Because up until now, it's working just fine without large cash prizes, I guess.

I suppose that depends on your sense of urgency.

Are cash prizes all that helpful in fostering insight?

I recall a demonstration at TED where cash incentives cause a worse performance, maybe due to pressure.

So if people are showing up on intrinsic motivation alone, it might be good to let that lie.

They seem to have worked pretty well for Netflix and the X prizes.

Or sense of purpose.

Just to remark that this seems to only apply to the state of Schleswig-Holstein, or, according to Wikipedia, 2.8 million of ~80 million Germans.

It's the only state with an agency trying to enforce it right now.

The applicable laws are federal laws.

Probably the point was he didn't want to do business with them (at least not anymore after being asked outrageous 10,000$ for the domain).

So, am I the only one here who feels like this is an obvious (and funny) parody? Or are all the "serious" comments critiquing the video/website/C.V. just another level of irony?

The only way I'd hire this guy is if it was a parody. As a parody, it's pretty good, but as an actual reverse resume it just seems really weird. I'm sure he'll get a bunch of offers from other companies besides Google. I just don't see this type of stuff fitting in with Google's personality.

It seems to be done either genuinely or as part of some larger campaign to promote himself / see if he "could" get an interview: http://matthew-epstein.com/land-a-job-at-google-journey/

the "waah I didn't get to play all my cards" thing is weird. he wanted a google interview, he got a google interview, holster your guns matthew, the fight's over

I think you are. I took the mustache very seriously.

how would he sit on the inflated round armchairs in this suit? i mean is he dressed appropriately for a technology company?

Well, he's not wearing pants so on average he's dressed "casually"

Well, maybe he is trying to create a hoax... Hahaha, Not sure really. If he is being serious this uncertainty will be his main problem...

But the concept and so the site are just funny. Hahaha.

Of course they would have the same genes as other humans, just distributed on less chromosomes. For all practical matters, they would be indistinguishable from 46-chromosome humans.

For a minute I thought they were referring to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in which case this would have been really shocking news (or, more likely, false reporting). This 'Heisenberg limit' seems to be more of a technical issue in quantum measurements (the abstract of the original paper also mentions that previous theoretical work had already hinted at this possibility). Can anybody familiar enough with the subject tell us how impressive this is?

For a more gentle start for those less familiar with functional programming (like myself) I can recommend "Higher Order Perl" by Mark Jason Dominus (also available for free online). The book discusses functional programming techniques in Perl. It has some really practical examples, which make some of the advantages of functional programming very clear. I also find it nicely explains a lot of functional programming concepts, which helps when reading those Haskell texts.

low signal-to-noise ratio if you ask me... I don't understand why this gets upvotes.

That's what the "flag" link is for. (You're new here, so I'm not being snarky - I realized you might not have noticed it.)

I think it should be read as a parable, not a true story.

I think Max, who- or whatever he really is, once stated he's consciously creating some kind of online persona? No idea what he intends to achieve, though.

So the 'successful business' which sprang from nowhere over the past year doesn't actually exist? The whole 'relocate to China to save a few bucks' craziness didn't really happen?

That would explain a lot, as this emerging story reads more like a fictional dot.com tale.

Edit: Thanks PRS. I won't be wasting time with 'Max Klein' posts in the future.

The mentor in the story is most likely many different people or the man Max Klein would like to be in his life. If they are many different people, he just rolled them all into one for story telling.

I can't see how someone who purposefully picks fights could be considered a valuable mentor though.

To my eyes, Max Klein headlines occasionally look as if penned by Tim Ferriss.

I don't think we're supposed to believe this is meant seriously. But it's a nice pun on what is probably an all-too common problem :)

I think I know this Ilana. She's in my class at Amherst College.

I KNOW I know this Ilana. She does go to Amherst. This is no hoax.

Zach! Get your act together! Ilana > Computer!