> Further, Daphne Koller is a serious force in the field, and seems to be a pretty good supervisor, so I'm guessing/hoping she is an interesting/engaging lecturer as well. Though, Stanford CS/Stats students are more able to comment on this last point.
What's the source? She's a brilliant researcher, but I've heard quite the opposite about her attitude towards human relationships...
I did research with Daphne (and co-authored a paper with her) in my senior year of undergrad, and she demanded a high standard of work, yes, but she was an excellent supervisor. Everybody knows how brilliant she is, but she also put a lot of effort into teaching my (also undergrad) project partner and I about how to formulate a research problem, how to do research, and how to present research. The primary concern appeared to be our personal growth, not the research machine (though that's not to say that the research wasn't important).
Working with her was one of the highlights of my undergrad education, and her class was great, too.
Ah, so I used a 2-degree heuristic to come to that conclusion--I haven't had any first hand experience with her, nor do I have contact with her former students. A few stats professors independently recommended her to me as a supervisor, her students seem to do well, and her research page is more welcoming than most (versus, say Ullman's page: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/ or say, read Brian Ripley's posts on the R mailing list). The one thing I'd add: my experience has been that academics generally have less empathy than others; I'd be interested to hear from old students how she compares to other faculty.
I know a lot of Daphne's former and current students and she seems to be a great advisor who genuinely cares about producing both excellent research and top quality research talent.
Further, in the department, I think she is one of the people who cares most about teaching. She runs the undergraduate summer research program. She re-does her class on PGMs substantially almost every time she teaches it to try to make it better. (Though such a high rate of change may or may not be a good idea.) Daphne is almost certainly one of the key people behind the *-class effort at Stanford CS.
For those with a negative impression of Daphne, my guess is just that they are misinterpreting her directness. If she thinks you're wrong, or you're doing the wrong research, you'll know about it.
(Also, Ullman is one of the nicest people in the department in person, which is crazy given that he wrote the standard texts in compilers, databases, and arguably automata. He's emeritus these days though.)
He stole $7-$70 million. That's depriving 7-140 people of their retirements. A life sentence for that is perfectly reasonable. We have a broken political system where money controls politics, and so many white collar crimes have minimal punishments.
People go to prison for 15 years for stealing $100. He did 70,000-700,000 times as much damage. Copyright violators face years in prison too, for doing a fraction of even that.
Whatever sentence he gets, I really don't feel like it's a miscarriage of justice. Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Hitler, Khan, and a swarm of others broke no laws because they controlled the laws of their countries. Yet punishing them for their crimes was not a miscarriage of justice. I'm not claiming his crimes are anywhere near the same order of magnitude -- stealing is much less than murder, and even 140 people is less than millions -- but the principle is the same. If a group of people creates unjust laws, and commits crimes legal under those laws, they deserve punishment proportional to the crime, not the laws.
> inquisitive, intellectual, creative atmosphere generated by all those christians
Are you thinking of the same reddit? It's a web site of funny videos, pictures of cats, rage comics, memes, and stupid jokes, and the occasional groupthink. 18 of the 25 front page links are imgur. Of the remaining 7, four are dumb discussions on reddit. One is a news article about the reddit founder (random crime story; otherwise uninteresting). One is a news link on youtube of actual news (if somewhat biased), and one is a link to an interesting study. Depending on how you count, that's 4-8% useful content. When you get into comments, it's even dumber.
reddit had a community of inquisitive, intellectual, creative individuals when it was formed at Harvard. Over time, the idiots and the bigots moved in, and right now it's a web site for wasting time on stupid amusements.
I was listening to right wing talk radio on a long car drive a few months back. What struct me was that the host, who mostly spewed venomous lies, would constantly refer to his viewers by some term (I forget the exact wording) like "the best and the brightest." I feel like reddit users are the left-wing equivalent of that. Clueless groupthink, combined with a very high opinion of themselves.
