I would downvote this if I could. The author clearly does not understand the principles of quantum physics. "Thoughts become things. Whatever you focus on, becomes your reality." Umm, no. Sorry, but your failed attempt at poor physics analogies do not improve your ideas about startups.
talked with a couple of guys from MIT who took 6.001, and asked them if they'd read SICP. They looked at each other and laughed, and said something along the lines of "Haha, ostensibly. I mean, we turned in our homework." Does that represent your experience as well?
If that's a legitimate indicator of wider behavior on campus, then I can see why the professors might question the utility of that book in that setting.
I took 6.001, and that's about how I remember it from back then. It's a great book but if you were going to lectures or willing to wrestle a bit with the problem sets, you didn't really have to touch the text. Sussman (as I recall) was a great prof, but one of the risks of having the book for the course written by the prof is that they may not be as objective about how well it's actually being used by students.
Yeah, I guess that's about right. (usually) go to class, scan the pset and read up on the bits that don't make sense, or better yet, find someone to explain them. I do have some distinct memories of reading the book. I wasn't a great student and I find it a challenge to read lots of technical stuff without a specific purpose, so I'm not sure my experience is representative.
I think I read about 10 pages of it one random day for kicks. I don't even remember them assigning any readings from the book (they might've been on the syllabus, but you could just watch the lectures and do the homework and you'd be fine).
I think it is interesting that this thread (at the the time of posting this comment) has 62 comments and 122 points, while 3 posts of the Bridgewater philosophy (which is quite interesting and a more substantial read than this article) have a collective 7 upvotes and 0 comments.
Mathematics proves things about an infinite class of objects all the time, like, say, the input/output behavior of your program. One technique to do this is induction.
Physical education is the new math. Students don't like to be trapped in stuffy classrooms. They want to be outside and run around in the fresh air and sunshine. Over the semester, not only have my students improved markedly in physical fitness, but they've learned critical problem solving skills. We're playing football. They've developed increasingly sophisticated plays, analyzed defenses and developed counter-strategies. They fluidly execute novel strategies informed by planning and an awareness of the evolving whole-field situation. Clearly, PE is the new math.
WTF? Math has specific content and method. A proof is not a program. A for loop is not an integral. Your vaguely technical subject is not a substitute for math just because your students seem more engaged. Teaching people to think logically isn't the point of math, any more than it is the point of history, biology, literature or, yes, even programming. If your students have fuzzy feeling when problem solving, they probably have fuzzy ideas about math. They haven't been taught clearly. If they're uncomfortable with reasoning in math, they haven't been forced to develop intellectual independence. And foisting of "check the steps" on a computer won't help. And don't get me started on how naive an ideas of correctness that is.
The Curry–Howard isomorphism[1] would beg to differ. I think programming is much closer to math than this comment gives it credit for. In some sense, programming is even stricter than math. When doing math, you just have to satisfy your instructor or your reader. When programming, your program must run on a real computer -- there's no room for hand waving or imprecise arguments.
While I admit it is true in the technical sense of Curry-Howard, it is certainly not true in the sense the OP meant: that learning program is a substitute for learning mathematics.
Let's examine the post in light of C-H. I'm not super familiar with Python, but I believe it is dynamically (that is to say, singleton) typed. This might not correspond exactly to Python, but let's assume there is an any type, product types (for forming tuples in function arguments) corresponding logically to conjunction and function types corresponding logically to implication. Any well-formed expression (e.g. 0) has any type, so any is true as a proposition. Thus, all types are inhabited and all propositions are true. By proof irrelevence, the logical content of any Python program is equal to the constant function 0. In other words, they have no proof content. Thus, I claim the students here are not doing math via programming in the techincal sense of C-H.
I stand by my original claim that they are not doing math by programming in a looser sense, either. I studied computer science, spent a dozen years working as a programmer and now I'm studying math in graduate school.
> I think programming is much closer to math than this comment gives it credit for.
I might have said something like this before I started doing serious math.
You make a mistake by thinking that programming and math are the same, except that programs get "checked" by computer. That's like claiming that video games are more physically demanding than sports because the rules are enforced perfectly.
Math is about understanding why something is true. A program that uses or applies a mathematical idea rarely (never?) contains a proof of that idea's correctness. For a mathematician, testing is insufficient evidence for truth. Proofs are universal and they generally apply to an infinite number of cases. There is a deep qualitative difference between conceptually understanding why something is true and checking a finite number of cases, or even implementing a procedure to check those cases. You can try to belittle mathematical methods by calling them hand waving or imprecise, but programmers are not even trying to do what they do.
I think the issue is not that mathematics is bad, but rather that it doesn't deserve the privileged place it has in the curriculum. Maths above pre-algebra is not generally useful, but instead it is only useful to those who go on to study the more technical subjects (e.g. engineering).
Maths is maths, and will always be a powerful tool. But the author is saying that most people need to learn problem-solving and logic more than they need to learn maths; for most people maths is useful only in that it teaches problem-solving and logical thinking. Thus, replace it with programming.
In my opinion, I think a far better idea would be to replace the 'computer studies' classes with programming. Most of these classes teach how to use Excel and Word, and if they do programming it's only a limited variety using Visual Basic. Modernise, guys!
It's a push notification platform for anything you can build it into. Load up your HN profile and there's a Notifo box to get notified when someone responds to your comment. Apps they put together like Push.ly to notify you when someone DMs/RTs/Mentions you on Twitter (note: they released this before twitter added the functionality to their apps).
My friend uses it on a site for his sales/signup process, when a transaction goes through he knows immediately.
One of the plugins I use the most is their Chrome to Notifo plugin for Google Chrome. If I'm on a page I can hit the button and it will push the page URL to my phone.
Same space, different offering. If you want _mobile_ push notifications, you need a mobile app in the App Store/Android Market that can hook up to APNS/C2DM, et cetera. Notifo does that.
Why couldn't Chad (who posted this) just have written a little summary of the company below the link? Even better, he could have added it to the form. This would leave the potential beta testers out of confusion and wouldn't require useless comments like yours to have to be posted.
Is that so hard?
[edit: I'm getting downvoted for this. Why? Could someone please post a reason why jraines' comment was useful in anyway?]
sigh Fine, I'll bite. I posted that comment for the same reason you posted yours: to discourage a type of comment I consider useless. There's nothing lazier, especially in a forum for hackers, than "what is this and why should I care?!". IMO the right attitude is "wow, something I have never heard of is at the top HN? Awesome, let me take 30 effing seconds to learn about something new that my peers consider important or cool". Then, if you still have questions, ask away, to the benefit of the forum.
Thanks for writing back. I'm sorry if my comment came across as rude, as I really did not intend it to be that way. However, while I also did find mian2zi3's considerably useless, he probably speaks for a lot of people with the same question. lmgtfy is great for the most part. But in this case, the original poster of the link could have been a little more professional and saved the potential beta testers the time to look into why they would want to beta test for the site.
the original poster of the link could have been a little
more professional and saved the potential beta testers
the time to look into why they would want to beta test
for the site.
To be fair Chad was a bit rushed while submitting this; just running out the door to pick me up as we were cutting it close for a drive down to Mountain View to meet with pg.
To be honest, I had to Google those names to find what the languages were like. :) Those are definitely going into the list of languages I would like to take another look at some day.
The game quickly turns into a pachinko machine as the levels get more difficult. I think it takes advantage of pachinko gambling psychology for a lot of its appeal.
