This was apparently pretty typical for English law hundreds of years ago. As I understand it, wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes. Many of the death sentences were not even carried out by the executioners, because they were so common.
I believe that Thiel is saying that the current structure of higher education, in tiers of increasing eliteness, bundled with a living and partying arrangement over an essentially-fixed time period, is bad, not that the course material or content is bad. I'm a CS student at a very prestigious university in the UK, and I'm not going to claim that I would have learned all of the same things that I have learned if I had self-taught, but I totally didn't need the whole living arrangement thing, and I'm not really sure why I had to fight with thousands of other students for my place, when most of the teaching easily parallelises if you just record the lectures and open up the course notes.
I'm not sure having better predictors of what businesses are good is necessarily a good idea. Part of the attraction of silicon valley is that it takes some of the risk out of trying new things, even if they might be bad ideas. This culture of trying things leads us to find the occasional really good idea. If we sit around all day plugging our ideas into models to see if, statistically speaking, the will succeed, we won't find the really novel ideas that look bad but are actually good.
Mathematica has a few of these features. If you paste in an image from a previous operation, then the image is shown inline in the piece of code you're typing.
The median-of-medians approach is also somewhat tricky to implement (avoiding array copies and so on), although it admittedly looks neat on the slides of the algorithms lectures.
This talks about our ability to reach or describe the worst case, so if we say it's Ɵ(n^2), we're saying that we can tell that the worst case is at least quadratic, and it's also no worse than quadratic. We might not be so good at the math and have only discovered that the worst case was at least linear and no worse than exponential (which is true of quicksort).
I think the main thrust of the update is providing this ephemeral face-to-face 'meeting' of your friends throughout the day, as if you're seeing them in the corridor, just like college. The text chat seems to be more of a platform for facilitating that.
Yeah everyone I know hates switching to G+ for group calls. We have to use Skype to guide people through the G+ interface and get them on a group call.
It definitely seems a little naive to hand over the keys to your life's data without accepting that you're taking on a fairly large amount of risk with regards to privacy. Even if the party to which you're handing it over doesn't intentionally behave maliciously, you still have to trust that they share your exact opinion on what reasonable use of the data is.
We desperately need the laundry one in my dorm at Oxford! I have invested way too many brain cycles in thinking about unobtrusive ways of achieving that.
The whole thing seems a bit flimsy to me though: (1) Don't provide free stock photos at the time that people want them. (2) Later doe provide stock photos at the time that people want them, but no longer for free. (3) Profit!
Totally agree about the weekly emails. Unless I was using stock photography all the time (in which case I'm less likely to need the free ones) this would be no use. I was searching urgently for a good free stock photo a while ago and these sites just made me screw my face up.
To make matters worse, there doesn't even appear to be any way to get the back-catalogue of most of these sites. Death to Stock gives you a collection of photos when you sign up, but it's just 10 sample images.