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mtpark

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Your latter point is often ignored as inflation numbers are often taken as undisputed (or at least "what can you do about it") figures. There is tremendous bias in the calculation of inflation, although the BLS has done a great job of fixing this in the last decade or so. Unfortunately historical data will be incomparable because of these frequent revisions. See the Boskin Report for more details.

Watch out!

That equation for the macroeconomy (Quantity Theory of Money) went out of style in the 80s when people realized velocity wasn't a fixed constant, i.e., it only appeared attractive given the small set of data at the time.

I think a lot of you are missing the point. I could be wrong but I think the gist of the message is to look at what 40B into ycombinator would mean in terms of value added, employment created, etc. (with the wild assumption that it all scales). His point is to heavily criticize the 40B bailout of GM.

Try example searches for "roller coaster" and "US presidents" . I think those are better examples to try and get a feel for what's going on.

I didn't either. Maybe I still don't.

I think it takes a search and is smart enough to give you comparisons between results. Look at their examples to get a feel for how it works.

I could be wrong, someone let me know if I'm completely off base.

This is only true for the best schools with a decent amount of money. As bloomberg noted in a piece last month, a lot of schools on the cusp are in big trouble financially and depend on tuition to make up the difference. For most of these schools, students making under whatever the line is, don't get full aid like they might at Harvard, MIT, etc.

Also, this only extends to international students at, again, the best schools. When I applied for college several years back, I think it was only five schools that were need-blind to international students (they were also very generous with that aid). There might be more schools that do so now but I can't imagine it's substantially more.

For me, the study of algorithms is cs. Hacking is just a means of implementation. Also, I think it's a huge misconception that algorithms is all about math -- it's about problem solving in general.

As Dijkstra said "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

It probably has to do with the fact that very prestigious schools typically have smart students and being smart in general is probably going to play a huge role in success.

[dead] 17 years ago

Without taking sides, why is this being voted down?

Your opinion that this snippet reads like a natural language and is therefore useful is well taken.

Wish we had launched our beta BEFORE the application.

Good luck to all of you. I think they mean well when they say they make lots of mistakes.

I'm surprised there's little mention of either context or culture. I think those are two of the most important elements of translation. Without context, it's impossible to know the tone, or sometimes even the actual grammar/conjugation of translations for certain languages (I'm thinking Korean/Chinese but this probably applies for other languages as well). Context also helps tremendously with disambiguation, one huge flaw in machine translation.

Culture is another interesting aspect. What somebody might translate as a greeting might require a totally different literal translation in another language, but it's always hard to justify translations that aren't exactly literal. This usually impacts tone quite a bit. From my experience, conversational style for the major Asian languages is indirect and hinting. Most people already understand the importance of cultural differences, this is strongly present in speech as well.

Programming aside, UI, and design in general, strike me as pretty important.

Just look at what separated early Yahoo and early Google, a confused page of text and links vs. a simple search box. Was this necessarily the reason Google ended up winning out? Maybe not, but it's probably a strong reason for why.