k_kelly

Really cool widget, but to me your tagline seems wrong. You give away tshirts at conferences because people notice them, they don't notice socks. Just say, make cool socks.

Right but regardless how meaty your copy is, no matter how privileged your information is or how sensational your story is, people will only start reading it if you have a good headline. The medium ultimately is the message and the more journalists realise they're writing for a browser and not for paper the more they can contribute to reporting the news.

This is pretty grim.

On the one hand it is good that the White house had a hackathon. On the other hand they didn't. Nothing interesting really got built, the time limit was brutally restrictive and it might be childish to say but seeing everyone at a hackathon wear business clothes is really weird. You really don't need a suit to be serious.

In the end it seems like this was done so that at some point down the road they can say the Whitehouse had a hackathon.

There's an old saying that you shouldn't argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

It's still broadly true. Regardless of the dwindling influence of newspapers, arguing with the NYT doesn't sell cars but it does generate clicks for the paper.

Tesla can best refute the claims in the article by building great cars. A car review is not a story with legs, a fight between a genius billionaire and the worlds most respected newspaper has juice, and only compounds interest in a highly negative article for Tesla.

Here are the female CEO's of the fortune 500.

Meg Whitman, HP (#10)

Virginia Rometty, IBM (#19)

Patricia A. Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) (#28)

Indra K. Nooyi, PepsiCo, Inc. (#41)

Irene B. Rosenfeld, Mondelez International

Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin (#58)

Ellen J. Kullman, DuPont (#72)

Phebe Novakovic, General Dynamics (#92)

Carol M. Meyrowitz, The TJX Companies, Inc. (#125)

Ursula M. Burns, Xerox Corporation (#127)

Sheri S. McCoy, Avon Products Inc. (#234)

Deanna M. Mulligan, Guardian (#250)

Debra L. Reed, Sempra Energy (#266)

Denise M. Morrison, Campbell Soup (#334)

Ilene Gordon, Ingredion Incorproated (#390)

Heather Bresch, Mylan (#396)

Kathleen M. Mazzarella, Graybar Electric (#451)

Mary Agnes (Maggie) Wilderotter, Frontier Communications (#464)

Gracia C. Martore, Gannett (#465)

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo (#483)

Beth E. Mooney, KeyCorp (#499)

Ironically despite being low on this list Marissa Mayer is by far one of the most recognisable, probably because as an attractive woman it's a good brand for Yahoo.

Just in my opinion, but the most interesting thing the article brought up is the attractive lawyer being fired for being incompetent. It seems like a company could get great talent by assessing women independently of their looks and hiring appropriately.

It still has to be remembered that many people don't live to 70. Even today people working in hard manual labor and black men in general are pretty lucky to get to 70.

People who are healthy and able to work should not be living on retirement simply because they have reached 65, but neither should someone die at work because their life was harder to begin with.

Imagine this concept coming from school. I cant imagine the amount of bloat facebook will have for younger users. Having a thousand friends entirely from before college would make me jump to a new network as soon as it became popular on campus.

There's always the problem of when.

While it's becoming more likely that a life supporting planet exists outside our solar system, we have the problem that mankind's recorded history is measured in thousands of years (and more than likely will only be measured in thousands of years) while the universe is a tale of billions of years.

I'd still say we are likely to see artificial satellites at some point, as our own would likely survive for millions of years in some capacity (even as junk), but the possibility of direct communication is probably never going to happen.

I don't understand.

The merits of hating / supporting a magazine is one thing. However achieving something of note before thirty is hardly an easy thing and not really something I'd criticize just to criticize. If you don't take support from your peers, or admire their success I don't really see what you yourself are working towards.

Also, by commentating on the general state of HN instead of reading the article, you are not in fact improving the quality of conversation found here.

I think the real concern with this is not that we’ll have fewer people in Japan (a good thing) but that the system can’t support contraction.

If you have a workforce in their thirties who are still at entry level positions or thereabouts, and a majority of voters between the age of 50 and 80, you end up with a political class that wins elections with pro-retirement and healthcare policies and a tax-base that has no way to pay for it. This is a recipe for disaster and it’s already happening in Japan. It could easily happen in any aging population.

It seems that Tim Cook excels at designing immensely complex supply chains and manufacturing processes. It's clear this is his absolute passion.

