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The 3rd paragraph mentions the text-only versions of both CNN and NPR.

I'm glad you two can get along in this capacity. I have ADHD and I'm very much like your wife and my last partner was like you, but my ability/tendency to multitask tended to be overwhelming for her even when it was just me doing it. Like, if I tried to talk to her while simultaneously listening to a podcast and doing something on my phone, she would be feel overwhelmed by association and ask me to stop the other things and just talk to her.

I don't think she had ADHD though so maybe it was different for her and more of a sensory thing. I just appreciate that you two are so different (in this aspect) and still able to respect and adapt to each other's differences.

Music helps me drown out surrounding noise/distractions and energizing music can pump me up, but I also get distracted by playlists because each new song triggers a novelty response in my brain and will distract me (especially if I start wanting to sing/dance to it).

What I've been doing that's actually been quite effective is I'll just loop the same energizing song over and over for the entire work day, sometimes even for multiple days. For me it helps keep me energized while also letting the song fade into the background since it's on repeat. I'm sure many people would not be able to stand this, but it's been the perfect solution for me.

I guess I was thinking more of aesthetic beauty. Truly there are deeper and more lasting forms of beauty to be enjoyed in the world. But our brains are drawn persistently to images, and I don't necessarily find anything wrong with that. I just think that the overload of stimuli from social media especially Instagram can be damaging to the scope of enjoyment we could get from the real thing in real life, which would arguably be more fulfilling.

I'll admit I'd really bought into the idea of Instagram as the solution to Facebook, as a place where everything was sunshine and rainbows and everyone could just appreciate art and beauty without the negativity of, well, controversial opinions. I could follow beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places. I could watch and admire. It seemed, dare I say, a healthy escape.

> “You want me to say I’m influencing all these people,” he says. “But I’m the one who is really influenced by this. The way I act online is shaped by monetary incentives. If a post does well, expect to see more posts like that. If copying and pasting motivational quotes from Dale Carnegie drives engagement, I will share them all day long. I don’t care.

My opinion is different nowadays. Instagram is surely a place where exists a lot of true beauty and expression, but it's also a place full of people largely driven by societal and monetary reward, to an extent that I've come to consider unhealthy. We are being influenced, and we are influencing.

And we like that-- my social brain wants to know what society considers beautiful, it enjoys training itself on what society considers beautiful, it wants to be affirmed in the beauty of its own body. Instagram gave me exactly what I wanted. But (and I don't mean to criticize anyone here at all, considering I was and still am subject to the same pressures and influences) I don't think what I thought I wanted was healthy. I want to be happy. A constant stream of corgi videos and bikini photos and travel porn gives me little ups, but it also shapes my brain in ways I think could be damaging.

In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.

> Why not just build more universities?

Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling [1].

> Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?)

The main reason anyone in the US goes to college these days is to get a degree, not to receive education related to any specific job. They want to get a degree because most employers still require a degree either for consideration or for promotion. The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified. Any employer that would accept a non-accredited degree from a private education company that could easily just be selling certificates (which already happens anyway) probably wouldn't even care if you had a degree in the first place.

> yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way

I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution, to the extent that it could afford to hire good professors away from existing universities and be a better option for them than pursuing tenured positions elsewhere.

Compounded with the unlikelihood that students would be able to get reasonable loans to attend a school that could very well be a scam, this seems completely untenable. Students get into enough debt as it is going to accredited institutions with government loans.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-disappearing-private-c...

I was going to say, hasn't all of this been known for a while? I suppose it's worth continuing to publish articles educating more and more of the public on the topic, but the headline is rather deceptive in presenting this as a new concept.

It's so weird that this came up today because I was just reading all about this yesterday. I was looking into buying bamboo socks because it sounded like they'd be more sustainable, but as I did more research I found that the most common process to produce bamboo rayon/viscose involves a solution of toxic chemicals that mostly can't be reused, and that the material produced doesn't even retain the beneficial properties of bamboo.

There is also the closed-loop process that reuses most of the chemicals and that material is called lyocell (branded TENCEL®), but I don't think most people who purchase clothing with bamboo cloth know the difference and I believe it has to be expressly labeled as such.

Kids today miss out if they're not online (which largely takes place on phones) and on social media. They miss out in social interaction, which is arguably even more vital to their development than reading books. Even when I was younger, so many interactions outside of school took place on AIM-- whole friendships and relationships were built off of these online interactions.

Nowadays kids have to be on top of the latest viral trends and YouTube videos and Twitch streams in order to keep up with what their friends are talking about. Like it or not, the digital world is pretty much essential for kids these days.

Speaking of pontification and making mountains out of molehills, your response currently has more text than all the other replies combined.

No one here is "offended" by the name and you're the only one who seems "triggered", somehow connecting the reaction to liberal white men being offended by trivialities.

People are merely considering the implications of the name, which is a mature and reasonable thing to do. You're free to argue for its benignity and many of us would agree with you, but when you get up on a soapbox against "political correctness" (which has nothing to do with this), you're going to get a lot of eye rolls.

One study [1] compared two different types of grasses vs grain feed. The cows that ate grass produced more methane per kJ consumed than those that ate the grain feed. There are a bit stranger numbers preceding these figures, where the cows that ate one grass type actually produced less methane overall than all the other cows, but apparently because they were consuming considerably less (all cows were allowed to eat freely). Mind you, this was a study of 6 cows.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c726/1bccd1f76d5060913b56cc...

