xiaoma

Out of curiosity what sorts of things do you watch on Coursera? I was a big fan in 2013-2014 and did a bunch of courses. Some of them, like the Scala course, were very self-contained and great, especially with the automated graders. Mostly, I found the platform frustrating, though.

The artificial pacing of the courses made it essentially impossible to go through any faster than you would in an an in person class. Also the honor code prevents people from actually helping each other when they're stumped in the forums. There's clearly some tension between my goal of learning and the platform's focus on credentialing (via credentials that carry almost no weight).

Many courses were watered down versions and since different institutions break up their coursework slightly differently, there was a constant problem of repeating material or missing parts of prerequisites. Now it seems nearly all the courses are watered down and most don't seem to have any prerequisites at all.

Is it possible to do an entire technical degree's worth of material on Coursera, even at the undergrad level? Regardless of the value of their own certificates and capstone projects, if a student could learn enough to pass a GRE subject test, that credential that would actually carry some weight.

That was the case, at least for parochial schools in the 90s.

Gender-segregated parochial schools in the US tend to have typical outcomes for boys and notably good outcomes for girls. (at least back when I was a student in the early 90s)

"If convicted of intellectual property theft (and there's a lot of evidence about this), Anthony Levandowski could be end up in prison for a very long time."

That's just barbaric. Yes, IP laws serve a public good when they're able to balance the needs of incentivizing creative endeavors with ensuring those endeavors eventually end up in the public domain. But it's not even remotely morally defensible to put a human being in a fucking cage for years because they shared some secrets related to making self-driving cars.

The US already has way too non-violent people in prison.

If you read the book, he directly explains that what's ideal for a company isn't necessarily what's ideal for society. For a company's founders or investors, it's pretty much always good to become a monopoly and that's completely legal, too. The anti-trust problems happen after a company already is a monopoly. The US government seems to have essentially ignored anti-trust issues during the Bush/Obama era, but enforcement used to be common.

During the MS anti-trust case in the 90s, it was common to hear things like "becoming a monopoly should be the goal of any business but once they succeed they can't use that monopoly to compete unfairly for another." It was lauded that the created the DOS/Windows monopoly, but it was illegal to force suppliers to bundle MS Word, IE or Media Player with each system and it was illegal to prevent them from pre-installing Word Perfect, Netscape or Real Player.

I don't think MS would have survived so unscathed if Gore had won, but it's impossible to know for sure. The political administration has a huge effect on how much these things are pursued, and it would be a huge deal if the Trump administration were to pursue anti-trust cases as aggressively as the Clinton administration did.

This article is exactly as objective and as "inciteful" as one would expect given the source.

Gizmodo's parent company, Gawker, outed Thiel for being gay and he later helped fund a lawsuit someone else brought against them (for taking and publishing a recording of a private sexual encounter). That lawsuit put Gawker out of business.

Stocks and real estate are a reasonable shield against monetary policy, but baskets of currencies, bonds and long-term-interest savings are all extremely vulnerable to inflation.

BTC on the other hand, is deflationary by design.

They've actually improved, too! It used to be $499 courses regularly marked down to $15 and similar ridiculous discounts. It wasn't just limited to people using coupon sites either... Udemy was mailing the crazy discounts to people all the time back in 2014-2015.

" That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read."

You know, that's just a gratuitous swipe. So was this in the blog post: "First, DuckDuckGo didn’t start as a nerd attempt to find the ultimate algorithm."

It really looks like you want to put down nerds to make yourself feel more sophisticated or popular. This isn't high school, though, and you're pissing in the same pool you're posting in. Turning "HN" into an adjective with a pejorative tone isn't going to win you any friends on HN, especially as a new poster. It's just mean spirited.

FYI, you can click on the [-] to minimize a comment with a wall of text and easily get to the next subthread in the discussion.

Zynga also had great DAU numbers while frustrating more and more of its users. Blackhat engagement techniques are strong in the short to medium time horizon. There's so much opportunity for fb if they could just focus on slightly different goals.

It's the same reason people try to get each other fired, "deplatformed" or ostracized for off-handed remarks, relatively mainstream opinions or even for supporting the wrong side of a divisive issue years in the past.

People are very tribal, the Anglosphere is highly politicized and it's a lot easier to make a snap judgment and label someone as part of an enemy tribe than it is to deal with nuanced statements.

There's a much cleaner solution. Just live in China and don't use a VPN. Unless you stay in an expat bubble, you likely won't even hear about Google very often.

And my person view is that all jobs should be compensated at the same hourly rate. But is there anything special about teachers?

Some nations tried that idea last century. It lead to war, famine and 100 million deaths. Aiming for utopia is a noble idea, but the results have been horrific thus far.

We have the models, but economists have been surprisingly resistant to mainstream mathematical tools and often treat fields as scalars. A single consumer price index makes about as much sense as a single temperature measurement for an entire country.

IIRC prominent economists actively ridiculed the idea of a "Manhattan Project" a few years back. The idea was to pull in experts from mathematics, physics, biology and computer science to invigorate the field via cross-pollination like occurred with mathematics and physics in the 70s and economists did not like it.

