It’s a lovely product and you can tell a lot of work went into making this course. But I fail to understand the author’s logic behind “a good course has to be free”. Why though? What’s wrong with creating value (like The OP) and then extracting it from the people that benefit from it?
In fact, there’s tons of anecdotal evidence that free MOOCS haven’t faired well in terms of retention precisely because of a lack of a buy-in from the people taking those courses.
I know the feeling, in fact a little over two years ago I posted something similar on HN and got 0 responses. It’s always empowering to finally acknowledge that there is no safety net.
Forget computers and engineering interviews, start looking for any and all work that pays. If all else fails, go to McDonald’s and work there until you save up a little. Once you have an income restart your job search.
If you go homeless that becomes a social stigma that’s hard to come back from, so do EVERYTHING in your power to avoid that.
Oh, and find an apartment you can afford.
If you want someone to talk to, you can give me a call (send message first to [email protected]).
As far as I know, this issue is not comparable to our carbon economy, I.e. Natural gas extraction, coal mining, oil, etc. Key difference is that agriculture is a closed cycle, animals produce a lot of green house gas, but it's gas that's already a part of our ecosystem. When we did stuff from the ground we add new carbon to the ecosystem, and this feat is what's destabilizing the environment. I heard this argument from an interview Elon Musk did about agriculture after someone posted a tweet at him about the documentary "Cowspiracy".
I think the issue of "not understanding each line of code" in Swift is due to a poor learning experience, and not the language itself. If the person teaching you doesn't inspire confidence that he knows what each line does, you should look for a new teacher. JavaScript has a much wonkier syntax and structure than Swift, especially if we're talking about ES5.
So is every single Apple product they sell on their opening weekend. Of course the difference is customers walk away with that product and pay full price, but I feel that the revenue projection is important.
Even though the rendering performance is very snappy and efficient, to me this fails on the most important thing for this sort of software - UI. Can you imagine someone totally new to 3D modelling opening this thing and just going for it? It's completely unintuitive and yet, because it's so accessible that should've been the primary concern.
No wonder the results skew towards elite education, they measure performance by market value. Your market value, under a certain threshold in terms of company size, is dominated by your network. Which the top schools are very good at providing. I wonder what difference would it make if First Round analysed revenue and profitability instead of market value.
Personally, I appreciate the fact that it was read rather than recited. This made it easier to interpret the message as I understood it. Theatrical motivational speeches have the opposite effect on me. So it was perfect.
I have to give credit for the idea of the article to Bret Victor. I think it was his "stop drawing dead fish" presentation during which he mentioned algebra and geometry as just different views for mathematics.
I don't agree with the comments that the site looks bad. For one, the font is amazing! The layout is extremely clear and functional, a lot of carefully crafted details make this site very polished. Thumbs up!
Did you know that a parabola could be understood as an ellipse, with one focal point at infinity? I didn't before today, who knows what I will find out next. One thing's for certain - I do want to work on making knowledge=power more accessible to all. Khan Academy is one place I'd love to help out, edX.org is another. If you're working on making knowledge accessible - I'm interested.
I found this in the comment thread under the recent post on writing a kernel. I think it was Terry himself that put up the link there. The amount of work and knowledge required to do what he did is just astonishing.
Oculus has been one of the most forward looking companies to hit the scene recently. This acquisition shows that Mark is well able to look far into the future. Personally, I find this as a very good sign, since we now have Google and Facebook as two giants unafraid of taking the lead. The more, the better, because it seemed for a time with Apple out of the game, it would be Google alone at the forefront.
In fact, there’s tons of anecdotal evidence that free MOOCS haven’t faired well in terms of retention precisely because of a lack of a buy-in from the people taking those courses.