afaict, from a NYC perspective, Uber is much better if you live in Brooklyn or Queens because, unlike yellow cabs, it's actually possible to get one by using the app. I've heard that in other cities, e.g. San Francisco, the cab service is about as bad as Brooklyn. I'm sure that in these areas, Uber is a big improvement over what was there before.

If you live in Manhattan, it's largely a matter of taste. the cars tend to be cleaner and the drivers friendlier, etc., but will cost you ~20% more. There is better tech integration, e.g. the app can be used to split a ride with your friends, and it integrates with paypal/whatever whereas yellow cabs just barely have credit card readers.

Additionally, you hail Uber from an app and meet at a designated spot, whereas yellow cabs by law have to be flagged down from the sidewalk. Personally, i'm not really into Uber, but I live in Manhattan and am probably just sticking with what i'm used to. I'd probably use it occasionally if i lived in Brooklyn. A lot of my younger coworkers use Uber exclusively (and frequently! i wonder how much of their pay they spend just on transportation).

I suspect that what happened is that other cities took NYC Medallion model (which isn't even really appropriate for Manhattan, at least these days) and applied it reflexively for whatever reason. Coming from Florida, I think it's fair to say that Uber is the first real taxi service many suburban areas are getting. The regulations preceded the industry, and so the industry never even developed. Uber basically said "fuck it," made up some silly story about "ride-sharing" (lol), and that was that.

hey, Facebook researchers are doing some serious hard-core work in the fields of computer vision (=how to track you) and applied psychology (=how to get you to want to be tracked and click on ads). they just hired Yann LeCun ffs, who basically invented convolutional neural networks as we currently know them, and he seems at least as happy and productive there as he was at NYU.

of course, this has little to do with Marky Mark Z., who seems to have just been in the right place at the right time with the right personal characteristics. then again, you could say the same about Bill Gates. that's the bitch of it, really. who knows whether the alternative to Microsoft would have actually been any better in the long-run?

so, which one would you vouch for?

since you lead off with FUSE (jesus christ) layered on git (wtf?), i really want to know which one of these you think is the most stable and whether you'd vouch for it if your life depended on it.

You're right. Treason is constitutionally punishable by death, after all. We could avoid that problem rather easily.

Greek Nationalist, eh?

I don't understand. You seem to be anti-socialist, yet without the Poles and the Turks, would anyone do any work at all in Greece? I'm just wondering.

Well, at least this student did. God only knows what kind of unholy messes the others made. Or, for that matter, how much cost accrued silently through inefficiencies over 25 years.

Marathon.

yeah, but what does Andreessen care about the fall guy chumps who actually end up running the code he's chipping it to have written? they're as expendable as any other piece of hardware. it's even in the name Dread Pirate Roberts, except instead of retiring they end up dead or in jail.

the arXiv paper presenting the results was authored by five people all with Chinese names. at least one of them is fresh from Beijing; i didn't bother tracking down the rest.

i'm sure a lot of research goes on there, by all sorts of people. Andrew Ng seems like a good guy. none of this is directly relevant to the submissions. (though neither is any of this that important, really.)

it's not called cheating there. the ideograms translate roughly to "auspicious cooperation with jade dragon of opportunity."

yes, they are complete opposites.

for one, crony capitalism actually exists.

You post like a pregnant yak!!!

perhaps correctly, but also vacuously. your "counter-example" only applies if the connection is perfect, which is not implied by a correlation.

Uh, you are "some millennial with a [communications] degree".

It used to annoy me that the Chinese applicants to my program had a separate admissions group comprising exclusively Chinese professors.

It still annoys me, but I realized that it's necessary since every single one has perfect test scores (including the TOEFL as you point out, which is just hirarious), glowing carbon-copy letters of recommendation, and a near-identical statement of interest. There's very little information to make a decision on a formal level, so you need to make best guesses based on province and other culture-specific cues.