kenster07

The story is heart wrenching, but the fact is, it may not be true. Anyone can literally say anything they want about someone and the internet will believe it without a moment's hesitation. It is downright scary.

If you were the accused and the story was contrived, you would not have much recourse.

There are lots of "flaws" in free markets, if you're using econ101 bullet points as a blueprint.

From the story, it seems NASA has no choice but to implement this despicable law. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I hope I am not.

I hope this kind of politics does not creep into other areas of American life.

There is nothing wrong with a 'whole lot of slow cores.' In fact, it is essentially how the human brain works.

Say you have person A and person B who have equal raw ability. Person A spends 6 years gaining domain-specific knowledge for his job through real work experience, and person B pursues a PhD in a somewhat related field. Which person do you think will command a higher salary in the job market?

It doesn't seem to be an efficient usage of time to pursue a PhD for the express purpose of earning a higher salary upon graduation.

I would say the common factor in all nations w exceptional academic achievement is the reverence for educators. The excellence of the students will always follow in such cultures.

I would go a layer deeper - the inescapable conclusion seems to be the focus on money itself. Without extreme discipline, these shallow economic metrics encourage myopic behaviors. And when these economic metrics become cultural pillars, welcome to Rome on the decline.

If a modern day Leonardo da Vinci materialized today, would he have a voice despite his lack of modern pedigree?

Is this supposed to be controversial? Smart, self-aware people know that pedigree is somewhat related to, but is not the same thing as ability. After all, the great thinkers of history all predated the Ivy Leagues, and an extremely small % of all students, let alone Ivy Leaguers belong to the former group.

The problem is, people, even smart people, are too lazy to think for themselves all the time. They either do not want to be tasked with, or are incapable of determining the worth of other people, so they use proxies like pedigree. It's a heuristic, and I'd go as far as to say it's embedded into human nature, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. One thing is for sure -- this problem is not local to Silicon Valley. It is a human problem.

This becomes a "bubble" when people become so absorbed in pedigree that they begin to selectively ignore that which pedigree is supposed to proxy.

The glaring issue can be summed up in one statement. College roi is detached from student roi in the near and mid term.

If these were strongly linked by design, the magnitude of the problem would be substantially diminished.

Businesspeople exaggerate and even outright lie all the time. You should always keep a grain of salt around.

The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason.

And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.

Getting rich while play poker with others' pensions. And just like a casino, the only sure winner is the house.

This issue is too complex to be summed up by the wealth gap. It presumes that wealth can be measured in money, when human happiness is increasingly becoming cheaper to acquire, and free in many cases. I don't think the author of the article appreciates all the economic forces at play.

One thing we do have to think about is how the economy would have to adapt if the true cost to produce critical goods became zero. Capitalism's supply and demand theory will become inadequate in such a case.

MOOC couldn't have come at a better time.

"No one ultimately cares all that much whether their daughter has a Coke or a Pepsi, do they? But they would do nearly anything to send her to an elite university."

Anyone else confused by this comparison in the opener?

I can play this game too:

Are bankers, lawyers, and doctors overpaid?

Well, it depends on what you want to pay people for -- what if we argued for the value they added to society on average? What about the banking industry during the financial crisis? What about the price of lawyers in California staying stable even though the supply has increased multi-fold in the past few decades? What about the people who design, validate, and erect the buildings in which these guys work? The people who created the private jets in which the questionably wealthy have always flown? The internet through which information became significantly more accessible (aka affordable)?

The people who truly enable the good parts of modern life? I know where my vote is going.

Many commenters are too lost in their own egos to speak rationally about this issue.

CS is not a "cool" major in colleges, and programming is not a cool profession among tweens. Until there is a significant cultural shift, which I would bet will not happen any time soon, the labor pool will not be commoditized in the USA.

On top of that, the skill cap for programming is substantially higher than it is in assembly line manufacturing. Programming may be more comparable to engineers who actually design the cars, but those jobs are not commoditized either.

I doubt devs are "ashamed" of making js web apps. The main issue is that it takes more effort to do so than a traditional web app. There are browser specific quirks. Frameworks like rails are so well-integrated with the db layer that it will be difficult to match that productivity with pure JS apps. And finally, a lot of devs don't want to take the time to learn, when the current standard is perfectly acceptable for most use cases.

The complexity of software patents has grown beyond the capacity of the patent system to properly evaluate them. As such, it this subsection of the patent system is susceptible to rampant abuse, and can no longer effectively serve the purpose for which it is originally intended.

If this were an engineering problem, the solution would be obvious. Unfortunately, it is political, and therefore a well-dressed circus.

I find it curious how so many computer engineers tend to have borderline religious beliefs when it comes to the topic of CS fundamentals.

This is an ineffective way to hire front-end devs, which is the scenario described in the article. In Javascript, there is limited room to implement fundamental algorithms, because many of them have already been implemented in native code, and they will pretty much always outperform a customized Javascript implementation for large n.

When doing front-end dev for a living, you will not be able to keep your fundamental algorithms chops by just doing your job. You have to go out of your way to keep them fresh. As a result, interview questions about fundamental algos for a position like front-end development will be biased in favor of those who are recently took CS algorithms classes, who do not necessarily have any more intrinsic potential as a front-end web dev, and who likely have less work experience.

As a consequence, it would seem that any employer that uses fundamental algorithms as a major factor in hiring front-end devs does not have a realistic conception of what the job actually entails.

And the same argument applies for any programming job where fundamental algos are not coded regularly.

These discussions are always rife with political undertones and ethical hazards.

The college system will be drastically altered by mooc, for the better. No more of the circus acts.

I believe Java is chosen for its popularity and its static typing, which helps the learner gain a better understanding of the algorithm at play than a duck-typed language would. It is even better to learn algorithms in C, where one has to work directly with the memory trade-offs. But learning these algorithms in Java is certainly more effective than learning them in Python, Ruby, etc.

The conclusion would not surprise me. Competitive games with a high "skill cap" require as much mental activity as anything else. The cause and effect may not be clear, but gaming can, at the very least, increase confidence in one's decision-making capabilities, which will improve performance on other mental tasks.

It's a bit sad for the front-end JS community that despite using one of the most comprehensive client frameworks in Ember.js, the author of this admin panel still felt the need to swap in a non-native data plugin (http://epf.io/).

It certainly is not the best. The worst case scenario for nuclear isn't even remotely acceptable.

A Google search would disagree with your assertion.

Why is it fundamentally stupid to be opposed to it?

Nuclear power in its current form presents tremendous, potentially country-altering downside when things (can and will) go wrong.

Is this really the best humanity has got -- the side effect of a decades-old weapons program?

Young kids who feel like they have something to prove are not the types to question the culture that they think will prove that something.

Perhaps the subprime crisis could have been avoided altogether if our banking sector wasn't so sleep deprived. Seriously.