People who go to Ivy League schools typically have wealthier parents and/or families who can fund their education. Subsequently this can likely carry over to their receiving support while they start a new company, not to mention the connections gained from attending such prestigious schools.
Granted that this does not apply to every case and there are true bootstrapping stories out there, but the fact of the matter is that wealth generates wealth and capitalism is the trademark of the startup industry. It has very little to do with the actual education in the end.
People on here think he's a demigod, and most of the world shouldn't have a reason to give a damn because he isn't all that important.
I have a Nest and the only thing I wish it wouldn't do is turn off the air at all when the weather system knows that it's very hot outside (perhaps this has to do with poor insulation, though). Otherwise, if you turn off auto-away during heat waves, it's great. The home I live in has pets and the thermostat is located on the top floor (it's old and the layout is less than efficient) so having access to it from anywhere in the world in an easy-to-use manner is incredibly useful.
I'm fine with a program like HS existing if people want to join it, but I'll have no respect for them until they treat both genders equally in terms of the tuition assistance.
Note that I'm all for women joining the program, but I'd presume people with the time to commit to the program are a) not working, and b) don't have much money, so it's completely unfair to exclude men to receive assistance just because they happen to be of the majority who are interested the field.
To be clear, there is no "tuition" and therefore no "tuition assistance". The living stipends are provided by external companies, like etsy, and they are provided as an outreach effort.
Now. On a purely practical note, HS is a business, and the core objective is to deliver excellent batch dynamics. The responsibility is to attendees and attendees only -- how are they delivering an experience that makes the time (and, indirectly, money) commitment of the students worth it? The issue of "fairness" does not enter the conversation because this is not a charity. Or, more straightforwardly, their responsibility is not to people who did not get in.
Now, ok, you might argue that you are not convinced that having a roughly-equal gender ratio is beneficial to the batch as a whole, but I am in the current batch and I'm telling you it makes a huge difference. If you don't believe me, let's chat over email or skype.
Absolutely not. I have been quite impressed with each and every female participant. It is incredibly obvious that no one in the batch was a pity case. But even if you don't believe this anecdotal evidence, consider that the ratio is worse this time around than any other batch. Since the facilitators are acutely aware of the batch balance (and other statistics), it clear to me that this decision was deliberate, and that it reflects a very strong male applicant pool this time around.
As for my speculation, given the rejection statistics, I'm guessing the HS facilitators could have chosen to admit many more females before this would have even been an issue that should have borne consideration.
Male and female applicants are judged by exactly the same standards. From our blog post when we first offerred grants:
"We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. It frustrates us a little that we feel the need to say that, and we think it underlines the sexism (intentional and not) that so pervades the programming world.
But we want to say that now, so people don't have to waste time asking or debating the point. Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch."
I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history. None of this stuff matters at all and the fact that anyone was surprised by PRISM's existence is nothing but foolish, in my opinion.
With greater technology comes inevitable supervision over such things, and it isn't in the name of reading about your browsing habits unless you enjoy children being abused or bombing buildings. The only shame is the lack of transparency about the surveillance, but again, this whole thing should have been completely obvious to just about anyone. Snowden is a traitor and a coward for leaking the obvious (while running off to hide instead of facing the demons he accuses so arrogantly) and Assange is a horrible person for a bunch of other reasons.
> I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history.
1. PRISM is an apparatus just waiting for another government to use it against the US. Who's to say that Russia, China, etc. haven't been using it to spy on Americans, too? I mean, it's clearly not that hard to get access. Yes - they might not look at your porn history, but perhaps they will use some useful political information against one of your leaders and fuck you up.
2. What would happen if the government was to have a good reason to misuse the information they were gathering. What would happen if a fascist party was to come into power?
3. Calling Assange a horrible person is small-minded. Don't make this about personalities; this is about individual freedom, the right to a transparent government, the constitution your country was founded upon, and human rights.
4. Rather a traitor to the government than a traitor to the principles that made the US what it once was. Unless you want mediocrity...
The simple fact that they are viewing ('metadata' about) my browsing/email/phone calls/IRC/Facebook/Twitter/whatever isn't actually the thing I care about.
