I am not exactly sure in what way his discourse seems as though it were addressed to an audience of men only.
My political correctness meter is tingling.
> We, as men, will never actually understand female orgasms and women will never know how ours are felt, no matter how accurate one tries to describe it.
My position is almost the same as btilly's. When he says "We, as men, will never actually understand female orgasms and women will never know how ours are felt... " anaolykarpov is merely including himself in the more general set of men, and thus communicating an opinion as an element representative of that set, regardless of the audience. The disjunction with the set of women is necessary to underline the fact that there might be a fundamental qualitative/quantitative difference in the way orgasm is felt by the two.
In fact, the statement wouldn't have been any less correct had the audience been only women.
The same applies if a woman were to say "We, as women, will never ..."
I really love the arguments in the category "You criticize 'X' but you offer no real alternative, solution, etc..." as if you can only criticize something if you have the alternative solution at hand. This is not one of those questions with an easy answer.
"Boy you sure criticize those Nazis a lot for genocide, but you offer no _real_ solution."
"Dude... stop criticizing those banks for their greediness when you have no solution". I realize these are rather hyperbolic examples, but you see where I'm getting at.
As for the OP, this does seems like really cool stuff, even if I don't really agree with "the interview" method myself because I don't do too well at them. I mean sure, there should be some on the spot questions to get sort of an outlook feel on the candidate, but that really isn't sufficient.
Why not give the the candidate a real world problem - maybe even related to something your company is trying to solve - and a few days to come up with a solution. I don't care if they also do some copy/paste from SO and other sources on the internet. That's why the interwebz is there in the first place. What would be more important in my view, is how the candidate is able to integrate all the information he finds - be it on the internet, books or his own head - and converge to a solution. And even if he doesn't come up with a working solution, you as an interviewer can now infer a lot more useful pieces of information than with a basic interview. You can ask questions like: 'why did you choose that library over the other ones?', 'why that programming language over the others', 'how did you come across the code on Stack Overflow; is it correct?', 'why that database and not that other one?', 'why is your solution single threaded and event based, rather than multi-threaded?', 'how would you further optimize that piece of code?' and so on.
I think this kind of conversation is something much more likely to happen day to day between the candidate and his coworkers if he does get the job.
Umm.. fourthed? I just couldn't help but jump in and
also recommend Greg Egan's "Permutation City". That book is just wonderful... think simulation, cellular automata as a model for computation, artificial life and all that other good stuff :).
Also, about the LEVAN thing... given the amount of data available online, both in various structured formats and unstructured formats, don't be surprised if deep learning will yield better and better results moving forward. To me though, they mostly seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I mean if you look back at the AI field, during the days before the "AI winter" came, huge amounts of data is one thing researchers back then didn't have available. This is not to say that there haven't been advances in learning algorithms at all recently. ..
As well as adding my own strong recommedatios for Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" I would also recommend "Quarantine" - which has a rather splendid idea for mobile apps - "neural mods" that actually augment the brains own congnitive capabilities (including augmenting sensory data for the ultimate in VR).
And there is what one group chooses to do with a very special neural mod...
This is happening now in deep learning. Deep autoencoders[1] are allowing for computer representations of "similar" concepts. I recently gave a talk on this very concept to assist in QA systems.
Even though the language is a bit dated ( also, English is not my native language) this essay is well worth reading and insightful. Didn't know about this Thoreau fellow before reading this though so really thank you for posting.
One thing i keep thinking about is the stark contradiction between the high standard of living of western society and ever increasing depression rates ( I don't have a list of sources at hand, but I believe this to be somewhat common knowledge ), so I think that this essay strikes right at the heart of the problem, in the sense that we are almost living for making a living( Or some such phrasing ), or at least hints at a deeper, more underlying and worrying phenomenon .
