Early 30s, undereducated, curmudgeonly, senior software developer here.

Not only is math my weakest area, but that weakness was probably partly due to my self-defeating and self-fulfilling belief that I didn't *need* much math, so I got my CS degree from a shitty university with just through Calc 2 and a couple non-calculus-based stats classes. No linear algebra, no dynamics, no quantum-anything, no Fourier analysis, no algebraic topology, no number theory, no discrete math, etc..

And so I've spent the last decade writing stupid CRUD-and-forms apps. It's boring shit that only pays high-5-figures (in my top-3-by-population U.S. city as I work in university research, though I am repeatedly sought by some of the biggest names among tech employers. But I choose my current employer for the work-life balance).

But to go anywhere more-interesting -- say, working on self-driving cars, or data-mining stocks or health data, or building robots -- I need more math. Shit.

I have taught myself some linear algebra from a LA book, at least, as well as learned some slightly less-basic stats (e.g. Markov models) and taken a couple graduate-level CS courses in AI and ML. But it's definitely not enough to break-free of my self-imposed intellectual chains.

So, get as much math as you can -- not because you'll definitely use it (maybe, maybe not), not because it's fun (but if it is for you, great; it is for me, when I understand it), and not because it's important for its own sake (by definition, anything that isn't eventually useful is useless), but because it gives you FLEXIBILITY later in life. And you have no way of knowing, a priori, whether you will need that flexibility.

I'm not original in this thinking. Learning more math is what Nassim Taleb would consider an example of "robustification" -- becoming robust against unknown undesirable future "bad" events or scenarios.

My strong advice: Don't be so damned efficient - or arrogant/overconfident - in your learning that you fail to robustify yourself against a future you that is smarter and wiser than the current you.

But is /dev/null web-scale?: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale :-)

This. I would shower you with mod points, if I could.

As a professional developer since the early 2000s, I've been saying the exact same things about agile processes ever since I was introduced to them. I've come to like TDD (if it's taken as a guideline rather than an ideology in which perfect code-coverage is achieved), if it's combined with heavy, Waterfall-like requirements analysis up-front, and a reasonable amount of documentation.

But on the whole, everything else seems to be a management trick to try to screw devs into longer hours for no extra pay, and into producing more-frequent status reports, more-fragile/less-error-handling software, with a shorter time-to-delivery.

After seeing dozens of projects numbering in the double-digits this way (a few of which I've participated in), across almost as many organizations, I'm convinced that most of agile methodology -- in practice, if not in ideal -- is bullshit snake-oil sold to senior management to try to make junior management look "proactive" and up-to-date on the latest tech and management trends. These junior managers are complicit with consulting firms selling their business process services to convert clients to using agile methodology (I was once such a consultant paid partly to spread the gospel). But frankly, this is the standard relationship seen between consulting firms and their clients: clients buy-into the idea that the unearned perception of competence propounded by the consultancy, and believe (wrongly, in a significant percentage of cases) that the consultancy's employees are more-competent than their own... "A fool and his money are soon parted".

The best I can say about Agile is that I believe at the time it was created (back around 2000), by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, etc., it may have been a clever way to stanch the offshoring trend of the time, by claiming that close face-to-face interaction between project stakeholders (devs, managers, BAs, end-users, etc.) was critical to project success. I've found this is actually very, very true -- but this is frankly a very, very old management lesson. That, and I don't think Waterfall (which I've also spent lots of time doing) is the right methodology, either. The least-bad methodology really depends on the purpose and reliability requirements of the software project...

That is a really cool map! Thanks for posting! :)

Indeed. Moreover, Jefferson himself fought in Congress to abolish slavery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery

In the Virginia Assembly, in the 1780s Jefferson supported a bill to prohibit the state from importing slaves. In the 1784 Congress, Jefferson proposed federal legislation banning slavery in the New Territories of the Northwest, but it was not passed.[4] In 1804 as president, he refused to recognize Haiti, a new republic established by a slave rebellion, and in 1805 and 1806 enacted an arms and trade embargo against them. In 1807 he signed a bill prohibiting the US from participating in the international slave trade; it had been protected from federal regulation for 20 years under compromises of the United States Constitution.[5]

True, it was philosophically-hypocritical of him to own slaves and only free two of them. But, it also believed that Jefferson believed that if freed, his slaves would be re-captured and would be treated much-worse elsewhere (so I learned from a tour guide when I visited his Monticello home several years ago). His position, then, seems to have been one of pragmatic harm-minimization, rather than ideological purity. For his time, his anti-slave stance was quite progressive, even though by today's standards, he would be (rightly) demonized and considered a laughingstock.