Its the fact that if I happen to spend private time doing/thinking/talking about anything someone in the government finds objectionable with anybody someone in the government finds objectionable, I will get flagged and investigated.
Seriously, I couldn't care less if facebook employees read my posts, they have no power to hurt my life. Gmail employees laughing over my email? go for it.
Mozilla employees discovering my personal fetish for modget donkey porn? meh.
But the government? I am now dependent on nobody in the governmental apparatus finding my private opinions and speech objectionable or questionable, now or ever in the future.
Fuck that. Either they stop doing that, or I stop expressing my private opinions to other people.
Society loses if the second one occurs on a massive scale. we have entered a really bad place.
All true except that you are greatly underestimating the risk of private companies collecting data that ends up affecting your life.
Start by thinking of FICO scores or credit histories. Similar concepts can be applied to eligibility for all kinds of 'privately' provided parts of society - job screenings, auto insurance.
Imagine vacation rentals where the owner can screen people out based on political affiliation... the are any number of ways in which private institutions can quietly 'hurt your life' using all this personal data.
I was somewhat understating concerns about private companies there to avoid diluting the conversation too much, but I totally agree.
Hell, anyone could put their hands up to blackmail me over my midget donkey fetish, it doesn't have to be the government - but it does reach a particularly nasty level when it is government policy.
Seriously this. And if people don't think prism has already been used to stalk people with dissident viewpoints in America they might have missed a few years of news about targeting 3rd parties, the tea party, the occupy movement, etc.
Ubiquitous surveillance can be used to control and coerce anyone, regardless of absence of criminal wrongdoing (though there are people who claim the average american commits three felonies a day now, because the USC is so overbroad).
It's not about "nothing to hide": when anyone can be blackmailed, including judges and lawmakers and law enforcement, the entire system of interlocking checks and balances breaks down.
Worse than threatening to expose MLK's private life, they wrote to him as if someone from his religious community found out about it and shamed him and suggested he kill himself.[1] So not just blackmail, but psyops.
As I wrote in another comment, it's not just surveillance for state purposes, it's also surveillance for the corporate interests of the state (pharmaceuticals, agribusiness/GMOs, oil lobby, etc.). What if the big 3 auto makers were so powerful that they tried to crush Tesla by subtly targeting its customers and employees with fake bad news (oh wait, maybe they're already doing it). I'm convinced that some of the spying on the EU was over agricultural policies such as their strong anti-GMO stance--US companies would love to have advance knowledge to maneuver around them. I'm not sure it's happening yet, then again, how would we know?
I wrote this the other day, explaining how Obama confirming ubiquitous surveillance in the US (even if it only targets foreigners (which turned out to be a lie anyway)) is a bullet in the head of the US internet industry:
> None of this stuff matters at all and the fact that anyone was surprised by PRISM's existence is nothing but foolish, in my opinion.
I think that is a mistaken position to be in. It assumes a couple of things -- that people who disagree with the program do so because they are doing hidden illegal things and now those would come to light.
Another assumption is that the government makes no mistakes, is not malicious, can be trusted with such information, and now or in the future it will not misuse it.
This is all coming from the same entity that tortured people while talking about human right and freedom. I am not sure trusting it to "not do the wrong thing" this your history is a rational choice.
At this point trusting it with all this information is no better than trusting a toddler with a box of matches and a can of gasoline.
You are missing the big picture. The issue is not with your own personal history, but with the power to have access to key people private life.
Let's imagine the presidential election, in the next 10 or 20 years, if the incumbent misuses the tools to find out that his/her pro-life opponent had an abortion (or in its close family), it could change the turn of the election.
You can apply the same kind of reasoning to any whistle-blower reporting corruption, pollution, or a toxic drug. It will become much easier to silence and blackmail them.
Democracy is funded in part on the equilibrium of powers, a dragnet collecting everyone's life, is breaking this fragile thing.
If you're comfortable sharing your browsing history with the government, feel free to email it to them at the frequency you prefer. However, I demand that they get a warrant from a non-secret court, so proper checks and balances can work, and their actions can be later scrutinized by the public and abuses can be tracked and punished if necessary.
It's not your porn history the government is interested in - that is, unless you run for public office one day, in which case they may suddenly become very interested in it.