The only thing is that it's begun to shape Apple. I'm much more excited about his moves to bring manufacturing to America than any product apple has launched under his stewardship.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but there seems no question that Apple is now a completely different type of company and it's amazing how much a single person can put their stamp on a global and multibillion dollar company.

I'm really interested that MIT is now top of the board considering it's a relatively small university. It makes me wonder if this is going to become a situation like when Slashdot attempted to poll for best graduate cs department and it was botted to hell and back.

One of the things I've always wondered was would Airtime have worked if Parker had decided to cap initial investment at a few hundred thousand dollars or less. He would have failed quickly, he would have known if it was a real product, and he might have got devs willing to go for equity (not the riskiest gamble as startups go and would have bought more commitment than a million dollars up front). Anyone tying their fate to a startup would not leave after launching the product.

It always felt like Parker tried to buy success or worse, didn't even want to buy success just wanted to buy a hot startup as a lifestyle choice.

I did a liberal arts degree and some time afterwards a CS masters.

To me I got educated by doing arts and got qualified by doing CS. Being exposed to challenging opinions on what it means to live is not going to come up in an engineering interview but I don't feel poorer for thinking about it.

I almost feel like arts would do much better as a sabbatical from a real degree, where you took a year to think about yourself and your interests.

Certainly price is the biggest problem here, no college degrees are worth their current prices, what you bank on is that they allow you to skip ahead of others less qualified to get better paid jobs, with no defined career from liberal arts this is a massive problem. Your education had value, but to yourself and writing a check for a hundred thousand dollars to yourself at 18 is not a wise investment period.

On the other hand, CS majors are failed by their course too, everyone knows that a CS grad who only learns the prescribed texts is not the best grad. All college degrees do these days is determine intent.

Education right now is at a massive junction, I feel like an arts student who used their extra free hours to hit Udacity, Coursera and mitX as well as building a github and doing internships in software companies would be downright dangerous when they graduated.

There are by and large two types of stories in newspapers. Stories that appeal to emotion and stories that relate to data.

From my experience in newsrooms, stories that are primarily emotional are dealt with by Journalists nearly exclusively, they require strong story telling and usually invasive interviewing and exposure.

Stories from data tend to be collected by outside interests and presented to newspapers. Journalists can then spin stories from the data, or if they are writing for a financial publication typically highlight the most salient points for consumption. Occasionally, and far more infrequently than in the past, the media institution will collect a survey themselves or crunch the numbers, and this is almost always pseudo-scientific.

Ultimately journalists rarely improve this data other than to make it more gossip worthy. There is a huge amount of data presented every day, from pr firms, from foundations and from public bodies, and all of it wants to be read.

Warren Buffet might prefer to read it in the New York Times, but with a strong and deep twitter feed almost anyone can now be as informed as the average news room (there are exceptions to this, on the other hand, reading those same newspapers cover to cover is also a good way to fill your head with soporific twaddle)

While I don't agree with the original article, as I think many publications offer some well reasoned analysis and challenging opinions, social media is more than enough to stay as well informed as anyone, though it remains more difficult to navigate.

On the other hand, imagine if Warren Buffet were only allowed to get his information from cable news. That would be frightening.

Then what does a talent shortage look like?

This article is arguing that the current situation is because companies wont employ below a minimal technical competence.

New, brand new, out of college only done programming in college programmers can expect massive starting salaries, the best equipment, and probably lunch and accommodation with a strong chance that they'll get a higher salary the year after.

Few companies require you to actually have used their technology or their architecture, if you have you might have already priced your way in to a job above the one been offered.

If the industry contracts as it surely will programmers are going to be scratching their heads at articles like this.

Programming is an adult way to treat a computer as opposed to the absolute infantilism most people approach their computers, or devices with. It's as much to say I understand that what happens on the hardware end is what is happening as the consumer, even though the processes seem completely different.

And none of it is easy or obvious. Dijkstra said teaching computer science was absolute cruelty because it does not truly reflect anything else in the world.

If you are going to work with computers don't think that an email server is an online mail room, don't go down the road of thinking that copyright law holds from one medium to the other because the idea behind the product is the same.

Don't think that skype is a telephone, don't think that facebook is the beatles of today, do know what something is, do know that the only intersection between life and computers is via maths and logic, do understand that these things matter now and will matter in the future.