magicmu

I don't think it does, since you can't sell individual Hearthstone cards for money or trade them between accounts. It's still an ethically questionable business model imo, but it's in a somewhat different category than loot boxes (or physical trading cards).

I've generally felt the same way, but it seems that in the last couple of years the line has become blurred. For example, if I have a smartphone that is always connected to the internet via 4G, and I speak within range of the microphone, does that count as doing something "on the Internet"? Then devices like Alexa or Google Home enter the picture. As more of our lives become connected, the line between what is and is not online becomes much more difficult to discern.

I had no idea about the details of Tricare, that's pretty interesting. I suppose it makes sense for a government to be very invested in the healthcare of its armed forces.I was thinking more about the United States army's particular global role as the primary means of the violent perpetuation of capitalism and Western hegemony. You make a great point; I think the main difference in our perspectives could be approaching the question domestically versus globally.

That's an interesting definition of socialism; I didn't intend it in that way. Open source seems "socialist" to me by virtue of the pretty much the same attributes that you're (I think correctly) describing as anarchic. It's a broad term, I think we're saying the same thing :)

On one hand it's always cool to see increased adoption of open source, but it strikes me as more than a little subversive for the DoD to adopt an open source methodology. I can't help but see the appropriation of an inherently equitable and socialist means of sharing innovation (FOSS) by a violent, exclusionary, and globally oppressive regime to be a step in a very wrong direction.

This was my thought as well, but for somewhat different reasons. I think Musk does fit this modern definition of libertarian -- a lack of faith in government progress is a necessary logical foundation for attempting to pioneer space travel privately. I definitely agree, though, that many YC guys don't seem to be libertarian at all. It's also definitely worth noting that this modern definition of "libertarian" is so divorced from it's original anti-capitalist meaning that it's almost a different word. Leary's vision was "libertarian" in the sense that it was wholly at odds with capitalism as it currently exists, and put the onus of human progress on people instead of government. It was not "libertarian" in the sense of advocating for exploitative private companies like those we see in the Valley.

Exposing personal information like that, while maybe not illegal (I don't have the qualifications to say), is something I definitely see as unethical; at least if an opt-out option isn't even provided. Beyond the personal info like email, full name, and profile picture (all of which is definitely easily scrapable and not a _huge_ deal to me), I noticed that it had made the type, modulus, and exponent of each of my RSA keys available. I know that these can be derived from an RSAPublicKey, but I'm not sure what making them easily viewable means (if anything). Could someone with more encryption knowledge shed some light on that?

Awesome write-up!! I had never heard of linear calculus before, is that an extension of linear algebra or a distinct field?

It looks like this site got hugged to death, does anyone have a mirror link?

Looks awesome! I've been using 1password, are there any big advantages that KeePass has over it?

They're all just a tad limited in scope. I guess it makes sense since I would think TC's primary demographic is technical people (I can't back this up though, may not be accurate). In general though, I agree.

I've been looking for alternatives to Evernote for a long time now, but haven't found a viable one. Thanks for making this, I'll definitely check it out!

I think disrupting the core components of our society that decrease and inhibit growth of wealth for specific groups of people would be the most effective way to increase prosperity for everyone. These components include, but are definitely not limited to:

- credit (specifically housing and pay-day loans) - the necessity (real or imagined) of a college degree - quality and subject matter of pre-university education - utilities (specifically electricity and internet) - housing and rent

To be clear, I'm not advocating the direct removal or destructuring of any of these things. I do, however, see these as disruptable (but largely ignored) aspects of our society and economic system that have direct, adverse effects on many groups of people.

I was thinking the same thing, it almost looks a little too good to be true -- although it does kinda make sense given the focus on GPU-based clusters. I wonder how this compares to Baidu's warp-ctc [1]. They don't really seem to be the same thing, and maybe I'm missing something since I'm just starting to get into ML, but it seems to be conspicuously absent from this writeup.

[1] https://github.com/baidu-research/warp-ctc

For them, a larger iPad with a keyboard is all they need for their personal work (email, Googling, etc), and the huge screen & 4 speakers are icing on the cake for watching Netflix or HBO Go with their spouse in bed.

