clmckinley

This was my first thought when i read the headline. Many people were told to get CS degrees because they will get a job, not because they love it. The cost of quitting a degree or not using a "valuable" degree is relatively high, especially for people who are inclined to coast. Most people who start college also graduate, even if they aren't prepared or love their program, so we have lots of bad cs graduates.

On the other hand, most people I know have at least dabbled in learning to code. In this case the cost of quitting is very low and the cost of getting good is reasonably high, so it self-selects for people who excel at it and love it.

That said, if you only compare people with similar aptitudes, my experience is that people with formal training are better.

tl;dr: The most important thing to me is comparing past work, interview and personality. If you have a CS degree with no personal projects, you won't get a job offer. If you don't have a degree but have active projects with good code then I don't care if you have a degree. That said, I have been getting hundreds of applications for every entry level job I post so I can normally find someone who has both.

I predict that all sites like this which thrive on community generated content will be getting rid of apis and bulk exports. This is because ai companies have used those tools to build their systems on data that prevents the need to the source website. This is an existential threat to sites like StackOverflow and a huge, missed opportunity for reddit.

Are they a multibillion dollar corporation though? I know they have had crazy valuation's, but we are moving past a time of value based on eyeballs and to a time of value based on monetization. Where does the monetary value of reddit really lie? It seems like most of their creative monetization strategies like gold, donations and custom avatars have failed. This leaves the more mundane avenues of advertising to users, and selling the content that users creates. Both of those are severely handicapped by a free/low cost api. If they cannot monetize a user or their data then that user is bad for their bottom line.

reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.

You realize that twitter is a corporation and not a government right? They don't enforce laws they enforce rules, which they also set.

Yes, get some limited funding to build out the infrastructure. We can build a platform that is better for the users and that will get them all to come. We will make it modern and very easy for third parties to help build on top of it this will increase value and uptake.

We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well now people with equity want some money back so we need to figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get some money back from the api users. I shall call this site reddit.

you should be able to use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard

I would argue that high paying jobs are a big driver of cities and never in human history have people had the ability to work in high paying jobs outside of big cities like we do now. The ability to effectively work remotely is largely dependent on job duties and IT in general can work remotely with little productivity loss. Hence the bay area getting hit harder than most.

To me the question is whether companies/employees will continue letting/wanting to work remotely in the future. I am certainly not concerned about a population collapse in big cities because many companies and people want to live there and don't because of cost.

why isn't stock buy back considered inside trading? Is the purchase somehow firewalled from the company?

I think for their hard limit on MSDN funds, MS shuts down everything that creates incremental costs. As far as i know they don't delete anything, even things like storage that have an associated cost.

That said, i am pretty sure the the TOS for MSDN funds say they are not be used for production systems.

And you generally know the person who is on both ends. This leads to a sense of history and consequence which is most commonly not available on the internet.

Most robocalls are illegal in the US. We have a do not call list and everything. I believe is it a name change is currently working its way through to change the name to "seriously, do not call... please list". [https://www.forthepeople.com/class-action-lawyers/robocallin...]

The problem is that determining the source is difficult and even if you did it is most likely over seas where enforcing the fine is impossible.

I would love to hear a technical solution that has been implemented somewhere that had a significant impact.

So then without making other more fundamental changes we would have to gerrymander. In fact a number of strange looking districts are gerrymandered with creating a majority minority district as the stated goal.

I believe we need structural changes to really solve this problem but absent that, I think having a computer algorithm that has the following priorities in the following order:

1) Compact (ie smallest circumference)

2) Least number of axis points and smallest difference in the sides.(ie a square is the goal)

3) Least number of wasted votes (ie use the proposal from the supreme court case)

4) Least change from a previous district (maybe not for this first run)

The problem with this analogy is that the 55/44 split is not equally distributed across a state. In virtually every case there are pockets of one or the other. As long as you keep the goals of uniform, compact and consistent sizes they should do a much better job of getting closer to the 4/5 you are looking for or maybe a couple of safer and a couple of swing districts. What happens now is that the party in control (which in 2010 was largely R) packs and cracks to get an unnatural advantage (looking at you Wisconsin)

My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?

i cannot upvote this enough. The regulation has very little if anything to do with the closure of the vast majority of small businesses. Access to larger/more efficient companies that provide better service to cost has killed the demand for the services that small businesses provide.

My experience has been the opposite. Skiing is easier at slow speeds and has a shorter learning curve, but takes a lot longer to get good. Snow boarding has a higher learning curve and is harder at slow speeds, but once it clicks you can do most anything on the mountain in a couple of days.

Skiing was intuitive and my body wanted to do enough of the right thing to get me down most of the beginner slope with little "learning". Snowboarding felt unnatural so i had to fight my bodies natural instincts. The trick with snowboarding is to go faster than feels comfortable at first because it is much easier when you have momentum.

What makes this the "uber for long buses"? It isn't even that they they are filling unused inventory on existing routes, from what I can tell they are simply using contractors. Is all it takes to be the uber of something to not have staff and have an app? The article didn't mention uber at all (or did I miss it?) and this really seems more like a regular long haul bus company that thinks they can do it better than a real disruptor.