Update: apparently it did lead to a conference, at least, and Nassim Taleb was one of the participants.

Pia Malaney recently spoke about her experience dealing with this problem as a grad student at Harvard. Her research topic interested a nobel prize winner she later worked with, but the administration had zero interest in it because their political supporters wanted research to support a course of action they'd already decided on.

Few economists are willing to look at their own incentives or, in her words, "the economics of economics".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA1br9n5lQM&feature=youtu.be...

It's surprising the article didn't even mention the leader in online economics education, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution: https://www.mruniversity.com/

It's been going since 2012, has nearly 1,000 videos and is completely free.

There is some distance between the US and the UK but it's still comparatively modest compared to the world as a whole.

If, for example, Asian and Middle Eastern countries influenced the law of this hypothetical world government in proportion to their population, then the UK might be compelled to execute violators of the drug laws you refer to.

Imagine how socially liberal European atheists would feel about voters living in middle eastern theocracies being able shape the laws about how their daughters could dress. Now imagine the reverse.

Why would anybody be happy letting people with such fundamentally different belief systems make their rules?

The other three Asian tigers weren't democracies then, either. But along with Korea they were free market economies. While political freedoms were limited, it was a far, far cry from the situation in any of the communist countries in Asia. The choice between living in South Korea vs North Korea was clear even in the mid 1980s.

"I would like to see the fall of NK, but seriously you cannot blame the Chinese for supporting NK in the past and mainly for one reason. That reason is that NK is the buffer zone between China and the 30,000 US troops stationed in SK. Heck what about the 40,000+ troops stationed in Japan."

A lot of people forget that the those troops are the very reason Japan, South Korea and many other countries in the region haven't developed nuclear arsenals themselves. The post WWII agreement has essentially been "the US promises to protect its allies and in exchange they limit their military investments and don't pursue nuclear weapons".

As much as China might not like US bases in neighboring countries, it's a lot better than if all of its neighbors had or were in the process of developing nukes. That scenario is a nightmare with too many ways of going horribly wrong.

What is your idea of "working harder" in this case? Are you familiar with what was attempted?

The US did invest heavily in rebuilding Korea after the war and in "economically winning over people and giving them more opportunity and freedoms". The portion of Korea that was and still is occupied by UN (primarily US) armed forces is now a healthy, well-educated, free and prosperous country—South Korea.

North Korea, on the other hand, is an impoverished totalitarian state that has been using the threats to demand aid for decades. It wouldn't even exist if China hadn't decided to intervene against the UN command in Korea and flood troops into the peninsula, and to this day it is the one and only country in the world China has formed an alliance with.

And your assessment is that the problem wasn't that the PRK chose communism, but instead it was the US not offering enough freedom or economic opportunity!? What about its communist allies?

I'm not a fan of all of some the US's military actions in recent decades, but if ever there was a war worth fighting since WWII, then surely the Korean War was it. You'd have a hard time finding anyone in the south wishing the communists had won the entire peninsula and that they'd become part of the PRK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_.2...

That's not a profession.

"You're inadvertently parroting speculative bitcoin hype here. The general rule with all bitcoin (and blockchain) media coverage is..."

I was in Japan two weeks ago and saw for myself. I was actually surprised about payments being taken in bitcoin when I heard a customer at a FamilyMart talking about it and double checked with the clerks just to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding.

I may have misunderstood the timing with Peach's support, since I wanted to book in NTD (the currency of my bank account) anyway. That said, exactly none of my comment comes from speculative media coverage. It's literally all from first-hand experience interacting with companies as a customer.

Japan is a huge part of this. Since the government approved btc as a currency, Peach Airlines has started taking bitcoin, huge chains of convenience stores like FamilyMart have been accepting payments in bitcoin, etc.

It's still a tiny portion of total commerce but an absolutely massive jump from previous bitcoin usage.

" Mayer did exactly what she was brought into do: increase the value of the stock to make an exit out of a failure."

Why are you giving her credit for that? Nearly all of Yahoo's value was its investment in Alibaba (which happened years earlier). If anybody deserves credit for Yahoo's recent exit, it's Jack Ma.

"Literally one in millions."

Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? The only reason you're hearing about this case is because the account holder is a university professor who lost a long standing Blogger site—used at his school and linked to by the NYT—and then the story made it to the front page of HN.

It's overwhelmingly likely that the vast, vast majority of people who lose access to their Google accounts never make it onto your radar.

I think you're right. It was probably politically motivated, at least indirectly. It was more likely due to coordinated flagging efforts rather than a human at Google deciding to ban the account.

He's getting a lot of support from the right, the center (e.g. Joe Rogan) and from many on the left such as Sam Harris as well. In all cases, it seems to be for free speech issues. He seems to hold a deep opposition to political extremes, though it's hard to tell what he favors other than free speech since his videos meander into mythology and literature so much.

Despite being successful for an academic, he's not exactly a famous psych prof at the level of say, Steven Pinker. Before politics collided with his work this year he didn't seem to be politically active at all, either.

It might have changed a bit after Joe Rogan's podcast but to be honest, most people outside of Canada probably have no idea who Jordan Peterson is.