For those of you that use Pidgin, there's also a really great libpurple plugin that I've been using: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts/
It works really well, but it doesn't have history scrollback. I'm happy when I don't have to open up my browser to chat with people.
The great trajedy of Unix -- and of of the greater trajedies of computation -- is that the composable, user-visible components that made Unix great have never been matched in later stuff, not even in Unix stuff.
We have lots of systems which make software modular and composable, but they are not for the end user. At best they end up being build-blocks for programmers who make gigantic black boxes. More often, programmers of gigantic black boxes struggle with tools and libraries that are themselves gigantic black boxes.
I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially? Did he become blind later on after learning how to code?
Hi everyone! Thanks for the support and reply. Wasn't expecting this kind of response when we wrote the article.
Herwin is visually impaired since birth so he definitely picked up coding with a screen reader. I have notified him of the comments here so he can share more of how he initially picked up coding himself. :)
I saw that you said you do video interviews, have you considered running "blind" interviews like how orchestras do? Applicants to orchestras play from behind a screen so that the judges selecting the candidates cannot see the candidate, and the only metric by which they can judge is the quality of the performance. Determining sex/age/race/etc through voice could be eliminated through audio filtering.
From the comments there, here's a fascinating example of how quickly a blind person can absorb information. 525WPM in this case: https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp
This question came up on StackOverflow a number of years ago and sparked an insightful conversation. I recommend reading through the thread to anyone interested.
I used have a blind colleague, I didn't work closely with him but did have a few interactions with him. This was maybe 20 years ago. So people have been doing this a long time. He was working on speech codecs when I worked with him. Anyway he just went to engineering school. At least in California they have people who help you and the school is legally required to make an "accommodation" if needed. That could be a reader, or more time on exam, etc. Here is a brief article on the guy
Same as anyone else, I assume. There was a completely blind student in the year below me at University, he did just as well as anyone else. His screen reader read at a ludicrous speed.
I can't imagine what it would be like to use a computer in general, without sight. However, most programming resources are in text form, so I guess it wouldn't have been too difficult (in relative terms).
Semaphoric patterns are used in the application as a more visually appealing means of peer key verification, device provisioning, etc. than say, QR codes.
The last chapter in Oliver Sacks' book "The Mind's Eye" discusses this phenomenon and how people who became blind adapted and compensated. Highly recommend it. He suggests a phenomenon like this is primarily biologically predetermined.
Sine-wave speech reminds me of R2D2 from Star Wars. Does anyone know if sine-wave speech was used as an inspiration? Maybe R2D2 actually says coherent sentences in the movies, but we aren't used to that form of speech interpretation
I doubt it, only given that the sine-wave stuff I've seen is from way after the Star Wars movies. I don't think it was a concept in the 70s, but if you can find some resources, post em!
Even for things as "objective" as mathematics, definitions ultimately come down to what makes it convenient to manipulate symbols like an expert would.
This comes up all the time in fields as diverse as software engineering, law, finance, business, even hard sciences like physics - things are "right" because they're convenient, and because the consequences of them being that way make it possible to build on those results with new constructs, while doing it a different, more intuitive way would result in those constructs being impossible.
What the article is saying is that your intuition for it being 0 or undefined is because you've been exposed only to exponentiation as repeated multiplication or as the limit of some series; if you consider other theorems like the binomial theorem, and figure out what is necessary for them to hold without special casing, you'll decide otherwise.
For me, intuition-wise, I'd order it "undefined, 1, 0".
There are 3 cases for 1 and one case for 0 that immediately spring to my mind when considering the problem:
0) Limit of 0^x, as x approaches 0 (from above).
1a) Limit of x^0 as x approaches 0 (from either direction).
1b) Limit of x^x as x approaches 0 (from above).
1c) "What did you multiply by 3 once, to get 3^1? So, multiplying 1 by zero, zero times..."
Limits here, simplified to intuition level, being "what would you need to fill that hole in the graph?" The fact that these disagree would be why I'd assume undefined, but the case for 1 seems stronger (to me).
The limit in 1b is 1 from below as well, right? I'm not sure how limits work with complex numbers, but the imaginary part of x^x approaches zero as x approaches zero from below, so can we say that the limit of x^x as x approaches zero from below is also zero?
Yes, perhaps "intuition" isn't the best word. Formal limits certainly aren't "intuitive" to me, at least by one definition of the word. I suppose I used "intuitive" to mean "according to my mathematical understanding, ignoring the mathematics explicitly dealing with 0^0."
Not really - the explanation from the "mathematician" perspective gives some of the rationale, and it makes perfect sense & in line with intuition.
Defining 0^0 as anything but 1 is weird since x^0 is 1 given the other definitions we have adopted, i.e. x^n = x * x * ... * x (n times) for positive integers, (x^n)^(-1) being defined as the unique number such that x^n * (x^n)^(-1) = 1, (x^n)^(-1) * x^n = 1 for non-zero numbers x, and the simple result that (x^n)^(-1) = (x^(-1))^n from proof by induction & the uniqueness condition of the multiplicative inverse, we then get the natural formula that 1 = x^n * x^(-n) = x^(n - n) = x^0 for non-zero numbers. Defining 0^0 = 0 or undefined doesn't agree with the formula given for all non-zero real numbers, and goes against the limit of x^x as x approaches 0 (as detailed in the article), making x^x a discontinuous function at x = 0 if it is defined as another value.
Plane geometry is woefully lacking in education nowadays. The situation is so sad that some of these questions are very similar to the geometry questions in the USAMO/IMO
Plane geometry was, at the time, perhaps the premier formal system to be studied as such; now, we get the same concepts across using calculus (which doesn't seem to be mentioned on the exam) and set theory (which would only really take shape in the 1870s).
(The history of mathematics doesn't get so much as a mention, either, but I don't expect it to.)
Actually from a cursory look at the Latin part, it seemed that all of the sentences and things they chose for you to translate were very specific cases of applying rules.
Maybe a bit harder than some of the other stuff, but still regurgitation.
look at the bigger picture: there is a lot to be said about mastering a classical language to such a degree that you can translate these sentences back. Sure, on the surface it looks simplistic, but students with such a command of Latin would equally possess a rich knowledge in Roman and European history and culture through the process of acquiring classical Latin. Someone mentioned "modern history" missing...well, maybe because they still thought highly of the renaissance value of "ad fontes"?
That would be me. 1869 might be a bit early for Civil War history to show up, but nothing on the War of 1812 or even the Revolution? Nothing on the history of Westward Expansion?
I understand going back to the sources ("ad fontes") and education for its own sake, but I've never seen something that implies an education that is so divorced from anything of the time the people receiving it are living in.
There were only one or two questions in the mathematical part of the test that I would consider regurgitation -- the rest is stuff modern students should be able to do.
Are you only referring to the mathematics section? Most of the things in other sections were either recollection, or knowing Latin and Greek. In the mathematics section, most of it was simply performing computation, which is still just knowing a simple algorithm that hasn't been very relevant since calculators became commonplace.
Still, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, since it's fair to make a test that selects for students that have been well-educated in that time period. I just don't think it's necessarily more difficult than a modern equivalent test would be.