Rather, what you should have an issue with is them having information about you that is deeply personal and private in nature. Have you or a significant other ever had to get an abortion? Have you ever had trouble maintaining an erection? Are you one of the 30% of women who cannot achieve an orgasm? Do you have any mental disorders, sexually-transmitted diseases, or genetic conditions? How large is your penis? Have you ever been attracted to someone of the same sex? Have you ever fantasized about child porn, fat porn, necrophilia, etc.? Have you ever attempted suicide?
Most importantly: do you believe that the government knowing all of this about you - and everyone else - makes you safer?
> Snowden is a traitor and a coward for leaking the obvious
So he would have been much braver by never leading anything? That's a strange definition of coward. Besides the fact that if it was "obvious" like you say, then how is it a leak?
You would when you'd have any conflict with any branch of the government for any reason. It'd be too late by then.
Given that the Congress creates over 50 new federal crimes each year, and where you live, your local government probably also doesn't sit on its hands, are you completely sure you'd never want the government not to know absolutely everything about you? Really sure?
>>> Snowden is a traitor and a coward
I'd give you a traitor - he certainly violated the conditions of his employment and clearance, even if for an arguably good reason, but coward? I'd think it takes guts to take on the US government alone, knowing he'd probably spend rest of his life either hiding or in jail, or maybe eventually both. Would you dare to do the same? If you knew something is wrong and you know it - would you dare to do this, knowing your life will never be the same? It definitely not a behavior of a coward.
>>> while running off to hide instead of facing the demons he accuses so arrogantly
Getting away from an overwhelming force that has every reason to crush you and every possibility is not cowardice, it is a natural act of every human who values his life and liberty.
While I (as an American) resent the implication, it is unfortunately very true.
I hear arguments daily on the subject of the new Xbox and M$'s latest privacy invasion, but most everyone has no clue who Ed Snowden is or what NSA/PRISM are all about.
>I accuse you of being a pedo!
>Please report yourself to the authorities. I would like you to reflect the next 5 years on the logical flaw of the argument.
I realize you're being hyperbolic, but there's a big difference between some random person slinging around accusations on the internet, and a police force in a sovereign nation deciding that a criminal complaint lodged by one of its citizens warrants the arrest and questioning of a suspect in the case.
The problem is that Sweden has thousands, or tens of thousands outstanding rape cases, but has only pursued Assange with this level of detail. If they vigorously extradited every accused rapist who had fled Sweden, that would be highly respected, and Assange would have had far fewer sympathizers for holing up in an embassy.
> The problem is that Sweden has thousands, or tens of thousands outstanding rape cases
That phrasing makes it sound like these numbers come from your ass; feel free to correct my impression.
> but has only pursued Assange with this level of detail.
What level of detail? They happen to know exactly who their suspect is and exactly where he has run off to, and thus far what they've done is ask that he be returned.
>If they vigorously extradited every accused rapist who had fled Sweden, that would be highly respected, and Assange would have had far fewer sympathizers for holing up in an embassy.
What does this even mean? How many accused rapists flee Sweden every year? I have no idea, and I bet you don't either. Maybe Assange is the one guy who's fled the country in the last year and this is what they do. Maybe they do vigorously attempt to extradite every single accused rapist that flees abroad. Maybe the Swedish authorities are working harder on this case because it's high profile and they're trying to avoid a PR mess domestically.
You're assuming skulduggery where there's perfectly reasonable explanations, and - this is me guessing here, so if you can reasonably show me to be wrong, I'll happily admit that - you're pulling assertions from your ass to back that assumption up. Stop that.
Keep beating that dead horse. Most reasonable people recognize that the changer are disturbingly high that the charges are trumped up, and to distract attention away from larger, more important issues.
That may be your opinion, but I see nothing to back up you r assertion that 'most reasonable people' believe the charges to be trumped up. Why bother trumping up charges through an intermediary instead of just issuing a warrant for Assange's arrest on espionage grounds?
Really? I've heard the charges. He held one plaintiff with his body weight and had rough, condom-less sex and he had sex with other plaintiff while she was asleep. In both cases the sexual encounters were consentual. He was originally charged by plaintiff one to take an STD test, rather than jail.
Not to mention that the translation (and gravity ) of the crime is closer to "sexual misdemeanor"/"sexual misconduct" rather than "rape".