...is nobody's crime.

If they went all out enforcing every law on the books, A) serious crimes would be neglected, and B) lots (more) innocent people would be caught up in things that aren't their fault, or even worth wasting everyone's time over.

True enough insofar as the quantity of laws exist. But anything less than perfect enforcement of the law has the following consequences:

1) Selective enforcement, which tends to imply arbitrary enforcement, which tends to coincide with discriminatory (racist, sexist, etc.) enforcement.

2) The proliferation of laws you rightly note make enforcing the law in-full so difficult. (If a law is not fully-enforced, then when somebody breaks that law and nothing happens, what is the response of the victim? "There oughta be a law!")

I submit to you that if the law were enforced fully and to the letter, citizens would pay more attention to the laws on the books and -- because "ignorance is no defense", and because even lawyers and IRS agents do not understand all the laws that they specialize in (much less the ones *outside* their specialties) -- we would have far-fewer laws... laws, which, as Ayn Rand said, are created so that we may classify people as criminals who previously would not have been so-classified.

I want every speed limit in my city enforced as strictly as possible -- so that people will get pissed-off at the low limits and demand they be raised. (It happened in Illinois after the 1995 federal highway speed limit was repealed: the governor wanted to keep the speed limit at 55mi/h, but almost overnight, due to a torrent of angry phone calls and letters, he backed-away from that position.) Likewise with every other law, for the same reason.

If you want to learn a cool language while having assured fun, learn Haskell. It is purely functional and very compact.

Oh, really? In what way is police brutality not condoned by our government (and even moreso by many other governments around the world)? For example, the police officers depicted on this site?: http://www.theagitator.com/

And why aren't those officers behind bars?

On the plus side, at least the privatized security theaters could compete against each other -- assuming an agglomeration of security services doesn't corner the market. (e.g., Blackwater/Xe/Academi providing screening for >= 90% of airports)

And, unlike with the Federal government, at least you can sue businesses, as well as file criminal charges against their employees (assuming Congresscritters don't insert immunity clauses - which seems likely).

The >3000 people who died on 9/11 might disagree.

Then millions of Americans who were not killed on 9/11 apparently (from various news reports) disagree with those 3,000. Your argument is classic post-hoc reasoning: the 3,000 did not experience the security-state Medusa that is the DHS and its subsidiary TSA. Those unfortunate individuals would have had only the same pre-9/11 experience those of us older than a teenager had.

Given that information, they *might* have come to your assumed conclusion -- but given our experiences of the TSA in response to 9/11, they might *not* have come to your conclusion.

One who thinks in probabilities does not think as you do. In assessing terror risk, you sound like somebody who failed Probability 101, or one who is a timid, whiny person, easily-frightened by bearded men speaking a foreign language while carrying box-cutters.

An aside: Also, it is morally-presumptious, arrogant, and intellectually-flatulent of you to claim to know what the victims (or anyone else, living or dead) would say.

I'm not aware of any Bitcoin mining company that threatens scientific journals.

The elevator has 150 people trapped in it, and your ship gets a distress call. You go to the rescue, and five Klingon ships appear from nowhere and start firing proton missiles at you. What do you do?

This is a stupid argument. If he had hacked the company, used the information for profit or to harm the company, and not informed them of their vulnerability, then he would be doing harm. But simply downloading proof and pointing out a vulnerability to a company, and expecting a tip sounds like pretty fair to me, unless he was intending to do something nefarious if he wasn't given a tip.

If nobody is up to the challenge of removing laws against criticizing, mocking or insulting, then I'd propose we replace these laws for a single law against the dissemination of false information. So, nothing that isn't proven true can be taught as such, and can only be accompanied by an appropriate disclaimer of conjecture or fiction. I guess all religions will be crushed pretty quickly then, for the betterment of everyone.