TheTrotters

“This partnership is a historic first for a major professional sports league, and will allow fans around the world to watch all MLS, Leagues Cup,1 and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place — without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle.”

The “around the world” part is huge for the MLS (and to a lesser extent for Apple). I’m in Europe and I’ve never watched an MLS game. But it looks like it’ll be the first and only football league that I’ll be able to watch in a civilized way so I’ll definitely give it a try.

This may be true for lower-tier and middle-of-the-pack graduate programs but at the higher end, if anything, the opposite is true. There's an arms race among the candidates to get the best grades in the hardest classes, to get the best research experience, best letters of recommendations, perfect or near-perfect GRE scores and often GRE subject scores.

Getting a good job sounds almost blissfully easy in comparison.

That’s of course a fair point.

But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world. People’s careers and influence are built partly on their follower count and who those followers are. Key users post under their real name.

Digg and MySpace were very different from that.

> Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.

They make money from ads… which people see when they use search.

Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.

Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.

But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.

EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.

You’re absolutely right about Google but, I think, it’s not necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so important that it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone.

And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.

What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.

Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.

Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model.

Note that the OP is asking about college-level math, not cutting-edge papers.

Textbooks routinely have a list of symbols and their definitions.

But, from my experience, notation is rarely the problem. I’d bet that the root cause of OP’s frustration is lack of understanding of concepts, not notation. (But, of course, it’s hard to say more without specific examples).

I wasn’t alive then but I imagine it’s similar to what the iPhone announcement was for me.

Scrolling + rubber band effect, pinch to zoom, or just using your fingers to control a device. It was magical!

For the younger generation those are very normal and mundane things. It’s just how their devices have always worked.

I had very good experience with The Economist but, despite that, I'm still hesitant to re-subscribe because I just don't want to bother e-mailing them if I want to suspend or cancel my subscription (or add/remove print etc.).

I had a great experience with Audible. I switched from Audible UK to Audible US but forgot to cancel the former. After six months I noticed I had 6 credits I didn't want. I sent one short e-mail explaining what happened and within 15-30 minutes I got a response that said they'll refund everything.

Few people are criticizing the show from deviating from books per se. It isn’t good on its own merits.

Of course they had to make some changes and flesh out some characters to adapt it for TV. They just made poor choices. Instead of going with chosen ones, heroes, and battles, they should have gone for politics in space.

Something like the political manouvering in A Song of Ice and Fire but in space.

But if you want your show to be a success you have to take chances.

If they make just another derivative show they can’t be surprised by the poor reception.

(Besides I’m not sure I agree with the premise. Game of Thrones was a big success and it was much more complex than a simple Hero’s Journey.)

Exactly. There’s a lot of wishful thinking that the show is criticized because it deviates from the books.

No, the show simply isn’t good. It suffers from the Netflix Disease. High production quality, painfully mediocre writing.

OSM doesn't seem to have public transportation data which makes it useless unless you exclusively use a car.

> I mourn that the default aspiration for getting a PhD isn't staying in academia and advancing science.

It almost certainly is for the vast majority of grad students. There are just way more newly-minted PhDs than tenure-track jobs, especially if you add some (reasonable) constraints like location, R1 university etc.

> it communicates extra information very cheaply and in-band with the code for people who are intimately familiar with the mathematics involved.

I think it's just the opposite. People familiar with the relevant math have, most likely, worked with this stuff in other programming languages and never used math symbols in their code.

I'm used to seeing θ or α in text and theta or alpha in code. The combination of Greek letters and for loops looks very weird.

Anyone who has even basic fluency with these algorithms has ~never worked with code that uses these symbols and will likely find them distracting in this context.

I've seen plenty of function use, say, `theta` but I have never worked with θ.

I disagree. Virtually no one who worked even a little with these algorithms has used math symbols in their code. For better or for worse it messes up people's pattern recognition.

In a vacuum real math symbols look better but they're virtually never used in practice and they mess up people's pattern recognition.

It's uncanny valley but for code.

> It sucks when you need to buy / move furniture though.

But isn't that an extremely rare event?

Maybe you move more than anyone I've ever known but I don't see how something so minor could meaningfully affect quality of life.

But that strategy is probably impossible in a market where the cost to entry is fairly low.

Suppose Uber drives out literally all cab companies out of the market in some city and rises prices to absurdly high levels. Creating a brand new cab company isn’t that hard. Lease cars, create a decent app, advertise a little and you’re good to go.

I don’t think I buy this reasoning. Operating a taxi doesn’t require a huge capital expense. So even if we accept your premise, once Uber raises prices way above what they used to be, someone can just create an old-schools taxi company with a decent app, lease cars and go ahead.

But I don’t buy the premise in the first place. Cab companies aren’t going out of business in any city which I frequently visit. They improved their offering (apps, you don’t have to pay with cash etc.) and they’re competing just fine.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. At least compared to every other generation.

TED isn’t necessarily much better. Plenty of talks are based on low-quality psychology research that doesn’t replicate (e.g. power poses).

TED should be viewed as high-quality feel-good, inspirational YouTube videos, not an educational resource.

Why?

People use all kinds of substances: caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, modafinil, a myriad of sleeping pills, antidepressants, and painkillers. At different points in time some of them have been banned or regulated, at others available to everyone. As things stand some of them require a prescription from a doctor.

In the vast majority of cases there's little danger to at least trying out stimulants like Adderall or methylphenidate, or substances like modafinil. If people want to try them I think they should be free to do so. If they have to jump through some hoops I see no reason to frown upon it.

Their body, their choice.

Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true.

We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.

In Poland I can use my bank login (a “Trusted Profile”) to sign in to government websites and access my data.

E.g. when I registered for Covid vaccine I logged in using my bank login.

There are other ways to do it too but since I already had an account in a participating bank I didn’t bother looking into them.

I don’t know if banks earn anything from it. I’d be surprised if they did.

I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers.

If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities.

I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom.

It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them.

It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.

Flavored sparkling water