22 December 2013

A TWELVE HOUR LAYOVER

If I'd known this was how it would have turned out, I would have taken the later flight out of Boston and taken the $300 travel credit. This sucks. My 730 flight was delayed til midnight and thus a 8 hour layover (which is already the longest I've ever had) turns into a 12 hour layover :(

Luckily I managed to nab myself a table at the gate so I can bum around here and hog it for the next 4 hours.

Now I guess I will just write about random things.


First thing's first -- here is a picture of the Harvard turkey/one of the Harvard turkeys (I have yet to confirm how many there actually are running around, since I only ever see one at once). isn't he cute?! Actually I have no idea if it's a he or a she. Actually it's probably a she isn't it? Since there's no crown... do turkeys have crowns? :/


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Here's something I thought of during the summer:
    Isn't it cute how pedestrian lights beep at one another for the blind? Their calls are staggered, such that the one on my side starts the call and the one across the road responds instantaneously; a conversation breaks out between the two sides as I cross the road, all the cars at the intersection stopped as if to listen to the exchange. It almost seems as if they are not only guiding us across safely, but also catching up with each other, telling the stories of what they've observed throughout the day from their vantage points on opposing corners. It's even more amusing when there is a 4 way intersection that all lights green at the same time -- oh, the commotion, the energetic blabbering of a full mahjong table awakening on the intersection! All this while a patient rectangle of cars sits still, waiting for the conversation to cease and the business of the day to continue.

I wonder if anyone else has ever thought of it that way, or if I'm just a weirdo. George certainly thought so when I brought it up while crossing and listening to the chirpy back-and-forth.

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My finals are over and I think my final class grades come out tomorrow. My compilers final turned out to be 25 true/false questions which I thought was rather trollish of the professor, and also caused me to do pretty horribly (I got a 68. That's a 17/25 -- I probably would have done better on a real exam =_=). However the final grade for the class that the TF provided was a 91, so hopefully not everyone in the class got a 95 or something, and then I should be fine... Math was okay, I'm not really sure how I did, I got a similar feeling from the midterms which means I probably scored around an 85% which is not horrible but not really as high as I was hoping for. Well, we'll see I guess. Systems was horrible for everyone, so I actually have no idea what to think lol.

This semester was pretty challenging I think, my longest pset took almost 30 hours no contest, the average time spent with Lukas on compilers was 20 hours a week, I was 1.5 weeks late (past the allowed late days post-deadline) for a certain systems pset, my VES animation looks like a derp's work, and I discovered that not doing math for a year makes one super rusty on math related things. So, yay! But, I learned a lot and had fun.

Oh! I am also serving as AAA's publicity chair for the coming year. So I get to make posters and publicize events and stuff, which should be fun :)

And next semester, I'm going to be a TF for CS51! Watch me be terrible at OCaml and not know what is going on haha. Actually when one of the lecturers called me to tell me that I got the job, I was in Chinatown and we'd just lost half the people we were with so I thought it was one of them calling me, so before I got who it was on the other line I yelled HEY WE'RE OVER HERE and waved really extravagantly in real life. The guy was like "huh...??? This is Jesse from CS51..." I was like OHH OMG IM SORRY herp. #embarrassment i am just a special flower ok

I also bought a 3DS over thanksgiving JUST for the new Phoenix Wright game and have been very diligently finishing it up. I'm on the DLC case now which I'm almost done with. It was very fun. Now I can give it away lol.

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The day after finals finished, I went out for dimsum in chinatown with Alex, Tony and Patrick as Tony's last meal before he went home. Then, Alex and I decided to walk around for a bit and take photos. We kind of went wandering because we didn't know where to go and we found this really weird tube thing:





It just sounded like if you put your ear next to a shell. You could kind of hear the ocean. Maybe it was supposed to be cool if a boat went by or something, but it was weirdly underwhelming for such a large device. Anyway look you can also see all the snow. I did not enjoy the snow as much as I did last year. I guess it gets old really fast. It's too cold, and turning into slush is disgusting. At least I have waterproof shoes this year. Last winter was kind of nasty with wet feet :(

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Here's a concept design for my personal website I threw together this afternoon at the airport in photoshop. I have no idea how I'm going to code it at all because I don't code websites. It might be a fun learning experience or I might get frustrated and give up and it might never come to fruition. So here's the beginning concept anyway lol.


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Okay I passed an hour. Most of the time spent was waiting for the images to be uploaded lol. Ummmm.... maybe I will finish Phoenix Wright now? Or I could keep reading Orange is the new Black (I just bought it at the airport book store! I actually wanted to read the Joy Luck Club but they didn't have it in stock). OR maybe I should actually take advantage of the desk I have and start trying to code this thing up? 

... nahhhhhh #lazy

13 December 2013

A Guest Post: lol quora

Quora is the biggest pseudo-intellectual circlejerk ever. While there are many posts that are informative, I'm not sure if the community really can sustain itself. It's a platform for people to feel important about themselves, rather than a place for real experts to answer questions.

You can say that the necessity to login with a real identity and the culture of writing long articles to respond to questions means a higher quality experience, but fundamentally people stick to the groupthink that they know will get voted higher on the page. Because most of the time it's not always facts that are being used to answers on Quora. They're just opinions being cleverly disguised as facts. That's not a good way to answer a question. -____- And if the question was really about asking for an opinion in the first place, Quora is not at all the best platform to get an optimal answer for it. There's absolutely no room to debate. 

Quora generally has two types of answers, the answers to factual questions, and feel good stories/positivity. Then there are the gems about once in a lifetime experiences that probably should be shared. These are good.  While the answers to the factual questions may be helpful, they are really just establishing a relationship between questions and facts that could be pulled from Wikipedia. I don't think feel good stories contribute much to Quora's goal of increasing the world's knowledge. In fact, they just feed into the whole groupthink mentality.  




Bitch, get off Quora and take your butthurt tears to College Confidential. Quora users shouldn't even answer these questions. But they do because of the allure of upvotes. 

I know this will get a lot criticism, but it's the same problem that every site that has upvotes has. Quora is just particularly bad because a real name is associated with it. So people try their best to maintain approval of others. I'm predicting that in the future, just like Reddit, Quora will be used as a marketing tool. At that point it won't be any better than BuzzFeed. 

Here's a potential solution for Quora. Implement an anonymous upvote system that doesn't contribute directly the first answer to a question. Instead, it should influence a machine learning algorithm that actually picks the best posts. I'm sure the engineers there are already working on the machine learning - they just need to cut the stupid public upvotes. Give everyone on Quora a "tenure" of sorts and let them speak their mind without fear of getting downvoted to oblivion.