Aside from your misleading assertion the encounters were "consensual" (you can't consent when asleep, and consenting on the condition that your partner wears a condom doesn't mean consenting to having sex without the condom) both seem like clear cut allegations of sexual assault to me. If you really think his alleged behavior is no big deal, well there's no civil way of saying this but that makes you an apologist for rape.
And that's without even getting into how little sense the conspiracy theory itself makes.
> Most reasonable people recognize that the changer are disturbingly high that the charges are trumped up, and to distract attention away from larger, more important issues.
There's a fairly high standard you have to meet to make a claim like that, and just stating that "most reasonable people recognize" your claims of an anti-Assange conspiracy don't suffice to carry the point.
In all fairness accused is not convicted. If convicted, any and all rapists should be jailed. But there's a number of conspiracy theories around his charges and there's enough concern that his trail would be railroaded for all the wrong reasons. What happened to innocent until proven guilty anyway?
What happened to innocent until proven guilty anyway?
Doesn't mean you can run away and avoid facing trial. For example, in Australia, if you flee from a Breath test (drunk driving) without being tested, your punishment is guaranteed to be as bad or worse than as if you were caught drunk driving. Presumption of innocence is a right granted to you as part of a legal system. When you refuse to operate within that legal system... you can't pick and choose the bits you want to apply to you.
To me the case is so murky- I would have no trouble believing that Assange was completely set up, but at the same time from his behaviour I would have no trouble believing he was guilty either. But as long as he avoids facing a trial, you can't just say "we must assume he is innocent". That is a right granted to you as part of a process where you will face a courtroom at some point.
I'm inclined to think that he acted like a douche (that is perfectly fine to assume based purely on the parts of the explanations that he has not contested), and wasn't set up but faced two women that wanted to cause him embarrassment, and that the two women got caught up in between the prosecutor and the lawyer appointed for them who both have possible political motives:
They're both known for wanting to substantially tighten rape laws in Sweden, and the lawyer in question is a partner in a law firm that also includes a former Swedish minister of justice from the time Sweden was complicit in illegal CIA renditions - as revealed by Wikileaks. Rather than a conspiracy, they might just have decided he was a convenient person to make an example of, score some political points on, and as an extra bonus he was someone they don't like.
Note that the above is not mutually exclusive with him actually being guilty of a crime. He could perfectly well be guilty and a victim of an overzealous prosecutor.
I really don't want to make a judgement either way. I do think that there's something fishy about the way the case has been pursued, though, but I'm inclined to think that a Swedish prosecutor with ambitions is sufficient - there's no need to infer outside interference.
Wanting to run from what seem likely to be kangaroo court proceedings doesn't imply guilt in my mind. Innocent until proven guilty isn't just a legal doctrine, it's also a philosophy that citizens of functioning democracies need to believe in fervently.
Presumption of innocence is not explicitly enshrined as a right in the US constitution. Rather, it's entered from other rights, like the 5th amendment. In the case of rape, many local US jurisdictions have weakened it in the interest of deterrence.
In all fairness, can we stop using the phrase "in all fairness"? In all fairness, it's just weasel words, and in all fairness the phrase reliably shows up several times in every Hacker News comment page.
Is this where we start parsing what exactly a woman really means by 'rape'? "It's OK, she didn't say she was raped, she said he had non-consensual intercourse, clearly a different thing!"
No, it is where we note that neither of the women filed a complaint against Assange about anything at all. They showed up at a police station asking if they could compel an HIV test.
They were interviewed by a friend of one of the women, in violation of police procedure, and the police on that basis decided to start an investigation without a complaint from the women. An investigation the first prosecutor closed down because she claimed there was no case to answer at all.
One of the women have since consistently refused to sign the police interview protocols.
Now, this might happen if someone is raped. But as it stands, it is unclear to what extent the women even agree with the police transcripts, much less with the police's interpretation of what they said.
Why is this a thing? Are people so lazy to go through their own mail that they need to spend money to have someone else do it for them? Even if you factor in far-off edge cases, there is little to no money to made here except for the most insane of people who are almost never at their home address, and that number isn't all that large.
