Either you're deaf, or your standards are very low. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I personally know tens of musicians, and most aren't even that talented, who make Lady GaGa look like the proto-amateur she is. Her talent is to sell, not to make music. Last but not least: she's ugly as hell. But then, so was Britney Spears 10 years ago, and that didn't stop her from becoming "successful".
It's sad to read the comments on the NYTimes article. Even people who claim to have years of experience in the "field" can't tell the difference between Computer Science and computers. Dijkstra said it all:
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
In my most humble opinion, the value of CS education is not to prepare young people for a job in IT. Instead, its value is in teaching young people how to think in an abstract and rigorous manner. This is much more valuable, and it's useful regardless of what one's future career path is.
These days students think they can hack everything. They think they can BS on their homework essays, they think they can BS on their exams, they abstain from precise reasoning because it's too much work. Well, guess what? You can't BS a computer. All those sub-human morons commenting on the NYTimes article, the ones who work in IT and who are so afraid of outsourcing, should keep in mind that CS education is, at its core, applied philosophy and applied math. The label "Computer Science" is a misnomer. Yet once again, I blame the Bourbakists. If Turing had lived a few decades before, Theoretical CS would be a part of Math, not a separate field.
"In my most humble opinion, the value of CS education is not to prepare young people for a job in IT. Instead, its value is in teaching young people how to think in an abstract and rigorous manner."
How can one disagree with such a goal? Yet surely any education should aim to teach the young how to think rigorously, and abstraction should be one of the tools. What then distinguishes CS education from what the should be doing across the quad in the departments of philosophy/history/literature?
Philosophy is mostly games of words that lead nowhere. Wittgenstein wrote all about it. History is interesting, but too ambiguous and too subjective. Literature is to be enjoyed, not to be analyzed. CS is rigorous Philosophy and, hence, it's a good mental exercise that one can't get in other fields of knowledge.
When you design an algorithm and implement it in code, the computer will not allow you to be ambiguous and imprecise. You made a wrong assumption? Sorry, your program won't work. No partial credit for you. It's tough, but it's fair.
When I read your post, I thought 'I bet this guy programs in Haskell'. And seeing your submissions I think I was right!
Humor aside, I agree. I think it's also a big problem in (general) AI: the usual cycle is someone thinks about a clever-sounding but vague and completely arbitrary theory of thought, then starts coding it up and fails to get anything really interesting. Early lisp programs were just one of these attempts at hacking away an AI. I think what we need is an abstract, mathematical language to describe intelligence. AIXI, as mathematical as it may be, doesn't fit the bill; it's one particular AI, not a language sufficient to describe AIs and their properties.
I don't have a problem with the Bourbakists doing very abstract and rigorous Math. After all, Math was an edifice built on quicksand until they came along. I think they contributed a lot.
However, I also think the Bourbakists created a monster, which was this notion that the "Greek method" was the only valid one, and that the "Babylonian method" was to be avoided. Even Combinatorics was considered "unworthy" of great minds. All geometrical intuition was frowned upon. Applications were laughed at. All of a sudden, Math became sterile. Interestingly, Turing's work, in a sense, derived from Hilbert's program to make the foundations of Math solid. The fact that Theoretical CS exists outside of traditional Math is nothing more than an historical accident. Computability is pure Math. Computational Complexity is still a bit "dirty" but it's also rather fundamental.
I never thought I would say this one day, but I believe that puritanical attitudes exist for a reason. Not that long ago, one could die of syphilis. Many other STD's would result in infertility. The sexual revolution is only a few decades old, and it was made possible by penicilin, antibiotics and advances in Medicine. You call anti-sex attitudes "ridiculous", while "anachronistic" would perhaps be a better word.
The other half is that a person with a large number of prior sexual partners is more likely to cheat in a long-term relationship, less likely to be sexually satisifiable by one person, and less able to form the intense bonds of trust and love that a relationship requires.
Thus, the "puritannical" stance on casual sex is as relevant and useful today as it ever was. In fact, it's more useful now than it was 1000 years ago; although STDs are much more curable, raising children is considered to be a 20+ year, shared process, making the intact family desirable.