It's not the style-- it's just not good writing, but it's trying so hard to be. It's the kind of thing that would show up in a college writing workshop and hopefully get workshopped into something more intelligible. As they say, "Show, don't tell." The passage describes a lot but not in a way that helps you actually visualize any of it, thus it's really hard to follow.

I'm not sure by what stretch of the imagination Tinder isn't useful, maybe not to you personally but to its intended audience.

By that standard, I could say hammers aren't useful because I personally don't have a use for them, or payday loans aren't useful because I'm personally opposed to them.

Last time I took the Megabus, the bus drivers were complaining that the company had sold the Midwest division (or something like that) to Coach USA. Indeed, the last few times I took it from Chicago to Ohio, they were Coach USA buses instead of the usual blue double-decker Megabuses. Apparently they downsized majorly in the region [1].

It didn't strike me as a particularly profitable venture in this country.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-megabus-downsizing...

What does that have to do the above reply?

It's a bit different in that this isn't a permanent change. This won't wipe out mosquitos everywhere just yet. The infected males will mate with females, and their eggs will be nonviable.

Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.

Huh. I remember a couple years ago I was at a hackathon when some guy just came up to me and some friends, handed us stickers with this logo while mumbling a few words, and walked away. I don't remember that person actually pitching anything and I'm not sure if it was Alan or someone he hired to give out stickers.

I agree with others that the author's experience may not be as significant to the wider discussion of female programmers as she thinks it is.

I'm a developer now; I could not have made it through a Computer Science major in college. I'd always been drawn to technology and my dad highly encouraged me to pursue IT, but I just didn't find CS itself interesting to me. I was highly, highly averse to the idea of "lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports".

Maybe it is in fact a particularly "male" engineer thing to want to focus only on excelling at one's trade while neglecting everything else in one's life. I was not like that.

So I studied Neuroscience and Psychology because they felt more applicable and "hands-on". I dissected cadavers, ran behavioral tests on rats, crunched data.

Then later I discovered that I really did enjoy programming itself; I realized I loved building things. Now I feel like I could sit through dry lectures on fundamental and complex CS topics that my younger self would find boring. It sounds like the author liked building things too. Maybe if her program had been focused on that instead of other things, she would have felt more motivated.

To me, this seems like a classic case of someone deciding that they're simply not good at math because they were taught it the wrong way or weren't shown why it was relevant.

I have a good number of bluetooth headphones so I never have to bother with wires if I don't want to, and yet I would still rather use wired headphones if I could.

I always tend to get weird Bluetooth problems. I'll turn on a pair of headphones and they will connect to both my laptop and my phone, with the signal from both being choppy. Or I'll turn on my headphones and connect them to my phone, but it will say something like "Connected (no sound)" and it won't play music through the headphones even though they're connected, until I either re-pair or keep pressing the button until it hopefully connects.

None of these are things I'd have to worry about with a headphone jack.

I have The Fuck because I think the premise is hilarious, though I don't use it as much as I'd like since it's kind of slow for me...

Last I remember (don't remember the source) they found that vigorous exercise elsewhere in the day doesn't make up for it.

Whenever a site requires special characters, it just ends up limiting me to one of the few memorized passwords I have that matches the criteria, most of which are barely 8 characters long.

I use LastPass but I don't like using the password generator because I want to be able to log in on mobile or other computers when necessary, but I don't do so enough to justify signing up for a subscription (I dislike subscription models) that would allow me to access use it on mobile.

I wish I could just use giant password strings on all of my sites.

They are allowed to speak. Harvard is allowed to withdraw their acceptances. No legal charges have been pressed against them.

There you go-- freedom of speech.

The Red Queen hypothesis suggests that the struggle between organisms and their parasites involves a constant reshuffling of offensive and defensive strategies, so it may be entirely possible that, if one of the bacterial/viral species released were originally adapted to infecting mammals or even our ancestral primates, they could target a pathway that humans (or more likely, some subset of humans) have stopped defending because modern parasites don't currently target that pathway.

It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.

Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.

Agreed. These conversations are important and relevant.

My first credit card in college was from Capital One. I personally thought they were great. They gave me my cashback rewards right away instead of quarterly, and the one time I forgot to make a payment on time (before I set up autopay), they forgave it and initiated the payment over the phone. After that I just never carried a balance and never had to worry about their fees and rates. Also never ran into any "gotchas".

You would be right in the case of UVA light [1]. Though it's interesting that we have photoreceptors for UV light in the first place.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21646980

I listened to you on Software Engineering Daily! Haven't found a use for the service yet but I've been keeping you guys in the back of my mind in case a good use case comes up at work.

I used to get a really good workout playing the Kinect Sports games on my Xbox. I'd play the boxing game for a couple hours at a time some days, until my arms were extremely sore (I did it for exercise). Eventually I started carrying light weights for the boxing game.

I'm not sure it's that these things never "caught on". I just think they were marketed poorly as serious games, and so only non-serious gamers bothered with them. Then, like with all games, we got bored and moved on, and the market never innovated further (though there was a Kinect Sports 2).

I first saw it discussed in either Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" or Dubner and Levitt's "Freakonomics". They sort of blend together in my head because I read them both over the span of a couple days and they touched on really similar themes (which I hadn't expected), but I suspect it was the former.

Wherever I read it, they listed it as just one of several reasons Asians tend to be good at math, with cultural factors being another important factor. Something about how, while Westerners generally had to just plant wheat and similar crops at a specific times and they would grow fine with a base amount of effort, the yield of a rice paddy was directly related to the effort put into maintaining it. According to them, this ingrained (hah, grain) into Asian societies the idea that your success is directly proportional to the effort you put into something.

I haven't studied it myself, but I thought that theory was interesting.