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.