The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a chemical clock.
https://www.quantopian.com/ has a great community, lots of examples & tuts available, and you can look at everyone else's algos. It's free, there's free backtesting, etc. They're a "crowdsourced hedge fund" using Python and the zipline library.
I've been using org-mode in various capacities for a little over a year now. I've tried other tools but keep coming back. As far as complexity goes, I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. I like what Neal Stephenson has to say about emacs (which applies just as much to org-mode):
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs.
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. [1]
A few things for newbies that might help:
1. A lot of org-mode 'power users' post their workflows and all of the attendant emacs lisp code [2] [3], and many new users feel like they have to customize their org-mode experience to that level to get any use out of it. DO NOT DO THIS! Start completely fresh with a clean install, just use it as a braindump outliner, and SLOWLY start adding new features as you go, based specifically on what you need for your individual workflow (the most useful first thing to learn for most people, after basic outline creation and folding, is probably the agenda view). This way you 'grow' the program to fit your own needs organically, rather than trying to shoehorn yourself into someone else's idea of a perfect workflow.
2. One customization thing I will say you should do immediately is to change the theme to match your preferred UI style. It will make a huge difference in how you 'feel' while you're using it. I love emacs but I hate, hate, hate the default UI look-and-feel. I will plug leuven-theme [4] as my current go-to for org-mode, but also dig the sanityinc tomorrow themes [5].
I will also throw in a compliment to the awesome community around emacs. It's happened to me many times where I've encountered some shortcoming or 'missing' feature of my existing setup, thought to myself "if only I could do X and Y," and discovered after 5 minutes of Googling that someone has already written something that does exactly what I'm looking for...
Remember, there's a special name for the type of reporting journalists do when they aren't just copying & pasting government and corporate press releases in their news stories: "investigative journalism."
Anything else is just reporting publicly-available information from some official source.
Notice that that's also the first line item to get slashed when budget-cuttin' time rolls around.
Perhaps there is a happy middle which doesn't cost an arm and a leg to produce a report, and still isn't straight-up propaganda. It's called reporting publicly-available information from multiple credible sources, and not reporting single-sourced PR releases. Also known as "journalism". I heard somewhere that it was essential to the nature of a free state.
> an unbundled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts
That subscriber will be worth a lot more once they can be targeted with individually personalized marketing content based on previous TV-watching habits, augmented with third-party data from other digital channels, web browsing history, purchasing history, etc. It's coming; YouTube proves it can be done. It's only a matter of time before we see different business models for the monetization of streaming content on more 'traditional' TV channels as well.
The alternative is a subscription model that would price out many sports fans, or obsolescence followed by slow death for want of revenue.
I believe we're nowhere near a full understanding of the diversity of pre-H. sapiens species. Just last year the discovery of another Homo species, H. nadeli, was claimed [1]. I feel like we're going to keep finding more and more of these folks, and - like the Neanderthals and Denisovans - discovering through genetic analysis that we interbred [2].
Also, the thing that complicates paleoanthropology, especially in regions like the Indonesian archipelago, is that most of the areas where prehuman Homo populations would have lived for significant lengths of time are now underwater.
Frustrating, but if we knew all the answers, what fun would that be?
The guarantee still doesn't prove that Udacity's credentialing process provides any incremental value above and beyond just taking the classes. Is it the knowledge, or the credential, that got you the gig? I'd like to see some kind of analysis comparing results for people who got certified vs. people who didn't.
Any hiring managers in this thread? Would you ever hire someone, say, with no degree or a BA in English Lit or something and no experience for an actual development role, if all they had was one of these nanodegrees?
Absolutely on the side of the 'disruptors' here, and agree that our existing educational model is hopelessly fucked from a cost-effectiveness and outcome perspective, but just not sure if it's worth it for someone to shell out $299+ for something that most employers won't recognize or value.
Front-End Nanodegree graduate here, and I recently got a job at a startup because of my final project with the program (neighborhood map--using Google maps and AJAX requests). My interview consisted of me adding a new feature to that project and explaining everything.
Would I have been able to have gotten the job without the actual Nanodegree? To be perfectly honest, probably. However, the Nanodegree provides structure to a rather cluttered catalogue of courses (not entirely a bad thing). Worth $200/mo? (That's how much it was for me to do it at the time). It depends on the person. Certainly cheaper than something like General Assembly or App Academy (not comparing the two as they are entirely different things, but they have similar "guarantees").
But knowing what projects I had to do, and what courses I needed to take to prepare for those projects, made it much easier for me to go through the curriculum, rather than just taking ALL of the front-end courses, ALL of the AJAX courses, etc.
Congratulations are in order, whether or not the credential helped you get the gig :-)
Based on your comment it almost sounds like your "portfolio" is what got you the job, not the certificate itself. But I guess where the coursework comes in is giving you a project that's a) feasible at one's current level of skill b) able to be completed in a reasonable timeframe c) demonstrates real development chops. Kind of a sweet spot that you might not get to without some external nudging.
Personally I'm in a marketing role with some development aspects, but I'm trying to move into a more technical role in future and while I "feel" qualified to be a Python data hacker, I have nothing other than personal projects to show my skills. Might take a look at this.
However, I wouldn't have gotten this role without another credential I got (front-end certification at Free Code Camp); without that credential I wouldn't have been able to apply for the job.
The same wouldn't be said of Udacity, but I did need to attend office hours more than a few times. Had I not had access to office hours, I may not have continued on with my free curriculum. There's only so many times you can bang your head on the wall alone before you give up on something. But if you have someone else there to help you when you need it, then you can get past barriers more easily.
Protip: do as much of the free courses you can until you get stuck. Then enroll. They might hate me for saying that, but even Mike Wales (curriculum developer at Udacity) suggested that :)
Interestingly, this practice is more common than you'd think, even at name-brand universities. My own alma mater got in some controversy over this [1]. This is also a shady practice of a lot of "for-profit" college chains [2].
This happens whenever any organization optimizes towards maximizing some narrowly-defined KPI: they find ways to game the system to juice their numbers.
https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began...
http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-10.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/
The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a chemical clock.