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Do you still see ads? Yep.

I've been asking myself this question for over 20 years: who are these people that click on ads anyway?

Ads are inherently going to be the opposite of Google's values, yet Google depends on them for the vast majority of their revenue. They show you some search results in line with their values, and if you can't get to the top of that "intrinsically", you buy ads or SEO. The folks that use that system to exploit the least intelligent win here, and Google takes a share of the profit.

Based on my Google search results in the recent past, Google isn't doing a good job of making sure the "best" websites (by my own value system, of course) make it to the top. I find myself having to go into second and third page results to get legitimate information. I'm seeing pages of medical quackery that "sounds good" but isn't based on science when I try to find diet or exercise advice.

As technology becomes more democratic, more people will use it. That means that the people that spend more time trying to sell you shit are going to win, because they're the ones that are willing to reverse-engineer the algorithm and push stuff up to the top. They add less value to society because they're spending all their time on marketing and promotion.

I wish I knew how to solve this problem. By imposing morals, Google "bites the hand that feeds".

I think it's highly probable that either the technology will be rebuilt in a way that makes abuse possible (Google being relatively open with their technology has this side effect), or that Google won't put in enough safeguards to force people to use it responsibly, but we will see. Maybe you need too many AI experts and too much data to build this technology for yourself, and maybe that only exists at Google.

This is clearly not a good-faith effort for Google to have you stop wasting time. Youtube has been around for over a decade and they're just getting to this now? I think this is clearly a minimum amount of effort to prevent backlash, and it is against their interests to invest in technology that helps you use their technology responsibly.

I don't need reservations that badly. But the difference between having to specify Mechanical Turk work and just talking to a Google appliance is pretty huge... We're talking hours vs. minutes of work.

People that are excited by this are being way too naive here.

I feel like this is going to make the world even flakier than it already is. If I can waste people's time without even the few minutes it normally takes to make a phone call, what's to stop a restauranteur from effectively denial-of-service attacking competing restaurants, or what's to stop me from booking 100 dinners for Friday evening because I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to want to eat (or who I'm going to take out for that matter -- smartphones make it easy to punt on that decision too), so I retain optionality.

This is advice for Amazon employees specifically. The incentives are not for him to give advice on how to become Jeff Bezos.

Easy for him to say. If you're at the bottom, you get little satisfaction or recognition for performing well, and are instead judged based on things like how much time you've spent in the office, how much code you've written, and how much your superiors like you.

Don't listen to what the guy at the top is telling you to do with your life. Ever. But do nod and smile when he says it.

I agree. It's (usually intuitively learned) reasoning that's very similar to the logical reasoning of mathematics. I think if you were to study, say, calculus in a manner typical of a first course in college, you'd be missing out on that sort of problem solving, but you'd definitely get that if you took a proofs-based class in analysis ("This function is continuous on this interval, so it must have a maximum. How can I use that to prove what's being asked?").

I think if you're a programmer wondering what math will help you in your career, which is the question this article is trying to answer, this article is misleading.

Most working programmers won't have to know any math beyond arithmetic.

For instance,

"Also, how does one distribute a large computation across globally distributed data centers? You have to understand some physics to do this well: at Internet scale, the speed of light starts to be a bottleneck. Heat dissipation, density of electrical current draw per unit area, etc, are all real world considerations that go into what programmers do"

Come on, let's be real. In grade school we learned that light goes around the earth 8 times a second. That means 1/16 of a second (63ms) to go around to the other side of the world. That doesn't set a useful lower bound since this is the ballpark of latency within a country anyway. You're just going to ping between the two servers and measure the latency.

That being said, programming could in theory require any kind of math. If you're doing machine learning, you'll need to understand statistics. If you're doing graphics programming, you'll need to understand trigonometry, linear algebra, etc.

If you're writing software for the medical industry you'll presumably have to understand a little bit about how that industry works, but I wouldn't suggest programmers go learn that just for the sake of improving their "general" programming skills.

Here's a more realistic take:

1) Learn math as necessary for a field you're interested in

2) Know binary and hexadecimal representations of numbers.

3) If you're going to use a lower-level language, understand how signed/unsigned arithmetic works, boolean algebra, and some basics of the floating point representation (in a nutshell, don't assume that computations are exact, so don't rely on equality (==)).

4) Understand time and space complexity. For most programmers, this is going to be simple: don't nest too many for-loops. I'm guessing 90% of programmers will never have to construct an algorithm whose complexity involves a logarithmic function, except for maybe binary search. Even then, most programmers will rely on libraries to do those things.

5) Be able to do back of the envelope calculations, and understand that order of magnitude is more important than exact numbers. Try to do them in your head so you can quickly evaluate possibilities.

6) Increasingly, statistics and machine learning are becoming important for programmers to know. Learn some basic statistics and it will make you much more desirable. Play around with R or Octave or numpy and don't make the mistake of applying too much statistics without thinking, unless you're in the marketing department.

I think this is how we should revamp science education. Teach people how to examine the evidence and how one can fool themselves. Less inclined plane problems, more scientific reasoning.

This book made proof based math approachable for me. There are mechanical aspects to proofs that are probably best practiced in a structured way and this book does that by also acquainting you with set theory.

Do NOT read Rudin. He is terse and unless you are already well versed in mathematics it is simply incomprehensible.

My recommendation would be Spivak’s calculus. There are a million great exercises and the book is beautifully typeset and overall a pleasure to read. Don’t let the title fool you, there are analysis exercises in there.

Everyone gets into coding a different way. If she is inclined toward design, I would definitely start with HTML and go from there.

As a new coder even things like learning the tree-like structure of HTML, the brutality of an errant slash or missed closing tag, or the frustrations of bringing a visual idea to fruition with plain text are challenging enough. I wouldn't worry too much about HTML "not being real code".

If time is on your side (more than a year), I would gently nudge her into HTML and see what she comes up with. If she finds it tedious maybe try another route, but if it sticks I would segue into simple Javascript or CSS after that depending on what she wants. If she wants more control over how the page looks, naturally she'll want to learn CSS. If she wants more control over functionality and making the page "do" something, Javascript.

As a completely radical idea, you could show her LOGO. I remember that being incredibly inspirational when I was a kid and appealing to the artistic side.

If time is on your side, you are lucky in that she can afford to play around and not go down the bootcamp route which will inevitably lead to burnout. I say nurture the interest as gently as possible.