makaimc

I agree that engagement has decreased from Twitter since the removal of photo embeds, but from less technical folks I talk to they are using Instagram increasingly from Facebook. that appears to balance out the decrease in usage from Twitter

You're absolutely not crazy. I'm 30 and in the midst of traveling the US meeting with software developers for 5 months. Every minute, both the ups and downs, have been worth it. Check out my site codingacrossamerica.com and shoot me an email if you're interested in figuring out whether this is the right path for you.

Hey HN, this is my blog on my travels across the US over the next five months to tell the stories of tech companies around the country. Let me know if you guys find it interesting.

In my professional life I haven't found spreadsheets to be a "gateway drug" to programming for people I work with. Spreadsheets are generally used to get something done and then take on a life of their own until they are so critical to a business that their failure can cost enough money to materially damage a business. However, there does seem to be something accessible spreadsheets that perhaps can be used in a slightly modified way to get more people excited about learning to code in a structured programming language.

Yes, Django 1.5 supports Python 3 although the authors recommend waiting until 1.6 for production sites (https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2012/aug/19/experimenta...). The larger question is whether the libraries you want to use support Python 3. Common libraries such as django-debug-toolbar unfortunately do not yet support 3 (https://python3wos.appspot.com/).

Thank you, that's really great feedback. I'll change it as soon as possible.

Hey HN, Tim O'Reilly came and talked to our tech team at CFPB last Thursday. He had some really interesting points on open government so I wanted to spread them more broadly.

"Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product."

So "real" programmers can't dress properly and reject any form of structure? Can we push these trivial stereotypes aside and instead realize that great programmers have a range of personalities? Smart people of all backgrounds, programmers included, rebel against rules that do not make sense. But rejecting rules does not make you a great programmer.

I cringed when I saw a quote by a student at my undergrad university. Not sure why anyone would respond to a reporter's inquiry on such a controversial topic that could get you expelled from school.

Wikipedia states that this design was originally tried in 1906. If it's better than standard wing designs, why isn't it already used in today's airplanes?

I tried the XML-RPC library and it's very easy to use. However, XML-RPC isn't that common. Do you have any recommendations for using Python with RESTful web services?

I wonder if the comments follows a Power Law (80/20 rule), or if there is a linear increase from 0 to about 100 karma points. Is there any way we could get the data and graph that?

Interesting, thanks for the correction. I've been using that wrong for quite some time. There's even a whole Wikipedia article devoted to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

It looks like it is only sorting the last week's stories by karma, not every story in HN history. Which begs the question: is there a way to see every story by karma?

It's very interesting to me that so many other people had the same experience with Digg and Reddit that I did. At first, I read it obsessively but now I can barely stand to scroll through the headlines. HN has gone through a different cycle so far. At first I only read the front page because it had enough of content for me, but now I skip many of the front page stories and go directly to the "lost" gems on the new page.

Anyone who has used both Facebook and MySpace over the past few years knows why Facebook won: much less intrusive advertisements and a simpler design for non-technical users.

I just read about this over the weekend in John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Great Crash. The ticker tape machines were about 3 hours behind in most parts of the country and that caused a massive sell-off as people tried to get out of the market even though they did not know the current value of their stocks.

Whether or not the program is worth $25,000 is up to the market to decide, not just you. Basing the value of a program by arbitrarily declaring "that's just too much money for me!" does not address whether or not the program ultimately offers enough value to the actual students. That question will be resolved in time.

I have to disagree with Dr. Greenspun here. Despite the Singularity topic's lack of immediate value some people are still be interested in studying with some of the most famous futurists in the world. Many people (myself included) enjoy learning for the challenge of thinking in new ways and this program at least promises that opportunity.

I used to work at a major financial institution that spent $300 million/year on IT projects. It had money to throw at every technical problem (until recently), but ultimately many of the challenges were never solved because of the mismatch between the finance areas and the IT organizations. Basically the "culture" of each side of the company was completely different: technology people didn't know finance and finance guys didn't understand the technology.

So it seems one of the biggest culture challenges is figuring out a way to meld together people with different occupational backgrounds. If the executives at the company knew that, they might have been able to find a way to get each side to respect the skills of their counterparts.

That's a good point. But how would you explain that to your average non-technical taxpayer?

I really like the analogy used in this article, but would taxpayers really be willing to pay for their government to send out useless emails?

This would be great if the telecommunications companies would offer a flat-fee monthly data access plan for all devices.

It would be interesting to see if comment karma scores changed by hiding the score from your view before you upvoted someone. That would eliminate "groupthink" because you would not know how many other people voted for a comment until after you upvoted (or waived your right to upvote).

For certain cases in IT this may be feasible, but too many interactions in business today are still done face-to-face that would render this suggestion impossible.

Eventually everyone will be on the web because the quarter that aren't using it are in two groups: older Americans and rural areas. Older Americans will pass on and wireless technologies will connect rural parts of the country.

The new site seems to be even slower than the old one, which was a slug in its own right.

Let's flip this around a bit. Who would have a better chance of survival, one of us transported back to the Middle Ages, or a person in the Middle Ages transported to 2009?

I'd say we have a better shot at living a longer period of time (over a year) since we could take basic precautions against disease and germs. The Middle Ages guy/gal would probably die of our modern germs within a few days (similar to the Indians when they met European explorers).

I don't play either WOW or the card game based on it, so I'm wondering, why would you play with cards over the online version?

One of the Booz & Co. partners I recently talked to said he has two piles of resumes: 1 page and 2+ pages. He reviews the 1 page resumes for good candidates and puts the longer resumes in the garbage without looking at them. A resume's purpose is to get you an interview- not describe your life's story.