tigertheory

I like Paul Graham a lot but this is simply not true.

Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others: - Steve Jobs - Bill Gates - Elon Musk - Sam Altman - Etc.

Let’s say the person chooses those numbers randomly and in the same way they are drawn (e.g. no replacement so number 1 can only be chosen once for the white balls).

The black ball is there just to get the exact probability estimate for the Mega Millions lottery.

To answer your question it comes from the Mega Millions lottery which draws 5 white balls and 1 black ball. And I’m curious to know what is probability I get first two numbers right.

That means that if those numbers are drawn randomly from the containers, I’m asking what is the probability that a person guesses those numbers right BEFORE they are drawn as happens in the lottery?

Let’s say W stands for white ball and B for black ball. Let’s say we draw and order the white balls from least to greatest. It will look like this: W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 B1

I’m asking what is the probability I get the two lowest white balls W1 and W2 correct but get all other balls W3 W4 W5 B1 incorrect?

Let’s say that the first five white balls are pulled from the first container containing 70 balls and that the sixth ball is pulled from a second container containing 25 balls. What is the probability then of getting exactly the two lowest numbered white balls from the first container?

fantastic and super helpful reply, thank you for taking the time to write it!

Fellow HBSer, thanks for your input super helpful!

I think doing it on the side is less feasible because (1) work takes up too much time for me to make meaningful progress in say 6 months, it will be very slow progress (2) I find that the best coding bootcamps also help in getting you a software engineering job which I think will be a lot harder just studying on your own

Thanks super helpful. Had a couple of followups: (1) Which boot camp did you attend if you don't mind me asking and in what city? (2) How you find the job interview process? (3) What kind of work are you doing now? (4) Do you feel that today you could learn anything you wanted to learn for example deep learning if you put in time or do you feel webdev is extent of what you can do? (5) What do you enjoy most about it? (6) Enjoy least? (7) What was different than you expected going in? (8) Where do you see yourself going in the future as a software engineer? -- Thanks a ton for your help.

Product Manager

Thanks for the responses guys. A few more points of clarification. PM means product manager. Top 3 tech think Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. In terms of my motivation I think today we are where the internet was in 1994-95, at the cusp of the next big technology wave. I think technologies like deep learning and AI more broadly will fundamentally change every single industry and the next big tech companies will be created during this period. Not knowing how to code I think places me at a big disadvantage when it comes to the software jobs that will open up and at a disadvantage if I want to take a stab at starting a company using these technologies. It is a risky bet for sure, but if I think long-term I have a feeling learning to code and being immersed in engineering by working as a software engineer will be a very smart move. But I could be completely wrong lol :)