When, pray tell, am I supposed to catch up on my correspondence?
In the break, or as a 25 minute project ("reply to/categorise all new emails").
My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
Good thing you were homeschooled then. The latter is much more common than the former.
public school with a good gifted program
What is this mythical thing you speak of? Oh, wait, you did say "America".
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as "public schools with good gifted programs".
In fact, for most of the population, there is simply no such thing as "public schools with gifted programs". I suspect that for a significant fraction of countries, you could even drop the "public" part altogether.
On another note, most of the "Cons" listed after "After Algebra II, you're on your own" seem to be situational and just as likely to occur in a public school as in homeschooling. Including the part about a sense of position. Public high schools don't always give you a good accurate sense of your position applied in the real world, they usually instead give you a sense of how much things are broken.
So all in all, I'd say as far as education goes for most people in the world, or even for most people in first-world countries, or even for most middle-class-or-higher children living in urban environments, if the listed cons are really the worst of it then you've had a comparatively superb education.
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as "public schools with good gifted programs".
To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.
(Link to How Not To Sort By Average Rating.)
Something of interest: Jeffery's interval. Using the lower bound of a credible interval based on that distribution (which is the same as yours) will probably give better results than just using the mean: it handles small sample sizes more gracefully. (I think, but I'm certainly willing to be corrected.)
But I fear that it would cause irreparable damage if the world settles on this solution.
This is probably vastly exaggerating the possible consequences; it's just a method of sorting, and either the Wilson's interval method and a Bayesian method are definitely far better than the naive methods.
Happy New Year, LWers, I'm on a 5 month vacation from uni, and don't have a job. Also, my computer was stolen in October, cutting short my progress in self-education.
Given all this free time I have now, which of these 2 options is better?
- Buy a road bicycle & start a possibly physically risky job as a freelance bike-messenger within my city ( I'm that one guy from Nairobi )in order to get out of the house more, then buy a laptop and continue my self-education in programming, computer science, philosophy, etc.
or
- buy a laptop, do quick and easy wordpress websites for local businesses, then buy the bike and use it for leisurely riding under no pressure? I only have money for either one or the other for now, and for some reason I'm hesitating. Maybe it's because I want to do both. This is important to me, and I'll appreciate any discussion on this. Thanks.
I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.
Kurzweil has joined Google as Director of Engineering. (Discussion on Hacker News.)
I think EY had a post about the death of his brother. Anyone know where that is?
(Speaking of which, the HPMoR link here should probably be updated to point at hpmor.com, since that now seems to be the canonical source.)
Option 1: Close the borders. It's unfortunate that the best sort might be kept out, while its guaranteed the rest will be kept out. The best can found / join other sites, and LW can establish immigration policies after a while.
Option 2. Builds. Freeze LW at a stage of development, then have a new build later. Call this one LW 2012, and nobody can join for six months, and we're intent on topics X Y and Z. Then for build 2013 there are some vacancies (based on karma?) for a period of time, and we're intent on topics X Q and R.
Option 3: Expiration date. No matter how good or bad it gets, on date N it closes shop. Then it is forked into the This-ists and the Those-ians with a few Whatever-ites that all say they carry the torch and everybody else is more wrong.
Option 1: Close the borders. It's unfortunate that the best sort might be kept out, while its guaranteed the rest will be kept out. The best can found / join other sites, and LW can establish immigration policies after a while.
This isn't so ridiculous in short bursts. I know that Hacker News disables registration if/when they get large media attention to avoid a swathe of new only-mildly-interested users. A similar thing could happen here. (It might be enough to have an admin switch that just puts a display: hidden into the CSS for the "register" button; trivial inconveniences and all.)
Beats me. I wasn't even the least qualified person; some of my coworkers could barely speak English. The Alice Springs unemployment rate was less than 3% at the time, not counting backpackers.
View more: Next
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
The rparen in your Ozymandias link needs escaping: [this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics\)) --> this guy. (I estimate p=0.5 of my not having screwed up the markup myself, but I'll fix it if I have.)
EDITED to add: harrumph, it appears that LW undocumentedly implements an extension to Markdown where a bare URL is turned into a link, and I haven't found any way to stop the linkifying without also changing what is displayed. So you might notice that the colon above is italicized, which is a really crappy workaround. Maybe there's a better one.
If you wrap text in a pair of back ticks (`) then it gets displayed as "code" so left unmodified by the markdown parser.
(E.g.
[this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics\)))