I moved in 1998 (ironically) to an isolated island my parents were from and lived there till 2008 and moved back here for college. It was like walking into and out of a time-capsule, I missed the emergence of the internet into what it is today.
I still learned to hack and everything else in Palau regardless, it was just like playing with a handicap, it's still possible to learn and all, it's just harder.
EDIT: to clarify, I didn't have it that bad, there was <20 kbps internet with a monthly total hour cap, but it was expensive and not very reliable and slow.
> I still learned to hack and everything else in Palau regardless,
> it was just like playing with a handicap, it's still possible to
> learn and all, it's just harder.
But in some ways so much easier. I remember how I treated the Internet
before I had a 24/7 connection. I'd make lists of stuff I needed, use
my time on the Internet effectively, learn from the material I
downloaded and use that to inform my next browsing session.
Whereas now there's so many distractions, case in point me posting on
this website right now.
I've been around computers since the early 80's, and I think about how lucky I am to have amazing internet pretty much every day. Not to mention the supercomputers we have in our pockets now. I remember watching my first "streaming video": ascii animations on a 110 baud dialup connection - that's a blazing 110 bits per second. And it was awesome! ;)
Sometimes I use my internets to virtually travel to places I've never been and read as much about life there as I can... That usually makes me feel extra lucky about the internet access I have. Same with reading about Nji!
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
What a great story! Cameroon is highly dysfunctional; the government is one of the most corrupt in the world. The fact that this boy can prevail regardless is impressive in a way those of us in more functional societies have trouble appreciating.
I will show this article to my sons this weekend and redouble my time with them teaching them to program. As with many things in life (healthcare, food, peace, schools), we also need to appreciate having high-speed Internet access and two parents with programming experience and the time and interest to mentor our children.
> Esp when Africa relies on mobile for financial transactions and banking and now these people are stuck.
"Africa" has no such mobile money reliance - you are probably thinking of Kenya. Africa is 54 countries and 1 billion people, your generalization is overbroad.
If we ask politely and explain why, most people are happy to play along. It's easy to see how trying for higher-quality discussion is good for the community.
> asking a community with many engineers to not harshly nitpick someone else's contribution is a futile task.
Behaviour like this also not acceptable in "real life", neither at work place nor anywhere else.
Maybe some get away with that cliché behaviour, but in my experience this is just an inappropriate way to deal with their own weaknesses, leading to embarrassing situations (for them) as soon as they get to work with people more experienced than they are.
I have worked in professional software engineering environments where people acted professionally, and plan to create one in my new company. The mentality that "nerds will be nerds" enables and perpetuates this counterproductive behavior.
Same here. But a new engineer I hired who looked great on paper and on his interviews is just obscene. He's not a great engineer to boot. Can't fire him because I need him for now. I don't think it's a self perpetuating stereotype. I think some people are wired that way, and engineers tend to skew there because of the way their brains work (obviously not every engineer).
So what? Is "smartness" an excuse for the unwillingless to learn productive (or at least non-destructive) social behaviour?
If anything, I'd argue it is exactly the reverse: From people describing themselves as "smart" I expect the ability to learn this even more.
They are definitely not too dumb to learn this: Internalizing some basic rules of social behaviour is not harder than learning a new programming language or familiarizing with a new framework. It's not because they are unable, but because they don't care and got away with it so far - by which I mean they didn't have to face the consequences of the damage they created in the past. That's why any reasonable manager (or community leader) needs to create an environment where they have to care early on, before anything significant happens.
Jesus, get some coffee or something. 34 Grand Prize Winners out of 1300 isn't something to scoff at. Considering his situation. It's not like he's being coddled with a participation trophy like some white kid in Beverly Hills.
It makes it sound as if he's a champion coder at Google, because it's lacking context. It's a clickbait title to drive views towards an exploitation piece (not necessarily negative exploitation, but still exploitation).
census says >80% are white and the typical household income was nearly ~$90k, too. That isn't a bad thing because of Beverly Hills per se, but it does seem typical of wealth not flowing freely enough in this country.
You're just being too harsh. Most people have no idea what Google Code-In is. Sure, you can change it to "Google coding competition winner" but "champion" is not that bad anyway.
Was just going to say that. I'm all for getting teens involved, but it's dangerous to puff up too much. I'm sure he's very proud of his work, but I'm not sure I would categorize it as a "series of complex technical tasks". I can't find exactly what he worked on, but from a blog post he wrote [1] it seems like pretty basic stuff:
I made a few PRs on the OpenMRS source code (had to squash a lot of commit though), and a PR on the reference application to allow login using only the keyboard! That was the most tricky task I did
I would argue that this is a "series of complex social tasks" -- Google Code-In is about having high school students get contributions to real open-source projects accepted. That means communicating over Slack/IRC/Mailing Lists, and learning each project's conventions, and so forth.
I remember taking part in this competition in high school, and I was only able to get one task done. And -- disclaimer -- I work for Google now.
By comparison, USACO or the Canadian Computing Competition is a walk in the park.
Ouch. First, please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread even worse. Second, please especially don't do personal attacks. Third, please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. You've done that more than once and we ban such accounts.
I've been around computers since 1998 and it's been 4 weeks since I have a good enough internet connection to watch my first 1080P internet video