SudarshanP

Things like Space, energy seem too risky and biotech, medicine etc. seem to be too regulated. While I have no idea who is right or wrong, I was certainly surprised that Schmidt did not dismiss Thiel's comment about not having a clue about what to do with the cash.

I am not an economist, but I feel scared when the wealthiest people have no idea how to rapidly grow the money they have gathered. Coz they own most of it... and if all they can do is slosh it around from account to account and not directing it towards making employees/machines produce "stuff that matters", we will rather stagnate quickly. Once the developing countries catch upto the west and we automate whatever we can easily automate, the whole world will be left with stagnant economies. A whole planet with nothing much to do apart from fighting over depleting resources.

I desperately want google to be able to spend that cash heap on making something people want. Something that will give it a good profit so that it keep this going on until it remains competitive. Else I want capitalism off the face of this planet. I hate to live in a world where money keeps leaking out of my pocket in mysterious ways and the guys who get it from me, stop doing anything that will indirectly improve my life.

And please do not buy 50 Instagrams with that cash horde :(. Open question to the hackers over here... If you were chairman of Google what would do with 50 billion dollars to create maximum new wealth(http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)?

Then we have ROS... XSLT pipelines and so on. There is something really beautiful about looking at your code as plumbing :)

I've also encountered people who prefer abstraction over concreteness and it works for them. So the best is for each student to learn according to his preferred style. I hope courses like udacity and coursera slowly evolve into something where each student learns by his/her preferred method.

"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"

I have suggestion for another chart someone may be interested in creating. A time series of such images. It would be even more awesome if the traces all the movements are depicted in a single image like a snake.

Study: Patent Trolls Cost Companies $29 Billion Last Year

It sad that people still believe Space Colonization is so pointless.

The Google I/O talk mentioned on the other thread explains how we can separate out the semantics from the implementation and let components from different providers inter operate. I feel things like Shadow DOM will give real encapsulation for the first time in web development. As of now we either use Iframes or try(through self descipline) not to cause damage when mix components from different sources.

If it not a causation, this may also mean that "non motivated students" never care about math. Either in 5th grade or in high school or later.

Or maybe it is a combination of both. The article only shows correlation. But how can one study causation without destroying the futures of students?

I once came across a thread on the scratch website where a student was saying he wanted to figure out how to use trig functions because the guys using trig functions wrote much better games. He(she) was complaining that all the explanations on the web made no sense to him(her). These kinds of tools together can ease the path for those who want to think, but never end up paying enough attention to math due to unnecessary hurdles that prevent exposure to deeper ideas. It is not a silver bullet, but definitely a nice tool in the hands of a teacher who wants to stimulate thinking and a student who wants to think.

No wonder they want their stuff cheaper.

But as he himself says, certain things are hard to outsource. For Example the particular blog post itself. Outsourcing the webdesign and the code behind the site would have been a lot more easier. So in a strange sense, even a skeptic has to agree with his point... A site like Taskarmy can fail due to bad technology but will not succeed due to its technical prowess. What he needs to figure out is how to connect the buyers and the sellers and make them stick around. All the CRUD that goes into his site will not be the secret sauce. The only possible real secret sauce is probably a method to connect the buyers and sellers using an algorithm that beats the competition heads down. In such a case it makes sense for him to keep the "secret sauce" to himself. Everything else is a commodity until he becomes a huge player. If one is at twitter scale, even status messages become "rocket science" and cannot be outsourced.