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Hardware

Submission + - Open Hardware & Software Laptop

mihai.todor85 writes: It looks like Andrew "bunnie" Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he "might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested" if enough people are interested.

Comment Creepy... (Score 1) 81

Let's see: stem cells -> eggs -> ovary tissue -> natural ovaries -> oocytes -> removed from ovaries -> fertilized -> transplanted into "foster mothers"... To me, that sounds like a combination between Frankenstein and Fantastic Voyage

Comment That's just a subjective and biased impression (Score 1) 285

While these online courses are not as rigorous, well structured and of the same quality as Stanford / MIT / Oxford / whatever courses, I do think that most of them are much better than what students usually get at standard universities in poorer countries. Does anyone from Romania want to contradict me?

Even though there is enough room for improvement, there are many students in other countries who don't even have access to courses such as Machine Learning, Cryptography, Quantum Computing, etc so any introduction to such topics is most welcome.

I think that in a few years they will only get better, based on feedback received from the forums as well as from the quizzes. Also, they should implement some mechanism to determine which segments of the videos are re-winded over and over, since those might need clarifications. A term index is also welcome.

Just think about it: if an online course doesn't live up to the expectations of the students, then it will just die out when they will stop following it. Now, compare this to a professor who teaches poorly a certain course: generations upon generations of students will be forced to try and make sense of that course, because they have no other alternative.

I personally followed Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning and, while it wasn't rigorous regarding the mathematics, it did offer me a really good intuition on how those algorithms work, as well as the required terminology to be able to start reading a book on this subject. I also followed Jennifer Widom's course on databases, which was really, really good and Dan Boneh's course on Cryptography helped me get a decent understanding of this subject for my current job.

So, we should encourage them to improve the courses instead of just yelling that some of them doesn't really live up to "the standards".

Comment My 2 cents (Score 1) 140

It's quite funny that people with modest coding skills still believe that they can make good money as freelancers. Putting aside the rare occasions when you find (a fat pigeon) some clueless and wealthy investors, if you're not backed up by some company with a nice portfolio, then you're usually out of luck. A few years ago, I was digging around sites like rent-a-coder to see if it's even remotely feasible to make some money as a freelancer. What I found was a swamp of "experts" who were willing to code youtube clones for 100$ and small companies that posed as users with perfect ratings. My conclusion is that if you're good enough and you have many years of experience in the industry, then you're better off as a consultant for (big) companies, paid by the hour. Otherwise, just find a nice job at a company that's willing to invest time in training you, and, heck, you might end up learning how to code while making some money as well.

Comment Re:"Do the right thing" (Score 1) 915

Yeah, she tripped, fell, and landed on his Captain Johnes, takng him by surprise. The standard swedish girl could break him in two, considering how feeble he is, so I am quite sure that the girls were encouraged by some 3rd parties to press charges, just because they don't have any other reason to throw the book at him. This whole legal issue of his sounds more like getting charged for stealing candy from a baby.

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