Beliavsky

It's different because the school itself is providing the "scholarship", which is the same as a white/Asian/male surcharge. It is legal for a non-profit to provide race-specific scholarships, which is what the United Negro College Fund does. But I don't think businesses are allowed to set prices based on race or sex.

I don't need to answer that question. The general principle is that businesses are not allowed to customers different prices for the same product based on race or sex.

From the DevBootCamp web site:

"We offer a $500 scholarship if you're female, a veteran of the U.S. Military, or from an ethnic minority group underrepresented in the software engineering field (African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander)."

Isn't charging someone more because of their race or sex is illegal? That's what a "scholarship" for only certain groups amounts to.

Doesn't the following quote from the article contradict the title's assertion that kids are not reading as well?

"Despite the large percentage of children with below-basic reading skills, reading scores among young children have improved since the 1970s, according to one test that measures reading ability.

The reading scores among 17-year-olds, however, remained relatively unchanged since the 1970s."

Feeding the hungry without inquiring why they are hungry can enable self-destructive and anti-social behavior such as drug addiction. Do the food banks and homeless shelters in San Francisco help the homeless turn around their lives?

The rationale for equal-weighting is that cap-weighting will have you over-invested in stock sectors that are priced too high. If tech stocks have a huge run and double their weight in the S&P, do you want them to represent twice as much of your portfolio? If you think the market is efficient you do, otherwise maybe not.

The strategy equally weights the stock sectors in the S&P 500 using ETFs. In a rising stock market this would incur capital gains taxes in a taxable account. If you are saving regularly, you could direct your new investments towards the sectors that have underperformed to get closer to equal weighting without selling the outperforming sectors.

I have wondered if affluent parents can replicate at least the money part of Y Combinator.

$120K is about the list price of two years of Harvard/MIT/Stanford . With a son who loves to program, I have wondered if sending him to a cheaper school and giving him the difference in installments after he graduates is better than paying for a "name" school. It depends on the quality of the cheaper school, of course. And I think school prestige matters more for investment banking than tech, so I'd be less inclined to suggest a cheaper school to a budding banker.

Nowadays there is a lot of talk about "inclusion". What about "including" people who dislike profanity? "Don't mess up the culture" would have conveyed the same message without the bad language.

The participation of white men in the political process is especially suspect. No bias there.

I prefer this conclusion: "Study Suggests Lower Mortality Risk for People Deemed to Be Overweight" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/health/study-suggests-lowe... .

Suppose conservative activists push out a CEO because he contributes to Planned Parenthood or otherwise supports legal abortion. Would the Eich critics be OK with that? Many conservatives believe that stopping abortion is as much about human rights as liberals think gay marriage is. Both sides can play the game of getting people fired for views unrelated to their jobs. It would be better if neither side did.

From the article: "We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public."

Clearly people with socially conservative views are not welcome at Mozilla.

Utterly unfounded speculation about the sexual preferences of other posters does not advance the conversation.

Homosexuals want to stamp out disapproval of their lifestyle, which explains why people who don't want to bake cakes or photograph homosexual weddings are being sued for discrimination. Homosexuals could certainly find people who are willing to bake cakes or photograph their weddings. Hounding Eich is part of their campaign to silence dissent.

Considerable research has found that fluid intelligence declines with age. There is a 2006 paper "Age differences in fluid intelligence: Contributions of general slowing and frontal decline".

We know that 50-year-olds are not as strong physically as 20-year-olds. The brain is an organ, and it would be surprising if every part of the body except the brain worked less well as one aged.

I clicked on traitor.

An American hero does not end up fleeing to a country like Russia under a leader like Putin. If Snowden had spilled the beans and then turned himself in, I'd respect him much more.

I wonder if Inbox Zero is a worthwhile goal.

My inbox is effectively one of my to-do lists. Since I don't cross off everything on my to-do list each day, my inbox usually has a few dozen messages. I have found that when I move an email to a "check later" folder, I never do so.

Unproductive people can be unproductive anywhere, and it does not make sense for them to take up precious space in places like San Francisco or New York City. They should move to cheaper areas.

"I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system."

My three children are in public schools, although they all did KG and preschool in private schools. Since the government does not own our children, I don't think it has the right to compel our children to attend a certain school. Are you going to ban homeschooling too?

I think that mass shooters want to kill a lot of people before they die, so the prospect of being stopped before they can do so could be a deterrent.

Most professors will not carry guns, but knowing that some may be armed could deter massacres like the ones at Virgina Tech or Sandy Hook.

Can't you just browse and search "incognito" with Google Chrome?

Art of Problem Solving is a good web site for math enthusiasts, and their "Beast Academy" books may interest your son. A math curriculum I like is Singapore Math.

I suggest searching the Davidson Gifted Forum http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ for posts about math resources and posting there.

They can only do so with error, but I bet that a higher percentage of country music fans than rap music fans are Republican. Given racial voting patterns, "white" genres of music will tend to have more Republicans.

This change does not affect me, but I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.

"All people are the same: race does not matter."

In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.

I wish Guido van Rossum had left well enough alone, so that the above line was valid code in current Python (it works for Python 2, not Python 3).

The article's criticism of IIT and IIM (elite Indian universities) could be made of the elite U.S. schools too:

"The short point: our system is designed to keep people out, not get them in. The true value of an IIT or IIM is not the intellectual capital they produce, but their filtering expertise – which keeps all but the superlisters out of these institutions. When the people entering the institution are the best among the best, they will shine no matter what the quality of faculty or the curriculum."