I was wondering what the purpose of a device like this could possibly be, that makes a lot of sense. My dad has one of the free Verizon tablets that they gave out for a promotion a little while back, and uses it for exactly this. I guess it's a generational thing, because it never really made sense to me.

Yeah, your last suggestion was what I was leaning towards. Because of the ubiquity of linear algebra, though, this seems like as good a time as any to start getting a good handle on it. Thanks for the resources!

Awesome, thanks for the pdf!

How accessible is a course like this with no prior knowledge of linear algebra? I know it's listed in the pre-reqs, but with a good head for math and lots of calc, is it something that could be picked up along the way? I'm normally pretty bold about stuff like that, but I know it's a core part of deep learning / ML. If it's really necessary, if anyone has any resources for linear algebra run-throughs it would be greatly appreciated!!

Everyone makes mistakes, and this one's more common than one might think :)

Yep, lesson learned big time :)

It seemed to fit our use-case really well. The CTO and I did a Meteor hackathon to get a feel for the tech, and thought that it would be a lay-up. Alas, it was quite an error.

The startup I'm with right now just finished a meteor/react project that I led. This article really touched on our major pain-point with the learning cliff that you hit after a certain point. We used FlowRouter since it has React support, but managing subscriptions correctly (let alone caching them) took way more time than we had anticipated. It wasn't until near the end of the project that we realized none of us actually had a total mastery of what was going on under the hood in meteor, which was a terrifying realization. All things considered, though, I think our biggest mistake was biting off more than we could chew in using React and Meteor, when we had never made an app using either before. On the other hand, blaze is pretty rough...

Ahh there we go. Still an interesting choice of university though, I would imagine some of the more high-profile schools would've been higher up on their list. Who knows what goes into those decisions though.

Great idea! It'll really be good for universities to start developing the infrastructure for VR courses, which I would imagine could easily be prohibitively expensive without something like this. Interesting angle by Cryengine as well, it seems like the benefit for them is getting more new game devs to use their platform. I wonder what the story is behind using Bahçeşehir as their flagship school -- Turkey I can see, since there's a big push for technological literacy there right now, but I would think a school like Boğaziçi or Galatasaray would be higher up on the list.

In New Zealand, isn't there also a huge insect called the Weta? I've never been to your beautiful homeland, but I've heard tales. I wonder what exactly differentiates these "tree lobsters" from Weta.

I think the hype that you (and the author) are talking about exposes an interesting problem in products that target developers. Overwhelming popularity is generally awesome for a business / product, but in this case it seems that over-use may actually be diluting the core value-prop of Docker. If people were silly, which sometimes happens, I could see a snowball effect where Docker is generalized to be wholly un-useful, which would be terrible for the product. Not that that will happen, but an interesting thought.

What a coincidence, I was just playing with this for the first time last weekend! They also have an npm package that can be used for both torrent streaming via node and the browser (https://www.npmjs.com/package/webtorrent). Awesome project.

What you're saying (and the somewhat muted point in the article) about advertising is totally true, but I don't think it just applies to children. People are hugely susceptible to advertising, which is why it is, and always has been, extremely effective if done correctly. It's especially disturbing when children are specifically targeted by advertisements pitching products are that demonstrably harmful, but it's not the exception. I think that one of the main reasons that most parents don't heavily discourage or forbid their children from watching these ads is that they themselves aren't aware of the broader picture. In that vein, I think education is just as important, if not more-so, than regulation of advertisers.

Like you said, a good cautionary tale. Even this incident, although definitely rough, isn't that bad compared to what can happen if you scale a full infrastructure improperly, or just overlook something involving a software-based business. Just a couple of months ago, a test EC2 instance that had been forgotten about got spun up by a very archaic piece of code, and ended up costing the guys I'm working with quite a bit. Always RTFM (especially AWS pricing docs) carefully, or feel the burn.

Interesting read, but not very much information underneath the fluff -- the definition of "demagogue" combined with a cursory knowledge of common logical fallacies covers pretty much everything here. It's also interesting that an article like this is being published by an organization like the BBC; punditry is (I think) one of the most common examples of the phenomenon of obfuscation through constructed debate.