What's disgusting is the double standard-- the stud/slut dichotomy-- that allows men to behave badly with few consequences. My opinion is that women have the power to end the double standard; if women stop being attracted to promiscuous men, for a man to be slutty will be seen as being as foolish and self-damaging as it is for a woman, and the double standard will disappear.
Where's the injustice? I doubt the Kamprad family has cost the Swedish welfare state what the state wants to tax them. He's merely doing what's best for him, instead of subsidizing the education and medical care of other parents' children. Frankly, I don't see any injustice.
I strongly disagree. This has very little to do with Excel Solver. This seems to be Microsoft's take at large-scale, real-world optimization problems, possibly with millions of variables and constraints. Can you do that with Excel? I doubt it. This Solver Foundation framework can do Constraint Programming, Quadratic Programming, and Mixed-Integer Programming. This is serious optimization, not the kiddie stuff Excel users deal with. SF seems to be based on commercial C++ solvers such as MOSEK.
I would say that open-source is not of great interest in optimization software. The idea is to write as little code as possible, and to trust that everything performance-critical has been optimized. Even speed is not the main issue for me. I want something that is flexible. I want to write little code because the less I write the less bugs there are. Correctness trumps everything else.
If I am using SF to allocate investments, I want to make sure an optimal solution is found, even if it takes a little longer. Computer time is cheap. Buy a bigger computer. Developer time is more precious. There are only 24 hours in a day.
You want to change the source code? With all due respect, but I would speculate that 99,9999% of HN users are not qualified to write numerical optimization code. Looking at it is of little use unless you have a PhD in Applied Math and years and years of experience.
Of limited use to HN readers? To those writing web-apps, perhaps. Those doing Machine Learning will probably be ecstatic to find this.
This is the guy from the hanselminutes interview...
Solver Foundation is not a port of Excel Solver - it is a ground-up implementation in managed code (C#). As TriinT said, the focus is on addressing optimization problems that commonly occur in finance, engineering, supply chain, etc. It's fair to say that there are things that Excel Solver offers that Solver Foundation currently does not (e.g. nonlinear programming), and things Solver Foundation offers that Excel Solver does not. In particular, there is a roster of solvers that are all accessible from a consistent, .Net friendly API.
It's not open source, but there is a solver plug-in model which allows you to use other solvers in place of the ones supplied by our team. In particular, open-source solvers such as lp_solve are supported.
I, too, would love to hear from someone who has tried this software. By the way, I found an interview with Nathan Brixius, a senior developer working on the Microsoft Solver Foundation library:
Regarding similar software, there's MOSEK and a bunch of others whose logos show up on Solver Foundation's website. If you like to code in Python, there's CVXOPT and CVXMOD. If you're into MATLAB, there's CVX and Yalmip.
The lesson is that whatever flying machine we are able to design, it will always pale in comparison to Nature's flying machines. If humming birds had nothing to teach us, papers such as the following one would not be published:
"Those super-sonic eagles are extremely elegant. And, why do we bother with 747s when ostriches are so much more efficient."
For starters, please do note that I wrote flying machines. As far as I know, ostriches do not fly. Besides, supersonic is not that impressive. Hell, a rocket can move at hypersonic speeds. When you design a fighter jet that is as maneuverable and energy-efficient as a hummingbird, please let me know.
Wikipedia: "With the exception of insects, hummingbirds while in flight have the highest metabolism of all animals, a necessity in order to support the rapid beating of their wings. Their heart rate can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute, a rate once measured in a Blue-throated Hummingbird.[9] They also consume more than their own weight in nectar each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. Hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death, and are able to store just enough energy to survive overnight."
Good find. But what is the efficiency of the nectar -> mechanical energy conversion? If you fly a F/A-18 at afterburner, you will be out of fuel pretty quickly, too. The issue is: how much of the chemical energy stored in the fuel is transformed into mechanical energy?
In any case, you're picking on the wrong issue. The hummingbird can hover better than a Harrier or a JSF. If you want to start an argument, pick on that.
> The issue is: how much of the chemical energy stored in the fuel is transformed into mechanical energy?
