kszx's comments

His father also called him Loong (not Hsien Loong), at least sometimes:

"He was still young and it was better that someone else succeed me as prime minister. Then, were Loong to make the grade later, it would be clear that he made it on his own merit."

http://www.singapore-window.org/sw04/040531a1.htm

(They use English in the family, although Lee Hsien Loong can speak Chinese fairly well.)

Cambridge professor about Lee Hsien Loong:

"No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap. I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician."

"I’m sure his father never realized how exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No, Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan Yew, “Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage him to do mathematics,” then he implied that that was impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good point indeed."

http://therealsingapore.com/content/cambridge-professor-lee-...

It may be true that this particular sample is too small; I haven't looked at the experiment in detail. However, just pointing out that n<=20 per group isn't enough of an argument to justify this statement. Significance is about more than just the sample size. The idea that it's impossible to get significant statistical result with small samples is a common misconception.

I do. (The number of layers varies with the temperature.)

May I ask the opposite question?

Why do many people change outfits almost every day? Do they derive satisfaction from the process of choosing clothes? Or do they derive satisfaction from the fact that other people notice these changes?

As you point out, choosing and owning different outfits comes at a cost, and people who choose to do so must have a reason for this behaviour.

Really? com.ycombinator.news seems much more logical and intuitive to me, just like 2015-04-01.

Or how about com/ycombinator/news?

The US (Great Plains Shelterbelt project), China (Great Green Wall, or Three-North Shelter Forest Program), and Russia (Siberia) are precisely the inspirations for this project.

Writing out long variable names while working on a mathematical model is like writing the same text with ten times the number of characters. It's neither elegant nor efficient.

Imagine you're playing around with variables and model configurations in complex mathematical terms, but one formula stretches over two pages and you always need to cross out and rewrite whole words.

It makes sense to use Greek letters for exogenous parameters so that we can use Latin letters for endogenously determined variables. The distinction between capitalized and uncapitalized letters is useful for a similar reason.

This makes economic formulae much more readable.

Is this "issue" a bug or a feature? Isn't it very liberating that people can't see whether you're looking at them or not?

Alexa's China sample appears to be unrepresentative, so the numbers are flawed.

Another indication: chinadaily.com.cn (English) is #23, just after one of the most popular Chinese web portals (sogou.com).

The Pico CMS website features an attractive description / value proposition: "Pico is a flat file CMS, this means there is no administration backend and database to deal with. You simply create .md files in the "content" folder and that becomes a page." Perhaps you can add a similar sentence to the Baun website as well?

Possibly.

But Sandwich Video's decision to accept equity is obviously based on an assumption that start-ups continue to reach high valuations.

So if we're at the top, Sandwich Video is late. In that case, cash out now by purchasing a video. The service provider will suffer the valuation loss.

If the video increases your expected valuation by another 100k or more - e.g. by influencing other VCs' investment decisions - then it's probably the right thing to invest in.

[This statement is inherently true by the principles of finance.]

HK is a potential retail destination for > 1 bn consumers in East Asia.

Mainland Chinese cross the border and come back with bags full of Apple products (in addition to LV bags etc.).

My personal impression:

Formulation 1 (with variables, short and concise sentences): easy to understand.

Formulation 2 (without variables, long sentence): difficult to understand.

==> I prefer Formulation 1.

The part about "Wilbarger Protocol" sounds like torture.

"When he was unable to regulate the information coming into his brain, I would perform a process called the Wilbarger Protocol. It was intimate. I would move a soft brush on Scooter’s arms, legs, neck, and back. Then he would put his hand in mine and I would grab his fingers one at a time, compressing the joints in toward his palm. Firm but gentle, confident but caring. I would watch his face, look for some tension to drop from it and then linger there, count to 10 in my head, and then move on to the next one."

It's definitely controversial if seen from an American perspective.

But it's much less controversial if seen from a German perspective. So perhaps you need to understand Thiel's German background first. Germany offers many successful alternatives to university.

Now combine it with Thiel's libertarian views: Apparently, Thiel tries to set up alternatives to college privately.

===

EDIT (for clarification):

I'm not saying that Germans would like this particular experiment. But they usually agree that university is just one out of multiple desirable options to gain a qualification.

In other words, I'm saying that thinking about alternatives to university is very German. This leads me to the idea that the motivation for this experiment may have its roots in Thiel's past.

Saying this as a German.

You can do that with US Dollars. It's more complicated with Chinese Yuan.

Correct.

You are free to reject unpaid internships. You are also free to accept it. --> No coercion. --> No exploitation.

In contrast, a law against unpaid internships restricts free choice.