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Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
301–310 of 371 posts
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with most of what you're saying, except for "every single person's money problem is solved with the very simple 'don't spend more than you earn.'" Sometimes it's not being able to earn enough money that's the problem--there's a baseline level of income needed to pay for very basic no frills food and rent in any given area.
> Sometimes it's not being able to earn enough money that's the problem This is going to come across as prickish, I'm not meaning it with that tone, but here's an example: 1) Costs are more than income? Earn more money. 2) "But where I live has a shitty economy and there are no jobs that pay more that I'm qualified for" Then your options are: move to someplace with better pay potential, work more jobs, downsize your…
> Step 1) Stop getting married and producing children.
It looks like his genes are smarter than yours.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#303I always wondered what the difference was between being really smart or just being really interested in a subject.
All through high school I never studied for a science (biology, chemistry and physics) exam. I would often work by myself and complete several weeks of study in a few days. I would read college levels books in 10th grade, just because it was interesting. Teachers would force me to go back to my locker to get my textbooks before an exam because I needed to study; I just put them back when they weren't looking. I didn't study for 12th grade standardized science tests and ended up with scores 95%+. (I also thought English class was stupid and typically got mid-70s by squeeking by).
That being said I am certainly NOT gifted and to be honest I don't think I'm that extraordinarily smart; I just find that if I'm interested in something, the effort I put in seems, well, effortless.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#304"Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or release-engineering practices." And then Linus went on to use Git. I'm not a native english speaker so I may be wrong on this one but I feel like there's quite some irony there: Linus got criticized for not properly using version control and... A few years later he went on to write the most succesful version control system ever! The same person created bot…
That's not irony, that's simply someone listening and changing his mind. That is a normal and healthy thing to do.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#305I think, in context, Linus was probably right. There are some situations where having 2 very different project/modules depend on common code could be hell. Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs. It might be better to keep an eye on each other, pick the specific updates, but have total independency. Else, you end up in commit wars and endless arguing on mailing lists. ESR is way overrated, IMHO.
>Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs I don't know anything about webkits, but how are "the BSDs" relevant?
They split off a common codebase, but they share a lot of code and patches fly across the multiple codebases without major problem. What takes the most effort is porting across big new features. But that is expected.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, check this out from 1998 (two years before OP) https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/30/122
Wait is this where the original idea for git came from?
Larry McVoy was the BitKeeper guy. This was early in terms of distributed version control, but I have no idea if it was the first or just (for a while) the most popular. Linus wrote git using several lessons he learned from using BitKeeper. It's not just a copy, though.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not entirely a marshmallow test and I disagree with your blanket categorization of it as such. During elementary school, a friend and I got a hold of a Math review book meant for college-age folks who didn't really grok Math in High School. We enjoyed competing with each other in learning math, but it resulted in us going into 6th grade knowing everything we would be learning for the next three years. In Math al…
You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. Maybe even in the more extreme case of a child skipping several grades altogether by himself, that's the best of a bad set of choices. But we shouldn't be offering only bad choices. At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to creat…
i skipped a grade too in school, and i skipped through a year university, also helping higher semester students in classes i never had.
the problem ended up being that i lost all my peers to study and eventually lost interest in the university. the result was that all my peers now have a ph.d and i struggled to get back in many years later to now write a master thesis...
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#308Isn't lack of ability to modularize a sign of lack of another kind of gift? Gifts come in different traits.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost exact same here, except I failed college calculus - twice. It's always been a sore point for me that people who are obviously not as 'smart' as I am somehow all managed to pass it - I couldn't even understand it. Can I lay a little blame on bad professors? perhaps. others complained about the profs too, but ... they still managed to grok enough to pass. I only managed to satisfy degree requirements by taking '…
Did you ever read Calculus Made Easy ? If you just want to understand enough calculus to know why a thrown ball follows a parabola, that really isn't hard. The typical university course aims higher than that - it's trying to instill a way of thinking that's required to progress towards a third year course in Generalised Nonsense Theory. That way of thinking is quite unnatural, and makes the calculus course harder tha…
Thanks for the Calculus Made Easy reference. It's here, to save anyone googling. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf
The prologue is great:
"Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.
Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics (and they are mostly clever fools) seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can."
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#310i love it how everyone is more concerned with showing how cursed (and therefore gifted) they are , instead of actually listening to the message from linus.
for what its worth , i was cursed too lol