kdoherty

I recently ended up in an interesting conversation with a university faculty member where we found that many of the most endowed universities could essentially make undergraduate education free and make back the difference (and often more) on straight interest accumulated from leaving their money in a bank.

Given that they are probably making more than the current interest rates by investing, I wonder why students still pay so much for tuition at these universities in particular.

>>You can save time by learning from the mistakes of others.

>Only barely. For important life decisions/paths, people only learn from their own mistakes (and often not even from those).

>Heck, Computer Science as a field itself forgets its own collected wisdom every new generation hits the market, and re-invents BS that other eras have tried and buried with another fad name.

Your last statement sounds like it's in favor of "learning from the mistakes of others" in that we could avoid re-inventing failed "BS" if we learned from others' mistakes. Are you saying that the idea that folks in CS re-invent work which has previously failed is evidence that it is not possible to learn from the mistakes of others?

I remember being in high school when Google Plus came out and thinking it would be incredibly popular. I totally missed the mark, and it's funny because while I thought it would take off with other people, I never really used it myself.

I had a really hard time getting into Vim until I found out everyone I knew who was using it had mapped something else to escape. Once I did the same, it was much easier to get started.

All I could find on these archives were summaries of the letters, is there anywhere where we can view the actual documents that are archived (either scanned or OCR)? I admit, I had a hard time navigating that page, so I may have missed something obvious.

Edit: My bad, after reading the Conditions Governing Use I found this: "Photocopies and photographic copies of material in the archive can be supplied for private study purposes only, depending on the condition of the documents." So it looks like these written summaries are all we can get?

Yeah, I think so! That's exactly why I mentioned the accident rate reduction cited in the Wikipedia article shared above.

I'd love to see official work that explores that angle (rather than a claim from an interview, which is what the Wikipedia article refers to), I just haven't seen any document/study about it yet.

It's great seeing that more and more data is being collected about this all the time. I'm a huge proponent of this tech.

What I wonder when I see these statistics, though, is whether all miles are really equal? For example, are Tesla drivers more comfortable using Autopilot in "easy" driving situations? Is there really a one-to-one correspondence in the distribution of the kinds of miles driven with Autopilot on vs. normal cars?

Furthermore, the metric commonly cited is "fatalities ever N miles." Are there fewer fatalities because Autopilot is great, or because Teslas are safer in general? Has there been a comparison between fatalities with/without Autopilot strictly on Teslas? Even then, it seems to me we are subject to this potentially biased notion of "miles" I mentioned previously. The Wikipedia article you mentioned cites a 50% reduction in accidents with Autopilot, but the citation is to an Elon Musk interview. I haven't yet seen anything official to back this up, but if anyone has any information on this, I'd love to see it!

I had no intention of criticizing any efforts. One should do whatever makes them happy, and as a frequent user of these libraries, it is to my own advantage for them to improve.

For the same reasons, I have nothing against people who "do anything that resembles anything that has been done before," and I certainly wouldn't attempt to discourage the author. I'm sorry if that cartoon is over-referenced (in attempts to be negative), I can't really control that, but I think it's something to think about when starting a new project (i.e. what is your goal, does it differ from other projects, is that important to you?)

Sorry if my comment seemed like I was shooting this down, I certainly had no intent of doing that.