Hmm - you claimed that the hummingbird was "better", but you don't know the relative efficiency.
It's unclear how the existence of supersonic rockets tells us that birds, which can't go supersonic, are better than planes which can. There isn't a bird that has the payload of a Cessna, let alone a 747.
> The hummingbird can hover better than a Harrier or a JSF. If you want to start an argument, pick on that.
What definition of "better" are we using? I've yet to see a hummingbird which can carry a person, which a Harrier can do.
Hummingbirds are quieter than Harriers, but if I want to break something, they're rather useless.
Let us agree that this discussion is pointless due to lack of reliable performance metrics. In general, biological systems are orders of magnitude better than systems engineered by humans and, hence, I mentioned that we have a lot to learn from Nature. Sure, a hummingbird does hover but it can't attack enemy tanks like the Harrier does. We're talking apples and oranges here. However, look at the size of the brain of a hummingbird and how little power it must consume when compared to the powerful computers that run the control algorithms necessary for the JSF to hover. It's humbling. But Nature had millions and millions of years to come up with such solutions, and we, humans, have been flying for merely 106 years. Maybe we'll catch up.
> Let us agree that this discussion is pointless due to lack of reliable performance metrics.
Except that there are reliable performance metrics. We've seen a couple - cargo capacity, speed, energy efficiency, ability to destroy tanks. There are others.
> In general, biological systems are orders of magnitude better than systems engineered by humans
Hmm - weren't you just claiming that there weren't reliable performance metrics? Then in the very next sentence you claim something about the relative values of said metrics.
> hence, I mentioned that we have a lot to learn from Nature.
I suspect that this is the reason why you're so invested in the "nature is better" idea. However, the fact that we can learn from nature does not imply that nature is better.
When I studied Biology in high-school I found it beautiful but boring to study because it was too descriptive. Many years later, after having done various kinds of engineering, I must say I am amazed at living systems. Now I see connections between biological systems and systems engineered by humans. I see feedback loops everywhere. I think in terms of robustness and fragility.
Saying that "we have a lot to learn from nature" is almost a vacuous statement. Nature is so complex, that there are billions of opportunities to learn from it and to design bio-inspired systems. An example: neural processing is orders of magnitude more power-efficient that CMOS. Sure, our brain can't do arithmetic at high-speed, but if we lose a bunch of neurons, our brain still works. Humans can literally lose parts of their brain and survive and function. It's amazing. By contrast, a dust particle on a Silicon wafer is enough for a CPU to malfunction.
This fascination with nature has a dark side, too. Just because evolution has attained such quasi-perfect designs, it does not mean we can do the same. Neuromorphic electronic systems never got anywhere. People in the 1980s talked so much about analog VLSI and neural networks, and I haven't seen that much coming out of it.
The problem with being fascinated by something is that being in awe is not always the most productive way. Sometimes despizing something works much better. Whatever. I am not saying anything deep, and cheap philosophy never got anyone to actual achievement, to building actual things that actually work. Hence, I shut up.
"I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction."
No one has ever been able to predict where technology is going. This one is for you to tame your forecasting proclivities and for the moron who's downvoting my comments without explaining where my argument is weak. Cheers.
Say that to da Vinci. His flying machines were inspired by birds. He studied Nature and tried to build machines based on the same principles as those that allowed birds to fly. Of course, that led his astray, because it's hard to design machines that fly by flapping their wings. However, the structural part remains. Take a look at how airplanes are designed these days, and you will see that their structure somewhat resembles the bone structure of actual birds.
Last but not least: never say never, and never predict more than 10 years into the future. In 20 years your predictions might be ridiculed.
"Volfbeyn said that he was instructed by his superiors to devise a way to 'defraud investors trading through the Portfolio System for Institutional Trading, or POSIT,' an electronic order-matching system operated by Investment Technology Group Inc. Volfbeyn said that he was asked to create an algorithm, or set of computer instructions, to 'reveal information that POSIT intended to keep confidential.'"
Now, you didn't think they used Black-Scholes, did you?! If you did, then: welcome to the real world!
