You know I'm friends with @bbatsov right? That's reaching pretty far. I've actively funded the maintainers in the past as well, doesn't mean I agree with everything or every name, but I respect their work.
I remember when I was a kid, Kangaroo math puzzles were incredibly fun. I don't know if you can get your hands on some materials, but they were such a blast. https://mathkangaroo.org/mks/
I recommend getting some math olympiad books; at that level they're just like puzzles so should be fun.
And when they feel adventurous, take a look at contests. Some countries (e.g. Romania, Russia) have contests for lower grades, though they are still quite difficult.
of course they are. The Chinese team selection tests are notoriously more difficult than the IMO, and they enforce a one-time participation limit. If they were to send 24 people, not only would they probably be returning with ~20 golds, they'd be taking away the golds of the other nations (as only the top 1/12 get gold)
Yes, China having more slots would mean unclear factor of more gold medals for China. (Although China has only earned 6 gold medals in half of its years, and 5 or 6 gold medals in only 24/34 years, despite having 1/6 the world population so proportionally should claim ">8" of the ~50 gold medals each year, so China does appear to be under performing the average country (per capita) in half the years.)
But those 4 smaller countries having 1/7 slots wouldn't mean 1/7 gold medals, since they only send 5-10 gold medalists each year in those slots.
Romania averages over 1 gold medal per year. China, with 70x the population of Romania, should easily be getting 6 gold medals per year almost every year and about 70 theoretical golds of their deep bench got tested, if it has comparable per capita performance to Romania.
Of course all these stats are kind of silly because of sampling limitations.
Yeah, that was a very weird comparison. Not only do those countries send 6 people each, those four started participating in 1959 while US started in 1974 and China in 1985. Though arguably, those first olympiads featured fewer countries, (with presumably stronger competition) so they had to compete against each other for medals.
Another factor might be the number of distinct participants. I believe the Chinese enforce a one-participation limit, though I don't know if that would make it more or less likely to get gold.
There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way,
that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
aren't most languages invented and initially developed within a private company? Go, Dart, Java, JavaScript, C#, F#, VBA, Kotlin, Erlang, C(at AT&T), Rust (at Mozilla). The list is probably very long
Most of those are open source, and while initially developed at a private company, most are run by non-profits (such as the Rust Foundation for Rust). Also, the language itself is not usually the main product at those companies.
> I always find out both fascinating and alien how much focus the US system puts on extracurriculars
One factor could be that, AFAIU, schools in US have many more electives than in Europe. As a student you have the choice to take more advanced classes for one subject, and only basic in other subjects, whereas in Europe, the curriculum is standard for all. So Universities in US need to compare performance on different axes.
> Of course, that also has its downsides. People end up re-taking HS exams year after year, because someone beat their GPA with a decimal point.
Another downside to the one-size-fits-all standard curriculum, is that it forces you to care about classes that you don't really care about, while not being able to focus on the subjects that you're really interested in. I think in US, if you're really good at something, universities may ignore average-to-poor performance in other areas.
I believe what GP is saying is: coming from python, which uses `and` and `not` and `or` you expect those to be the binary operators in ruby as well. You are then surprised when they behave unexpectedly. Who is then to blame for your frustration? Is ruby a bad language for having both `and` and `&&`, or are you at fault for not doing enough research? (I don't see why someone coming from python would look any further after trying `and` and seeing that it seems to work just fine).
I think this is an unfortunate situation, but one that doesn't really happen to someone that does ruby day-to-day; so it shouldn't really factor in as an argument to write ruby off.
But then is being surprised by `["0","1","10"].map(parseInt) // => [0, NaN, 2]` in JavaScript a sign of bad language design or does it just mean that you don't have enough experience with the language yet?
perhaps they are biased against the tool from participating in a campaign to police the name in the past.
But also, there's nothing wrong with more tools in this space. This is clearly an experiment, it should be welcomed.