As an atheist, you're also free to move to a different country if Christianity bother you. US is 76.8% Christian. China is officially atheist. The only reason you're interested in this country is because it was founded on the Puritan work ethic, and has a very high level of social capital coming from Judeochristian values. But you shouldn't stay here and bitch about it. Same thing with blacks trying to go to the (better) white schools in the South prior to Brown vs. Board of Education -- they had their own place where they'd be accepted. Have fun with that logic.
Bigotry doesn't belong anywhere, even if people are free to leave. Intolerance hurts atheists more than it does Christians, and you're an idiot for endorsing it.
If it's been said once it's been said a thousand times over: if you're looking at the reddit frontpage for anything beyond slightly humorous cat pics or rage comics, then you're doing it wrong.
The stuff that gets to the frontpage is there because it's the most commonly appealing thing in the largest original subreddit communities (r/pics, etc). The intelligent discussions happen behind the scenes, on the small to medium sized subreddits. Anyone that's been on reddit for more than a week understands this.
There certainly are intelligent people in any community beyond a given size. You'll find intelligent Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheist, and Hindus. You'll find intelligent evolutionists and creation scientists. You'll find intelligent Republicans and Democrats. There are smart people who listen to Mozard, and smart people who listen to Limbaugh. You'll also find idiots in each of those communities as well. The ratios will be a little different in some cases, but in all cases, there will be both smart and dumb.
By that token, there are, without a doubt, plenty of smart people on reddit. They are, as your comment implies, a tiny minority, confined to a few subreddits (and those are mostly characterized by groupthink -- e.g. any conservative comment on most liberal subreddits will get voted down, no matter how intelligent and well thought out). The front page is defined by what most people vote for, and that's rage comics, misogyny, with the occasional sprinkling of anti-Christian bigotry (this used to be more prominent, but the average IQ has dropped to the point where r/atheism is beginning to look smart). That's representative of the average reddit user.
All that said, I'm not looking for anything on the front page beyond a way to waste a bit of time. When I first joined reddit, I looked to it for intelligent articles. Later, I looked to it for amusement. Now, I look to it less and less, since memes aren't the same thing as wit.
I don't think this was the problem with Borders. With Borders, the selection was just poor. There are canonical books on many topics. If you went into the computer section, you wouldn't find things like K&R, Stroustrup, etc., but the latest and crappiest C and C++ books. The same thing was true of books on most topics -- music, photography, sewing, etc. -- there are classics, and instead of carrying those, Borders would carry Dummies and other books.
If you went into the sci-fi section, you wouldn't find Philip Dick, Stanislaw Lem, or even a decent selection of Asimov -- you'd find a bunch of sci-fi books written the previous couple of years, and in many cases, sequels without the originals.
Finding books of quality at Borders was hard. I'd often want a book, go in there for half an hour, and find nothing. The value-add of a good bookstore is that they will have pre-selected the best books for you. If I go many of the little used book shops in my area, it will be a rotating selection of excellent books. Not every book will necessarily be my style, but every book on the shelves will be great, and there will be books on most topics. This is much more useful.
I don't really understand why this was the case. Borders ought to have economies of scale, and really ought to be able to have some central office somewhere picking out good books. Somehow, the selection was random and crappy instead.
I think part of the problem was that Borders probably went the route of overusing metrics, and providing more books similar to the ones that sold, which lead to a bunch of crappy books on popular topics (where it's much more useful to the customer to e.g. have the top 3 books on videography than the top 3 books, hidden in a bookcase of crappy books, where the good ones take an hour or two to find).
In case it's not obvious, someone logged into the cypherpunks account, edited the above comment, and changed the password.
cypherpunks is a generic account shared by many people on many websites. The username and password is cypherpunks/cypherpunks where allowed, and cypherpunks/cypherpunks1 where the username and password must be different. E-mail is usually cypherpunks@mailinator.com. It allows you to use websites while maintaining a semblance of anonymity.
This is now broken on HN. redditors rise to new heights in their debating ability.
I'm not going to repost all comments from the discussion, but the original comment was along the lines of:
I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.
