I don't think the article mentioned this, but one of the big reasons behind all of this homework is the personality of the people dolling out the homework: Conscientious people can't stand not being busy. So they try to do everyone else a favor by loading them up with lots of busy work. The only problem with that is not everyone is conscientious and in constant need of busy work.
I had the most homework in Middle School and Graduate School. Not sure why exactly, just something strange that I noticed. Ended up dropping out of Grad School over the excessive busy work. Turned out to be an excellent decision!
I took a technical interview today over the phone, and you know what, they were pretty fair with their questions. I don't know what kind of competition I'm up against for the position, but very fair questions.
I use to be an Altavista user. In Middle School one of my teachers showed us Google in the computer lab and I've been using it ever since. What I remember standing out at the time was Google's UI; it was just a logo, a text input, and two buttons. I thought that was neat and just kept using it after that. The search results may have been better, but that wasn't why I made the switch.
I got downvoted big time the other day for a very similar comment to this, but it needs to be said: People that complain about ads have obviously never had anything that they needed to advertise.
People that complain about this stuff obviously have never launched an app before. If you don't record what people are doing with your app, then you're not going to have any idea if anyone is actually using it, or if it is any good, or if there is anything you need to fix.
They've really fixed the effectiveness of their ads with the site redesign, so maybe the increased valuation is worth it. Not really something end consumers notice, but as an advertiser I definitely have.
Hey Tones411, I actually created an app that does this for Android called RoboStop. Check it out! Unfortunately Google will be removing the app from the Play Store on March 9th due to increased restrictions regarding access to user's data (call logs), but I plan on moving the app over to RoboStop.org in about a month from now.
That's the problem with lawyers and administrators. Wag should have just ignored their lawyers and did the right thing. It's pretty easy to see what happened here, the executives/administrators/lawyers at Wag are cowards, and were too afraid to compensate these poor people without some sort of legal agreement covering their asses.
This. I hate hearing all this co-founder stuff all the time. While I'm sure it works for some people, I've found the whole co-founder thing to be a terrible idea. The only positive benefit I've found is having someone to talk to about what you're working on, but I haven't found co-founders to be helpful other than that in the cheerleader department.
The reason YC is always talking about finding co-founders is because Paul Graham had co-founders. Had Paul Graham gone at things alone, YC would probably be preaching the virtues of flying solo.
If you know how to program, don't force the cofounder thing. It's really easy to end up bringing on shitty cofounders. Look at Facebook and SnapChat. In my experience it's typical to end up bringing on an Eduardo, a Winklevoss twin, or a Reggie Brown, then you have to get rid of them because they suck and literally aren't capable of contributing anything.
I moved my old blog to a new domain name recently, and wasn't able to keep using Medium because they no longer support custom domains. So now I'm using WordPress for my blogging software and also using their hosting as well. That's too bad for Medium, because Medium's blogging software is superior in my opinion. They've just made a few boneheaded mistakes. My theory is that Ev Williams wants to create the next Twitter, and that's the reason behind his poor decisions. Williams should have just worried about creating the best blogging software and blog hosting solution and things would have kept humming along just fine. Greed can make people do silly things.
Ev, if you happen to read this: 1) bring back custom domains. 2) start charging a monthly fee for hosting custom domains like WordPress does 3) Create a native advertising service that publishes promoted stories into the main Medium.com story feed.
Sort of looks like the VCs are pumping up valuations and then looking to the public markets to then dump their investments. I can't remember who said this first, but I think it's accurate.
Lot of crooked unscrupulous shit going on in the financial sector! Uber is a legit "unicorn," but $120 billion dollars??? This is the dot com bubble all over again. I know this isn't technically illegal, but it should be.
$120 Billion valuation on $2.6 billion in annual revenue? Seems like a pretty steep price to me!
Note: I believe that $2.6B figure that I found does not include the amount of ride revenue that goes to the drivers, so maybe that's why the valuation is so high. If you add back in the drivers share of the revenue, maybe the valuation isn't that crazy.
Microsoft is still going to make a browser though aren't they? If there's something that they don't like in chromium they can just change it as it's open source. Doesn't sound like a big deal to me. But that's just my opinion, man.
Retro/Vintage computing enthusiast here. I actually got into playing around with old computers because I was interested in using a computer that simply ran Microsoft BASIC for the operating system. Much simpler times! But yeah, I don't think there is anything out there right now like what you're talking about. I would suggest simply purchasing a retro computer if you want to teach your kids the old school way. Python is a pretty good substitute for BASIC in my opinion, the only problem is you have to teach object-oriented stuff if your students want to make anything interesting with graphics. (I teach kids to code btw, thus my interest in the topic)
EDIT: I forgot to mention FreeBASIC. With FreeBASIC you can do a lot of stuff the old school way, including graphics. However, I haven't actually gotten around to playing with FreeBASIC yet so I don't have a whole lot to say about it.
Diverging from PHP was a good move as PHP 7 has largely caught up with HHVM in terms of speed. That's really neat that Facebook invented their own language to meet their needs. Will have to mess around with it further sometime.