weissguy's comments

I don't have any insightful macroeconomic explanation to offer. Just my $0.02: if you are complaining about earning $80,000 to sit behind a computer screen and type all day, you are one entitled SOB. There are 10 million people in China and India who would probably cut off their right arm if it meant they could work for a well-funded startup in the Bay Area for $40,000 a year. They'd make it work even if they had to live in RV's in Fremont.

The battle between R and NumPy reminds me of the competition between American and Japanese auto manufacturers. Did American car companies successfully play QA catchup in the past 10 years? Probably, and God knows they needed to. Meanwhile, Japanese car manufacturers were building on 35 years of QA excellence the whole time.

I would be far more excited about the possibilities created by a cornucopia of new stats/dataviz functionality built into Python than I would be about some packages that make R a bit less terrible to write.

If I ever strike it rich, I swear to god I'm donating $5,000,000 to the cause of reaching total feature parity between the best of R's packages and NumPy/SciPy.

Keep in mind that a couple weeks from now, the Western outcry about this news will die down, but their air will still suck! When I was in Beijing, I felt so terrible for the infants I saw on the streets. My lungs felt worse than ever for the 3 days I was there, but they will likely breathe that air for their entire lives! When are Chinese people going to realize that they can't live in a giant cloud of smog?

I would think that a multi-level/hierarchical/mixed GLM would be an interesting approach to their data. Multilevel modeling assumes that there is correlation between observations that are inside the same "level". This is in stark comparison to regular GLM (even one with dummy variables to represent categories), which assumes that all observations are 100% independent.

E.g. in a model that predicts students' GPA, you could divide your data into a hierarchy consisting of, at the highest level, geographic area, followed by high school, maybe followed by teacher. In that model, the correlation between students who are in the same state, the same school or in the same classroom would be accounted for. You could even go as deep as at an individual level if you have >1 observation per student.

In addition to regular predictive variables, judg.me could probably use their weblogs to group people's judgement scores by country of origin and by individuals, among other possibilities.

In other news, the sun is still pretty hot!

They might not actually break in half (I was exaggerating), but my point is, when something inevitably happens to any such computing device that sees so much travel tome, there goes at least $150 for a new screen, or worse, $500 + personal data when some dude in a pub sees that Apple logo and makes a grab for it when I'm concentrating on my beer.

I've used an iPad before and I am totally willing to admit that it is a sexy device. It felt fast and was able to do a lot of useful things.

What really convinced me to buy my netbook was the ability to not worry about my computing device.

Carrying around a $500 thin piece of hardware that is constantly in danger of breaking in half or getting stolen in an unfamiliar European city was just not appealing to me.

Did you do a clean install of windows? Mine ran like crap until I did that, plus I doubled the pre-installed RAM to 2GB.

It's an ASUS eeePC 1015PEM. Unfortunately I don't think they sell them anymore. They've since upgraded the processor to an 1.66GHz N550 which performs better on youtube, but I've heard it gets 25% less battery life.

Display is 1024 x 600 non-glossy.

Before I moved internationally for school, I was concerned I would need a secondary computing device that would have a lot of functionality, a lot of portability, and be cheap enough not to worry about if it, say, dropped out of my backpack while riding my bike across town.

I looked at all kinds of tablets, but then I realized I could get more functionality, roughly equal portability and battery life, for a much cheaper price.

My ASUS netbook was the best money I've ever spent.

For $250, I got:

-A 10.1 inch screen

-9-10 honest hours of battery life if you're conservative

-A 1.5GHz dual core processor fast enough to watch 360p videos while running Visual Studio and Eclipse

-2GB of DDR3 RAM

-A 250GB HD

-3 USB 2.0 ports

-Ability to dual boot Win7 Pro and Linux

-A keyboard

-A webcam

-All in a device that weighs less than 3 pounds and fits easily in any small bag.

It blows my mind that people would want to spend $300+ on a device with slightly more portability and far, far less functionality.