sadfaceunread's comments

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: A Tiny Minority of Elite Grad Schools Produce Most Tenured Academics

This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

So what about any charitable effort that discriminates on the basis of a protected class. If you can't do something for free to help one group without excluding some others no charity would be possible. Should MIT/Harvard intentionally avoid captioning? No. Should the government force them to use CCing? Hell no.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Abusing Contributors is not OK

I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online discourse.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Abusing Contributors is not OK

Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin

This is exactly my opinion as well. We don't remove books from the library because the author had moral failings, or even if the author committed genocide. The content has value and should be preserved. The removal of the content from OCW is the step too far. Lewin absolutely should be restricted from further teaching at MIT or on MITx but the work itself should not be considered problematic.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Two Seamless members say hackathon misattribution was unintentional

This article is a follow up to another piece in MIT's newspaper about a "disqualification"[1] related to misrepresentation of work in presentations from MIT's student hackathon. The comments of this article and the original are the kind of local bickering and political wrangling and blame shifting that occurs all the time, but I think the broader question of what happens in hackathon presentations is interesting.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N53/HackMIT.html Exactly what happened and if it was a disqualification are subject of much discussion in the comment sections and this follow up article.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Songftware – Music Written Like Software

Very cool. A couple questions: is the song really the right vehicle to pass around? By analogy isn't that like moving the binary instead of the code? I understand the lack of DAW cross-compatibility but it seems like you might need all of the components that make up a song along the way in order to work on a subsequent task.

It looks like this is still in the experimental/conception stage. Right now it seems more like a mental model for music than actual tools. I'd be interested in seeing what analogies besides code would be applicable or might have lessons learned. For example, I know that collaboration and sharing of mechanical engineering design software is relatively less useable/mature than sharing a git repository. For artists that collaboratively work on 3D models or images I'd imagine that the workflow is passing around .psds or whatever, rather than final images because everyone is on the same platform.

I'll be paying attention as this develops.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: After raising $50M, Reddit forces all remote workers to relocate to SF

The amount of remote worker angst in these comments is pretty ridiculous. Yishan has seemed reasonable enough and has come to terms with the fact that some parts of Reddit's operations aren't being run how they should be.

Saying 'fuck reddit' for a reasonable business maneuver is pretty out of line. Reddit had remote people other than just developers, managing those relationships remotely may have been part of the issue.

sadfaceunread | 11 years ago | on: Artificial sweeteners linked to glucose intolerance

This is an impressive piece of work but I worry that a larger amount of work is needed in the relationship between glucose intolerance, diabetes and metabolic syndromes in general. The fact that glucose intolerance is induced by a high sugar diet and leads towards a path of clinical outcomes ending in diabetes, doesn't necessarily indicate that glucose intolerance developed via artificial sweetener consumption is indicative of being on the same clinical pathways towards metabolic syndrome and diabetes.
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