind it who can read the entitled diarrhea y'all "hur dur the internet should be just html and usenet" ppl are spewing?
HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at.
this is super cool - and you posted the source code!! btw - with all these contributions, this could make for a really cool art piece/perhaps a book :)