grammr

Relevant discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2990768

Agreed. I was confused when he started the article by claiming that in "Silicon Valley, there is no more pejorative term than “lifestyle business.”"

This is absolutely not a characteristic of the startup community.

Many people mistakenly assume that MapReduce is only useful when dealing with Google or Facebook scale datasets. Nowadays, MapReduce is simply a convenient data access pattern, particularly when your data is spread across multiple machines. For example, Riak employs the MapReduce paradigm as its "primary querying and data-processing system." [0]

Clearly, Riak does not expect each and every query to run for hours and involve TBs of data. MapReduce is just a straightforward way to process distributed data.

[0] http://wiki.basho.com/MapReduce.html

Check out https://www.cloudability.com/.

They have all sorts of cost monitoring and analysis tools for popular cloud providers.

You very well could be right. But what's meaningful here is that Berkeley is hard, and that was the original point :)

> Are you saying that the caliber of student in the EECS department of Berkeley is so high that even the bottom 13% of the class would have gotten C's or B's at another school?

Certainly not any other school in general, but at your average university, probably yes. That's not so hard to believe given the competitiveness of Cal's engineering programs.

This is a valid point. The EECS department at Berkeley essentially sets the distribution of letter grades that will be assigned at the end of each course[0], so there will always be many damned smart students who end up getting really low (or failing) grades because of their performance relative to their peers.

I majored in CS at Berkeley, and there were only one or two professors that I can recall who strayed even slightly from these departmental guidelines. For me, the harsh curves essentially ruined what would have been an amazing educational experience. It was basically a perpetual preparation for the next exam, because you were always competing for your spot on the grade scale.

This is a very real deterrent for not only students who need a decent GPA (e.g. for grad school), but also for those who want to actually enjoy their time at university.

[0] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml

"I want to put a ding in the universe."

There are definitely different magnitudes of innovation. There's innovation in terms creating new products and services that people will pay for, and there's innovation that nudges the entire human race forward a little bit.

The scientists and engineers who enable the first manned mission to Mars will not be college dropouts.

He's making a fair point, which is that certain types of classification methods basically involve "fitting" a hyperplane to a dataset in such a way that the hyperplane divides the data into different classes [1]. In trivial cases, we may be able to do this in two dimensions, in which case the "hyperplane" is just a line bisecting two different classes of data. It's easy to see how this can be conceptualized as a type of regression.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine

Considering how strongly the author feels about developing exclusively on *nix, I found it surprising that it took as much as an interview for him to learn that "company X" uses Windows. Almost all software job reqs. offer reasonable insight as to what key technologies they use.

Other than that, I found his response reeking of condescension and inexperience.

My mom is a pretty senior manager at T-Mobile, so when I first read this post I texted her about the acquisition. She said that there were rumors in the company that Sprint was trying to buy them, but she had heard nothing about the AT&T acquisition. Five minutes later she got the news break from the CEO. HN ftw.

"I also want them to be humble and realistic."

Ironically, this statement is neither humble nor realistic. No one cares about how you'd like them to be. If all entrepreneurs were humble and realistic, we'd still be in the Stone Age. Yea, a lot of wild ideas fail, but the small number of them that succeed usually have a big positive impact. It follows that society is better off with a bunch of crazy, unrealistic entrepreneurs trying to "build the next Facebook".

My databases professor at my university once brought up Jim Gray's data latency analogy to illustrate the costs of using different types of storage. Basically it goes something like this:

Using a register is like interacting with information in your own brain, using an L1 cache is like walking to a bookshelf in the room you're in, using an L2 cache is like walking across campus, using RAM is like going to Sacramento (we were in Berkeley), hitting the disk is like going to Pluto, and using tape drives is like going to Andromeda.

I never fully registered the consequences of hitting disk until then.

I think he's suggesting that if any part of the reddit codebase is too complex, then it needs to be ripped out.

Write code with testing it in mind. Testing is often introduced far too late in the programming learning process, if at all.

I think IDEs will be one of the last classes of applications to move from the desktop to the Web. In addition to the usability challenges of running a highly complex application in a browser, there are also a ton of security/access issues that will need to be addressed to make a Web-based IDE useful.

We often need full, unrestricted access to the machines we're coding on, as well as the ability to obtain and use a ton of different tools alongside an IDE. Bringing this kind of freedom and flexibility to a browser is going to be tough.

+240% because of a tweet? I don't think I've ever seen a better opportunity for a short.

"If one wants a more educated populace, the answer is less school, not more."

This is the most ignorant statement I've seen on HN so far this year. Institutional education is far from perfect, but that hardly means we are better off without it. You denounce education because people manage to learn a lot outside of schools, but the materials and resources that enable such learning are direct byproducts of academia itself.

I listen to music about half the time I'm coding, but I almost always have my Bose QC 15's on. Wearing them with no music playing blocks a ton of distracting noise out. While expensive, they're one of the best investments I've ever made.

I'd like to say that it still wasn't all that prophetic back then, but I was only a wee lad and don't seem remember much of the early 80's...

"Jobs's fundamental insight - that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks - was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances."

It's interesting that common sense becomes "prophecy" when you're Steve Jobs.

Not exactly. Complex numbers greatly simplify math in that they allow us to represent phase and amplitude, for instance, using only a single term. Usually this appears as e raised to some power of i (or j) that is multiplied by an angle. x and y coordinates can't really accomplish the same thing. If I had an (x, y) pair, y would tell me something about amplitude, but I wouldn't really know anything about phase without comparing x to something else.

Check out phasors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasor_(sine_waves). Complex numbers make phasor math simple and elegant.