Andrew Ng, who founded Coursera, is a professor of machine learning at Stanford - I am taking his course right now. I wonder whether, once Coursera has been around for a while, he might use his machine learning knowledge to predict such things as how likely a person is to drop out of a course or to do well in a course, or to compare people based on the university they attended or other factors. Could be really interesting.
This is from 2004, but I thought it was interesting and relevant in today's world of ninjas, rockstars, cowboy coders, and interviewers who think a good programmer has the memory of Von Neumann.
-Linkbait articles rapidly accelerating to the front page while good stuff like questions or Show HN gets lost in "New".
-The slight trend in the community towards vitriol and nasty criticism, which there was a lot of chatter about two or three weeks ago.
In both cases, in my understanding, there's a lot of upvoting of the controversial links/comments from new people with low karma, which is how they're kind of taking control of the community.
I came up with some ideas in the shower about this. First, I thought it might be a good idea to create some logarithmic mapping of karma value to vote weight. The weight wouldn't give the user more karma for being up-voted by a high-karma person, but it would factor into the site's systems. That way, people with more karma have more of an impact on the community.
Second, I thought that the quality of a user's previous submissions should factor into their reputation or something on this site somehow. Maybe HN could look at the trend of votes earned on recent comments and the ratio of downvotes:upvotes or downvotes:views (since controversial comments get upvoted a lot, we want to look at how many times they were downvotes, not the total score since that will probably be very positive regardless of how many downvotes there were) and use that information to somehow affect the user. i.e. if someone is getting a lot of upvotes for mocking someone's project in a nasty but particularly clever way but also getting a considerable number of downvotes, the system should say hey, this guy writes posts that a lot of people don't think belong on our website, and then take action on that somehow.
Note, I'm "new" (198 karma, joined about a year ago) so I may not know what I'm talking about.
I'm the same age as you, Dan, and just started to realize a similar thing. Your post really struck home with me.
Right now I'm in the middle of a seven-month internship with IBM. Back at the start, I distinctly remember when Hacker News was full of articles discussing 42 Floors' open job offer to you, and I felt miserable - "I could be that awesome if only I managed myself better" - and determined to spend the entire seven months in a mad self-improvement frenzy.
At the start of the summer I made this big sheet of paper with little letters and numbers next to each day to be crossed off. There were different things I wanted to do each day - read a bit of this book, work a little on this project - and they were all meticulously planned out. Since the work was divided up into such small chunks, however, it was easy to just miss one because ultimately it didn't matter. I also resented that the paper was planning out my day so much. Once I'd missed one, it was easy to miss another, and pretty soon it all fell apart. I don't think it's a good idea at all to micromanage yourself this much.
Next, I tried making the goals slightly more long-term. I divided up what I wanted to do into months instead of days, making columns for each month between now and January and writing down what I wanted to accomplish in each month, all the books I wanted to read, etc. The problem again was expecting too much of myself and being too strict on myself. When I wrote down a reading list, suddenly reading the books didn't feel enjoyable anymore - it was something I was forcing myself to do and so something that I had to do. Even writing "Do a Rails project" made it less of an enjoyable experience because I felt like I was doing it because I had to instead of because I wanted to, even though I had only written it down in the first place because I wanted to do it.
I've grappled with the second goal set for the last two months, talking to my friends and discussing a lot of the same ideas that you wrote about in your blog. I think you and I both came to the same conclusion, which is that you just need to have some vague idea of where you want to go and go there in a way that you'll enjoy. When the inspiration hits, you'll be free and flexible enough to do something with it, instead of being imprisoned by goals. So right now, my goals are just "Learn more about algorithms and do cool projects", which I'm enjoying a lot more. In particular, I think that we as programmers have a bad habit of assuming that we're capable of a lot more than we actually are, an assumption that kind of handicaps us by making us think we can jump into things in an unrealistic way such that we feel frustrated when we're not as godlike as we imagined.
If this is utterly unreadable, thank Bill Clinton, haha.
The article just says "electronics with backlit displays". I'm surprised it singles out tablets, because unless I'm reading it wrong, that includes laptops, or even television sets. Strikes me as untrue, since almost everybody has these and stares at them all day and not everybody has sleeping problems.
Sleeping problems is a pretty extreme case. If the tablet or laptop pushes your sleep time back to midnight from 10 PM, that could be a large and significant effect even if one doesn't consider it 'a problem'.
(In some groups, this might be a problem, and the paper specifically mentions them: adolescents already have a sleep schedule that has been pushed back by puberty, love their gadgets, and have hard and early wake-up times. The result: highschoolers spend the first few classes half-asleep.)
I got it at a used book store for $5. The second chapter was page after page of code to build an app to be used for the rest of the book. None of it was explained, and of course it didn't work for me and I didn't know if I'd made a typo or if it was just outdated. The book promised that the code would be available online, but the website was defunct. It ended up in the garbage at the end of the school year.
http://notfound-static.fwebservices.be/404/index.html?&a...