jtcond13

Does anyone have any sense of how sensitive the bootcamp boom is to the overall monetary expansion of the last several years? If VCs stop piling money into dipshit startups, are these places going to go away overnight?

Yes - Insurance. For one thing, many people can code well enough to move data from CSVs to a database (or vice versa) but not well enough to read/write an API. I guess the main reason, though, is that many back-office applications don't need to be 'real-time' and for those it's always going to be easier to send files and have someone import them to a DB.

This is a fair observation; Manhattan always feel to me very impersonal. However, I think the parent comment is referring to the Interstate Highway System construction in the '50s (and the broader 'Urban Renewal' movement of that era), which razed many of the dense neighborhoods in smaller cities to make room for highway construction. The relevant comparison isn't Manhattan to Scarsdale but the life one could once live in Hartford or Newark to how those cities are today.

Do people feel that reading Hacker News meets these principles? On one hand there's a lot of good links and discussions here, but a significant portion is either too obscure or just not very interesting (e.g. most medium.com links). How do you optimize your HN reading to maximize time spent learning?

Cool write-up. Programming is a great thing to learn as a kid.

"Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book" - Benedict Evans

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256

Wufoo is a good way to set up web forms quickly.

Sure, force your boss to have the H-1B guy write that SQL query.

Then hop on the Google Bus and try not to think about the ways in which the tech industry is rotting away American democracy (c.f. "Facebook is confirmation bias at scale").

Americans used to have an institution that gave them a steady diet of relevant news. It gave them a healthy mix of local, state, federal and international news in reasonable doses that could be read over dinner. It mainly gave its readers reason to consider whether the darn politicians in $STATE_CAPITAL were doing their damn job or whether the town council really had any reason to be raising taxes. It was called the local newspaper.

~15 years ago, we abandoned this to spend our free time sharing Buzzfeed quizzes with one another.

This is a great product. Glad to see it doing well.

Any reason Expect isn't included on many of the common Linux distributions? That kind of limits its use, for many of us.

+1 to this. Most of us are terrible at understanding our own bad behaviors and are friends are too nice to tell us.

Your periodic reminder that 'retail salesperson' is the most common job in America (~4.5 million).

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-10-m...

Yes, although the IRS only allows companies to offer ~5k/yr before the money becomes taxable compensation.

FWIW -- Cal Newport's books on career development ('Deep Work' and 'So Good They Can't Ignore You') are very good, quick reads for those interested.

Books are most useful for matters that don't change very much, which would probably include most academic subjects. Programming language books are good when they're more general in nature (e.g. John Resig's JS book) but are less useful when learning, say, a specific library. In the latter case, online materials seem to be a better guide.

Having a keyboard at a lower level than your desk can help with this. Investing in a monitor and keyboard tray is probably a good idea.

Setting aside the implication that Thiel is "good people", this is totally wrong. They will suffer guilt by association in a quite literal way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_Seven

Trump's opposition to the H1B program was purely tactical, as Rubio had pushed to lift the visa cap during the 'Gang of Eight' immigration negotiations in 2013 ('Mark Zuckerberg's favorite Senator'). There would be zero support from Republicans in Congress to dismantle the program.

The NYT had their code on GitHub: https://github.com/newsdev/elex-loader

Hmm... almost like a "public house"... maybe they should serve beer?

Amazon's PaaS offering (Elastic Beanstalk) isn't too difficult to use and may be less expensive than Heroku.

The penultimate paragraph here must have been difficult to write.

marginalrevolution.com, a blog maintained by two Economics professors at GMU (more interesting than it sounds).

It's too expensive, takes too long and fails to accommodate the diversity of educational needs. It also does fairly little to help people find suitable careers during adolescence.

That said, these problems are widely known and discussed. Alternatives such as Montessori education are becoming more available. Most American 18-year-olds are reasonably numerate and literate; some even manage to pick up some scientific, historical or foreign language knowledge as well.

In hindsight, the weirdest thing about it was how difficult it was to find suitable times to go to the bathroom.

It would be helpful if white-collar employers were more willing to hiring eighteen-year-olds. Many of my twenty-something (and older) peers at $Megacorp actually started this way, with some earning a bachelor's degree part-time.

This is actually pretty common at your local MBA program (State U or similar). The widespread practice of using MA students to teach undergrad courses isn't far off, either.

Writing this from a mid-2009 13" MacBook Pro (2.26 Ghz processor). I've also upgraded RAM/HD over the years, as well as replacing the battery. It's mostly for internet with some occasional programming and sound editing. It runs the latest Mac OS.

Is there an obvious reason to upgrade that I'm missing?

"hours of nightly homework, daily sports practice and band rehearsal..."

Maybe adults should stop telling teenagers that their performance in these things matters that much? Sports / Music are great if you enjoy them, and learning the high school curriculum is important, but outside of the top 1%, there's little reason to compete in these tournaments.