madmanslitany

10 ms·

31.
by madmanslitany 17y ago
Blackboard started as two separate companies, one of which was called CourseInfo. This is the part that forms the core of Blackboard's software offering. One of my professors at Cornell told us a bit about how CourseInfo came about; if I r
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by madmanslitany 17y ago
I think this appeals to the identity crisis that programmers can sometimes have; are we really engineers? We're the most removed from the physical of all engineers with the exception of the ORIE/FE people, and nobody's quite sure what they
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by madmanslitany 17y ago
I would agree that Page is probably being intellectually dishonest in his argument that H1N1 is a prime example of why Google should be allowed to retain data longer, but I don't think your comparison holds. At its core, what you're descri
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I would second this; I don't have any experience with writing startups, but I used to post to fanfiction.net when I was younger. I quickly noticed that the stories with the most reviews and attention weren't really "stories." They were wr
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
Great job organizing this, I really enjoyed it.
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
It's kind of bizarre sometimes when I think about how I got into facebook in the spring of 2004. I was a sophomore at Cornell at the time, and I don't feel like anyone talks about this that much anymore now that facebook is all-inclusive a
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable as it is here to meet someone briefly through a friend and then add them the nex
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
This is probably the first substantial article I've seen on the lead-up to the recession written by someone who's "one of us." It seems like much of his career activity took place a decade ago, but much of what he relates still rings true
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
"In short, welching on these debts would likely lead to exactly the problem that the government has decided must be avoided." I think this is true of the payments made to AIG's counterparties, not so much of the bonuses being paid to the fi
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
Valid point, but people who are just in it for the economics might go for what's classed as an information science or management of information systems degree, which are usually viewed as easier than the mainline computer science degrees.
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
It'll be interesting to see if the regulators really do accept that Madoff acted alone; I personally think it's extremely unlikely. There must have been a hacker somewhere in his office helping him, because the investors received very deta
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
The article does mention something that people don't talk about too often--at least at my alma mater, the general attitude among CS students was that it was much harder for H1-B students to get internships and jobs than permanent resident/A
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I don't think it's the permanence that changes things, it's the visibility. Gossip about you from high school isn't that likely to turn up when you move out of your hometown to the big city, for instance. I don't really think that most of
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I mostly agree--many of the posters do deserve to be punished for what they said, but I think incidents like this one (and other somewhat similar stories like the fuss over JuicyCampus last year) point to a more fundamental societal problem
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
This kind of goes back to pg's "Cities and Ambition." Even amongst top CS departments, I think the atmosphere of the surrounding area does influence what the students want to do with themselves. Entrepreneurial spirit isn't necessarily so
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
That's not necessarily true; for things like designing proprietary languages themselves optimized for financial risk modeling, yes, you better have a CS Phd. But it's definitely not the case that everyone who touches functional programming
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
Good commentary. Apple has kept Microsoft on defense with its PR for so long it's pretty hard to imagine Microsoft mounting a successful counterattack against them. Still, that begs the question, what COULD work for a Microsoft ad? The "
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I mostly agree with you, but isn't $1500 a bit of an underestimate? Jersey City isn't that cheap; $1500 is definitely impossible in Newport or near Exchange Place, and I thought that even around Journal Square it would cost more than $15
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I can't agree with this more. I despised gym and sports in high school, but in college I gradually took on more physical activity through a bit of martial arts (I was still a total slacker when it came to showing up for training, but it wa
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I fully acknowledge that this is the kind of thing that can give privacy advocates nightmares about what Facebook and Google are capable of, but I'm incredibly excited by ideas like this. Things like this are what keep me interested in Com
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I'm deeply impressed and I give him a lot of credit for pulling that off, but does anyone ever know what happens to these kids? I feel like there's a story every year or two about someone who pulls off some kind of bizarrely difficult acad
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
Professor Arms at Cornell once said during lecture that he was most impressed by the quality of the math articles on Wikipedia, and I think the same holds true for the computer science articles (and, really, when you get to the point of tal
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I don't know, but I think this is really just another iteration of the debate over how much college should be vocational training and how much it should be devoted towards building minds. My greatest regret towards the way I approached som
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
Isn't Steven Chu, Obama's new Secretary of Energy, pro-nuclear? From: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=reactivating-nuclear-rea... "Nuclear power, as I said before, is going to be an important part of our energy mix," said physicist St
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I'm not sure if I agree with the author's conclusion, which seems to be that the newer generations of computer scientists are going to identify less with its separate sub-domains (science, math, engineering) than with the discipline as a so
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I've always thought that that was pretty cool--helps keep organization standards high overall and prevents poor managers from building their own little kingdoms. Even if a group ends up with a new hire who lacks some domain knowledge, I'd b
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by madmanslitany 18y ago
I started working on this about a month and a half ago. My RMSE is pathetic thus far(just started tweaking a kNN with Pearson correlation as a distance metric), but I don't really care. It's a great way to brush up on a lot of CompSci con