Speaking for a family of four in Chicago: the amount of crap mail we get is a constant chore, and we regularly miss important things amidst the piles of upsell offers from the banks that own our mortgage, or the dealership that sold us a car, or the store we mail-ordered a pan from once, &c.
I think you're wrong about the appeal of this service. I wish we had something like it here.
Also, "laziness"? What does that even mean? There's a finite number of minutes in every day. Make a case for why I should spend any of those minutes dealing with paper mail. How many other goods and services do you use that we could interrogate as a facilitator of "laziness"?
Speaking for a family of three in Chicago, we get a lot of crap mail as well. Really, it's all we get.
But:
a) my 3 year old has fun grabbing it out of the box and pretending it's from various people.
b) it takes literally a few seconds to just throw it out.
Now, if we were getting so much junk mail that it was making us miss our actual, important mail, that'd be a problem.
But we don't get any actual, important mail. It's 99% junk.
Anywho. The Postal Service is going to disappear in my 3 year old's lifetime anyway.
That's like saying, 'why is email spam filtering a thing, it only takes seconds to delete all my spam!'
Perhaps if you're young and single you may only get a couple of pieces of mail. Try having some kids, owning a house, etc, and you'll see the amount of crap that get's stuffed into your mailbox skyrocket. Then you've got to deal with shredding huge amounts of credit card and other offers, and trying to sift through piles of junk everyday just to see if there might be one important piece of mail out of the dozens.
I would rather the post office did this for me (i'm suprised they're still not riding around on ponies), but I would most certainly pay for this service if it were available here.
P.S. If you do the math, a median software developer salary is 90K, which is about $40 an hour. I could spend at least 10 minutes a day going through and shredding snail mail. That works out to 4 hours a month or $160 of your valuable time. $4.99 is definitely worth it.
Even better would be if the post office offered free large shipping envelopes to be stuffed with spam. Penalties for abusers of the postal systems could range from additional charges to rate-limited use (I think it would be an unconstitutional limitation of free speech to completely deny a party the use of the postal service).
I don't think it's a question of "lazy", because for me it's not about saving time. It's about reducing physical clutter.
There's the short-term clutter that forms when I let piles of mail kick around, waiting to be dealt with. If all of that was digital instead, it wouldn't be cluttering up my environment. And I am demonstrably better at processing my digital inbox than my physical mail, because I can do it from any random waiting room or park bench.
And there's the long-term clutter of things that need to be filed away. I would much rather not spend the space. I have already experimented with scanning workflows, and none of them really hit the minimum convenience threshold for me yet.
I wish I could find a good automatic-feeding document scanner that works standalone (no PC), does OCR onboard, automatically handles rotation/sizing/two-sidedness, and pushes the resulting PDFs to the network drive or cloud of your choice. If it exists in a consumer-size device, I haven't found it.
I can somewhat think of this for people with a lot of real estate. You don't necessarily want your bills and stuff sent to the rental house, and if you have a lot of properties it might be better to aggregate rather than to send them all to your permanent residence.
Right, because nothing in the technological landscape changes, ever, in any way that could be relevant to the success of a Lisp-like language.
I'm not saying I'm convinced a Lisp-like will explode, much less that it'll be Clojure in particular, and I do think it important to keep the history in mind, but I think you overstated things.
Lisp suffered from the AI Winter and the lack of acceptance of GC based languages on mainstream computers due to their limited capabilities.
Many of the capabilities of modern IDEs were already available in Lisp and Smaltalk environments in the early 80's, but you could buy a house with the price of those systems.
To be fair, it's really not like Instagram had never considered doing video up until Vine came out. Hell, I'm sure every high schooler had the idea of "Instagram for video"; it's a very accessible, logical progression from Instagram-style photos.
While this is true, you can't deny that what this article is showing is almost exactly what was innovative about Vine. The short, hold-to-film, no edit clips originated with Twitter's product.
That being said, I'm not excited about this update. I love Instagram, but mostly for it's simplicity; the number of vines on my Twitter feed worth watching is astonishingly low, and this will only produce, IMO, more content not worth watching.
Granted that this does not apply to every case and there are true bootstrapping stories out there, but the fact of the matter is that wealth generates wealth and capitalism is the trademark of the startup industry. It has very little to do with the actual education in the end.