Check out Tavis Rudd's Using Python To Code By Voice (from Pycon 2013) for a cool demo (that starts at 9:00):
http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using-python-to-code-by-voice
91 karma · joined March 17, 2012
http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Hacker-News-Meetup/
The first meetup a couple of days ago was successful- thanks Dan for organizing it and Coderwall for hosting. Hope to see more of these.
Also: https://www.facebook.com/groups/gosfhn http://sfhn.eventbrite.com
> Temporary files usually start with a dot or a dollar-sign.. to make sure that Nginx never serves any files starting with either of those characters...
> location ~ ~$ { access_log off; log_not_found off; deny all; }
Wouldn't that regex match temporary files ending with ~ (as it should)?
I guess there is no change, since the advantage YC sees in multi founders is probably only for the time interval before these disputes, at which point they are already doomed. But what I may be missing: could amicable breakup ever help a company avoid the dead pool?
Another thing I find missing from the discussion: is this move also meant to push new founders to profitability faster? PG seems to be mentioning it more lately ([2], [3] etc.).
[0] Honest question- I hope it does not spark another single vs. multi founder debate.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK3sVFs6_rs
[2] The best solution is not to need money. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4067297
[3] The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
The author points to statistics about tech companies started by immigrants and presents Desai as part of the team that developed new technology, but Desai studied MBA and he was only doing an administrative job at IR Diagnostyx[0].
Moreover, the openning example does not seem to be precise; the author claims that Desai was not given an opportunity to start his business, which does not seem to be aligned with Desai being affiliated with IR Diagnostyx from 2009 to Feb 2012[1]. Furthermore, upon graduation in 2009, the US did give Desai 12 months of OPT[2], for which self-employment does qualify. In fact, if Desai had studied Science/Tech/Engineering/Math, he would have been give an an extension of 17 months of OPT[3], for a total of ~2.5 years to work on his business.
[0] http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SB130652363641519729/Americ...
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/in/hardikadesai
[2] Optional Practical Training, assuming he was on F1 visa as a student: http://icenter.stanford.edu/students/current/employment_faq....
[3] http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...
http://www.scipy.org/NumPy_for_Matlab_Users
IMHO, it's best to prototype in Octave and then build in python. I find that the Matlab/Octave syntax is too focused on linear algebra, so it's better for small prototypes (and for people coming from non-SW fields). For big projects, I prefer the 0-based arrays, more than one function per file, and all the rest of the python goodies. I estimate that 70% of my time is usually spend preparing the data (e.g. parsing xml, or some other files, etc), for which I find python more suitable.
In fact, I usually work with them side by side, testing ideas in Octave, then implementing these pieces into a large python project.
Edit: this has also been discussed here before, e.g.
We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to[0]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209955
A lot of the current post seems to be taken straight from there. Compare, for example:
> in Alzheimer’s patients their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.
with Goebel's quote:
> 'Their short-term memory hardly works, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.'
Here's a direct link: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449323592?portal=oreilly...
First, I think their business model (talent discovery and job placement) depends on good assessment of students' ability. At least, this is Udacity's business model[1].
Second, I think that the OP's assumption that this is not for accreditation is wrong. I think they do want Coursera's statement of accomplishment to be valuable on it's own (even if "Stanford" is not mentioned in it). For instance, if I were an employer, I'd hire anyone with Coursera's statement of accomplishment in a challenging class as the Probabilistic Graphical Models class [2]. Of course, the only problem is, as the OP mentions:
> For online courses, no one has cracked how to verify whether an identified student is the same person as the one doing the assessment.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3859253
[2] The class started with 44000 students [3]; by the 4th week there were about ~2000 left [4]; my guess is there are around 1000 left after the crazy 5th assignment... Though, One may argue that these statistics in part are due to rough edges and cryptic instructions in some of the programming assignments and quizzes.
[3] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne-kolle...
[4] according to the published class' 4th week quiz statistics.
I probably used every curse I know while working on the 5th PGM assignment, but I am the first to admit that I did learn a lot, and I'm sure they will fix the rough edges for the second run of the class. Moreover, the entrepreneur in me is very inspired to see fresh-from-the-oven code. Sure, I've already seen apps that were lacking some features because they were released fast, but here I have an opportunity to actually see some fresh code (since we are basically asked to "fill in the blanks" in Daphne's implementation). I admire Daphne's entrepreneurial courage to publish something even if is is not 100%.
Also note that the PGM class has many more pointers to recent research in the field [1], which I think the OP would find interesting.
Finally, I think the OP is missing a bit of the bigger picture - comparison of undergraduate studies in Israel and the US. I could probably write a long post about this one day (I've taught science undergrads in both college systems), but at least I should point out a couple of things. In Israel, there is much more focus on the major; about 95% of the classes are in the major field of studies. (One chooses her/his major before applying to college). There are (almost) no GE classes [2]. There is probably no one attending CS classes who does not major in CS (or double major). There are advantages and disadvantages of each system. But as a result, you can put more challenging content into CS classes in Israel.
Therefore, it would probably be more fair to compare a CS class from the Technion to upper-division or first-year grad class. That is, instead of comparing it to Stanford's CS161 (or any other 100-199 classes), it would be more fair for the OP to compare it to the level of CS228/CS229A (or almost any other 200-299 classes).
[1] Not all of these are plugs to Daphne's research- I even remember some pointers to Thruns' papers. (he's sort of a competitor.)
[2] Perhaps this is to allow 3 years college, and save some time we spend serving in the army.
With this method or a something similar, you do not "lose everything" when you miss a deadline. IMHO, "losing everything" for missing a deadline is part of the reason for the (exponential?) decay in the number of students participating in Coursera's PGM class[1,2].
[1] Based on PGM's "quiz's highest score" statistics, the total numbers of participating students are 6950, 3500, 2650 for week1, week2 and week3 respectively (other weeks' stats are not complete as of this writing).
[2] Another interesting stats is the ratio of perfect scores to all other scores: 25.2%, 34.3%, 49%. This could suggest that the deadline system filters out most students but the very top ones (assuming uniform difficulty of quizzes, and uniform quality of lecture videos/slides, etc.). This may not be what you want from an educational perspective. And, yet it may actually be what you want to support a business plan similar to Udacity- discovering talent. (see my comment below)