Hacker News: BigJeffeRonaldo

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "The Tragedy of Newcomb Mott, Who Thought He Could Walk into Soviet Russia"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 11:27:27 +0000

These people hate white American men. Since white women voted majority Trump, they're beginning to receive hate as well. Whether or not reality fits their narrative isn't really relevant. Leftists seem very intent on pushing the race war narrative as much as they are able to lately.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "If Susan Can Learn Physics, So Can You (2013)"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:50:57 +0000

I felt the same way until I got to undergrad and relearned math from the basis of naive set theory and spent time working through the basics (proper definitions, proofs, Dedekind cuts etc.).

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:41:22 +0000

Nobody pays for Netflix; they just use their cousin's/sister's/girlfriend's/etc.'s account.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:37:40 +0000

Recent events have convinced me not to follow such a course of action. Most of the media seems more intent on printing fake news that fits their agenda than honest investigation, leading to the more sarcastic among us to refer to WaPo as Jeff Bezos' blog, etc. The media has a lot to do to recover their standing in my eyes before I'll read their work, much less pay them for it.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Don’t Pursue Programming if You Aren’t Passionate About It"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:13:11 +0000

Passion is not really interesting. I'd rather hire someone who is skilled, easy to work with, and will get stuff done. I don't really need him to get hyped up on caffeine and write medium articles about how passionate he is; I'm paying him to do a job.

I also am not sure what to make of the Op's mention of starting to program at 10. I read my dad's copy of K&R and installed some Linux distribution at that age too, but I didn't make any real progress until I realized that it's just a job and started acting more like a professional.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "“My Code is Self-Documenting”"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 20:23:51 +0000

I can tell you're upset, Vince, so I'll be the one to end this discussion.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "“My Code is Self-Documenting”"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 14:01:10 +0000

This generally won't work for straight forward game theoretic reasons. Boss thinks you're slow->boss brings on h1b consultant willing to pump out spaghetti code and toady up to him->you looking for a new job. Organizations get what they ask for

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "“My Code is Self-Documenting”"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 21:35:22 +0000

But it does. It depends on the organization, but there are groups where chugging coffee, talking a lot, and pumping out dozens of half-working features by coding like a drunk cowboy will get you promoted and recognized as a team player, while pushing back to take time and do things right will have you reprimanded. Many such cases out there.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "“My Code is Self-Documenting”"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 21:00:29 +0000

It's a matter of incentives. Business folks don't care about comments unless they have a dev background. Your options are then to focus on the incentives present in the situation, or materially harm your own life and well-being by working extra hours to make up for your management's inability to manage.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Should gifted students go to a separate school?"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 20:24:19 +0000

If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Should gifted students go to a separate school?"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 20:17:13 +0000

You're asking parents to sacrifice the mental health (via bullying and social issues) (and thus physical issues likely stemming from mental health problems), intellectual development, future earning power, etc. of their gifted children to benefit others. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing my children to a utopian project. These children also often develop social issues, as different IQ buckets have very different social norms (imagine how a 100iq normal person forced to socialize only with <65iq disabled folks would be affected).

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Should gifted students go to a separate school?"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 20:00:17 +0000

I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 20:09:58 +0000

Well, the model at least does not maximize likelihood

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:40:55 +0000

I find it very interesting that many so-called "Ivy Misser" schools such as WUSTL and Tufts have more 1%ers and fewer 60%ers than extremely elite schools such as Princeton and Harvard. Even Yale has a lower ranking on the list. Perhaps the elite of the elite are more concerned with giving their progeny a broad exposure to different classes of people, while more middling members of the upper class concern themselves with status signalling.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "I Didn't Get Hired to Google"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 14:41:05 +0000

This is exactly what I thought when I heard about this guy. He's undervaluing himself bigly. If you obsess over one company, or girl, or whatever else, you take all of your own power away and hand it over to chance. An interview or conversation could fall through for any reason at all. Meanwhile if you're intense enough to study algorithms for 8 months you can probably get a pretty good job at any number of places without wrecking your self-worth if you get rid of the tunnel vision.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Nissan says self driving cars are impossible today"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 05:25:11 +0000

I don't care about self-driving cars until car company CEOs have their kids riding in them. Until then, I am not interested in taking the risk of testing their engineering.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 14:33:31 +0000

Because investment banking is a sales job.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 16:35:16 +0000

Great post. If you have a worse background, you have to fight your way up, whereas those with more family resources just have to not screw up badly and they'll probably end up alright.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 12:45:09 +0000

Well, most states won't let me practice as an engineer, even if I get really good at Solidworks from watching YouTube videos, because I have no background in the field.

New comment by BigJeffeRonaldo in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)"

BigJeffeRonaldo — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 14:24:43 +0000

And this is why Trump's win was so confusing for many citizens if the US--too stuck in their bubble to understand the rest of the world and its happenings. See also Nassim Taleb's essay on the Intellectual Yet Idiot class: https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...