How do you know he didn't, and while he brought up FF, Safari, IE, once he wins that war he will move on to getting his browser icon included.

Reddit appears to only show images to posts about the image, not to a website. Most of reddit content are just posts to images and the discussion about the image, so IMHO that improves reddit's usability for their target audience.

HN is more about interesting content/discussion instead of posting memes and it is much harder to scan and determine interesting content from images than it is from titles. As a note: when HN has the same target audience as reddit is when i stop using HN.

I agree that you would expect more from a $3000 computer, but that is not what hololens is. Considering all of novel sensors and capabilities with the hololens, it is pretty amazing to me that the hololens is only $3000.

Actually helping people in a significant way in large wealthy countries is harder/more expensive because the bar is already higher. A disadvantaged person in a first world country is still much better off then a disadvantaged person in a third world country.

Not saying that working in a country with no regulatory or physical infrastructure is easy, but buying a bunch of mosquito nets is much cheaper with very few unintended consequences compared to doing something like OP suggested. For instance, wouldn't a revived/subsidized CC put a lot of current companies/workers out of business? How would that opportunity effect a high schoolers decision making? Is this something that goes on forever, it sounds like we would be training more people to do a job then would be needed if this program stopped. etc, etc, etc.

I would love to see this compared to other 1st world countries. I know the US spends way more on defense then other countries, but how does elderly care compare for instance. Also, how does total (personal/business/fees, etc) revenue and revenue/citizen compare.

These are some really interesting questions. I think a lot of these depend on how you think of the internet. I think of it as a utility that is required for a true equal shot at a good life in america. Let me take a crack at your questions:

1) I assume you are speaking of primary school, in which case yes, because they are serving children that cannot be relied on to make good decisions. That said Libraries primary users are adults and children under adult supervision, in which case no they should not be filtered, but depending on what you do there could be consequences.

2) No, because cable is not a required for success in the same way the internet is.

3) No, see above.

4) Interesting question, but it is really a straw-man because it is so trivial. I would say no, internet providers should be required to treat all bytes the same.

5) This is interesting, but seems more like a content owning question then a net neutrality question. I personally don't think caching has anything to do with how you treat the bytes going across the wire.

6) Yes i do, and that is because there are different costs to serving different neighborhoods, where there are virtually no differential costs between bytes of data.

7) Net neutrality doesn't specify how much you can charge, just that all bytes are treated the same.

8) If it is a private network then i don't think it would be considered a utility. If it becomes a required monopoly (kind of like a foundation patent) then yes.

9) I don't understand this analogy. Coke and Pepsi are luxury goods goods that are physical that are sold in non-monopolistic industries.

10) Sure, but the ISP should charge and treat netflix bytes the same as other similar bytes.

11) Yes, but when they are essential they should treat all similar cars (packets) the same

12) I am not sure how this relates as long as VPN packets are treated the same by the network infrastructure i don't care who pays for the access to that infrastructure.

13) Yes, they should treat all packets the same when they go over the network.

14) I am not sure i understand this one. If they don't have the infrastructure to handle the incoming bytes that is different then the core internet infrastructure. But if you are talking about a small ISP then i think they should still be required to treat all bytes the same, now they could limit the number of bytes a customer purchases, but not they type.

15) i think a simple net neutrality law will prevent lots of special case laws. Just treat all packets the same, period.

I am strongly on the side of free markets.

The problem is that large infrastructure based industries like the internet are very vulnerable to monopolies or oligopolies. That is clearly the case with the internet and it is getting worse with the infrastructure owners are buying the content companies.

When oligopolies own the infrastructure needed for other companies to innovate then that is exactly where the government needs to step in to prevent them from abusing their position to stifle innovation. That move actually protects the free market.

So much this. If I am getting my degree from an established/well known university I am much less likely to do something like this. This is even more the case for top students from top universities.

My business school had all graduating seniors take a similar assessment and liked to advertise that our students scored in the top 99% of all universities on the test. The thing they left out is that the top 50% of business schools did even bother with the test.

That didn't make the assessment totally useless, but it also didn't mean that our graduates were in the top 1% of business schools.

I think this works for some of the softer things like the vast majority of drugs, but i don't know if i want there to be an easy way to get "clean"/untraceable weapons, chemical weapons or child porn. Even some of the harder drugs can have a significant negative impact on your life and society after a single use.

Basically telling people they cannot have or do anything would create a black market and the associated problems. So assuming there is anything we want to regulate (which i think most people do) then we don't really solve the core problem, we just change it and potentially make it smaller or bigger.

In terms of most drugs though i am 100% on board, especially if it goes along with treating addiction like other mental illnesses and provide help, instead of prison.

Yes lots of alternatives, you can argue that there is an alternative for virtually everything that is available if you are willing and know how to find it.

This is the same argument that Windows Phone (ironically) make, but most people want the same programs that all of their friends run. Computers and most other electronics are appliances to most people they just want them to work without any thought.