xiaoma

5 ms·

1.
by xiaoma 9y ago
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,
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by xiaoma 9y ago
That was the case, at least for parochial schools in the 90s.
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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)
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> "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 w
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 tha
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 (f
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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.
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 peo
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> " 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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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.
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 diffe
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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.
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> 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 uto
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 entir
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 p
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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, ha
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 prop
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 A
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> "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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
What is your idea of "working harder" in this case? Are you familiar with what was attempted?
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
That's not a profession.
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> "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 p
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 tin
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> " 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 (wh
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by xiaoma 9y ago
> "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 universit
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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
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by xiaoma 9y ago
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 h

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