Agreed, the captia is excessive. Ended up giving up on the site after trying to add in a second boat (not a sailor).
It's very difficult to have a positive experience when the first thing that greets you is a source of frustration. It's also silly to put something like this between the user and the meat of your site.
A significant number of people will just elect not to do this, and as a result never see what you wanted to show them.
I see similar things across the board. Chrome has terrible autocomplete also. The suggestions have to be physically back-spaced to avoid them being autocompleted when you press enter.
"The thing about working on yourself is that it’s actually work. Reading an article, or a book on behaviour, self-improvement and what else doesn’t actually change you any more than reading Harry Potter does."
This is well put, and I think part of the reason so much self-improvement material is drivel. Generally, I've noticed that some of the most pathological people are the most into 'self-improvement' as an idea. That being said, their brand of 'self-improvement' generally does not extend beyond reading and quoting books by various gurus.
On the flip-side, those I've met who are actually highly motivated and disciplined, have never picked up one of those guru books.
Reading up on something is one thing, and in many cases, it's an important first step. There's no way to start using a new language without reading something. That being said, simply reading is not enough. On top of that, what you read has to be actionable. The self-improvement platitudes are not actionable. Reading a book on Python does not turn you into a python developer. Why should reading a guru book turn you into one?
I'm always happy to see solid philosophy show up here. Really, it's an under-appreciated field that gets written off as useless. Looking back at when I was in college, one of the courses that I still make use of was a philosophical logic class. Infact, the prof I had for that course sent me a link to the Open Logic Project, which has come in handy ever since.
I also have a soft-spot for Russell and his student Wittgenstein. Tractatus is an incredible, though later redacted, work of pure axiomatic reasoning. While HN focuses mostly on tech, I think that the kind of reasoning found in Analytic philosophers can be a boon to anyone doing anything that requires the sort of logical design found in the technology field.
Articles like this are always alarmist. Where are the peer-reviewed citations? Why is this not in Nature? If this article were so well vetted, it would be there.
I generally don't like to say people are making things up, however there is a lot of mythology around how much work IB students do. I've frequently seen IB students while I was in undergrad boasting about their level of proficiency, despite it seldom being supported.
These students are high school students. I'm very doubtful that this course covered material like file types and encoding. First year CS classes are almost exclusively programming basics and architecture.
This line of thinking only really makes sense if you presuppose that every person taking a computer science course in high school has an understanding of file types. Many don't have this knowledge. I don't see why students should need to have additional knowledge that is outside the scope of a course, just to pass the clase.
There's a reason these things are taught in a CS program, often at higher levels. And that's because they're not common knowledge.
On a very similar note, wild turkey are actually very dangerous. Their legs have spurs on them, which have been known to cause severe or even fatal injury to small animals like dogs. I remember being told when I lived in the country to avoid aggravating them.
This looks cool, however can someone with some electronics know-how explain to me why the connections on most, if not all the keys are crossed? They don't look like insulated wires, though I could be wrong.
- Someone somewhere on a DARPA project