wutman

Youtube started as an easy place to watch pirated movies.

Exactly. People tend to overstate the importance of spurious, surprising findings that don't make scientific sense. Some of these may lead to breakthroughs, sure. But the overwhelming majority are just noise. And it takes experts to decide which are worth investigating. To wit, anti-vaxers love subgroup analysis without supporting scientific logic (ie more autism in this population of 5 boys from the study).

I'd hate to see old, frail people getting Etanercept (an immunomodulator) to prevent Alzhemier's based on very questionable evidence when all they really get are the costs (increased risk of serious infections leading to death-- an FDA black box warning).

This is a harsh thing to say and here goes. This article and its response are boring. They're what happen when you take a high-stakes situation (union creation, scabs, overworked grad students) and take all the emotion out of it. People already interested may read these happily, but as a layperson, it took some effort for me.

The tldr; is ("scab" professor) supports holding class even when the sky is falling because of their duty to educate. The other side (grad student organizer) argues that not holding class was okay because many undergrads supported the grad student's efforts. Scattered throughout are references to Plato/Socrates and some philosophical musings on if grad students are employees in the since of working for a business (and therefore able to unionize).

I think the general U.S. population is okay with monopolies that make their lives better. Apple will continue to push the envelope. Developers can fight back (does anyone remember the Apple vs Spotify thing?) but if Apple keeps putting out a consistent quality experience, the vast maturity of the population won't be sympathetic.

Skimmed your two submissions and have 2 suggestions-- 1) cull your words relentlessly. 2) write in a reader-centric, not you-centric way. Your articles don't grab reader interest.

What does outschool offer that khanacademy doesn't have?

Agreed. It's funny seeing replies here. Making people feel bad about themselves doesn't get very far in influencing their viewpoints. A lot of smart people disagree with higher minimum wage. You won't reach them by saying stuff like "it just takes a basic high school diploma..." "you're out of touch..." But you will get padded-on-the-back by others holding your beliefs.

This is exactly right, but in my opinion usually not important. If Joe Public, or a competitor, or whoever knows how many posts you have, users you have, administrators you have, etc how much does that actually affect your operation? I guess they can better compete against you in some small way with that information, but in my opinion it's almost never worth the effort to obfuscate. It's like optimizing for a problem you don't have.

This doesn't fit everywhere, but... 1) Never modify existing tables (okay, almost never). 2) Add new tables at will. 3) Pay a consultant to write PL/SQL that glues it all together and blame them for any and all issues.

You'd think TurboTax would have clear scripts for their frontline representatives to deal with this fairly and quickly. Rip the band-aid off all at once, so to speak. There's not exactly a clear message between these representatives, though. Not having a clear message shifts the focal point from management right to the poor frontline workers.