dlf's comments

Very cool. I was doing a pretty straightforward website a few months ago that I would've used something like this for if I knew about it.

It would be helpful if there were a page on the site that described how it works in more detail, or maybe just a FAQs page linked to in the footer with answers to questions like "What kind of website files does Yoozon support?" and "What do you mean by dynamic? ...will Yoozon support my Ruby on Rails site?"

I liked that part where I made the character dance.

Wouldn't an electronic receipt serve that purpose just as well?

FWIW, as a non e-commerce person, I always read POS as "piece of shit," so this did make me chuckle at first read ...carry on.

netvibes.com

Np. Would love to hear about your travels. Feel free to ping me for more ideas/details. I've traveled pretty extensively in Central America and Southeast Asia, and a bit in Europe.

Huh. Never had any trouble there and I stayed out every night. Maybe I just looked like a enough of a sloppy backpacker, although I don't think I was traveling with valuables and it's hard to store a laptop in board shorts and a v-neck. I'm pretty big too, so even having lived in rough areas and wandering around in the "bad" parts of cities/the world, I've never had any trouble.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua is spectacular. For something a little more remote, Cahuita, Costa Rica is great too and is not far from the surfing mecca of Puerto Viejo. I bet you can find wifi in either spot, at least in San Juan del Sur and Puerto Viejo. There's some beautiful spots in the Philippines as well. Try El Nido or Dumaguete (great diving and both definitely have wifi).

The estate, just like with other private debt.

Public loans are discharged upon death, so there's that. Private loans are not though, and there can still be tax consequences for public loans.

I think the most important theme to this article, aside from the individual story of debt and irresponsibility, is that this looks an awful lot like the way the housing bubble came about. Cheap debt that the borrowers are unable to afford long term. The difference here is that student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, so it seems there would be more people defaulting.

As a side note, the price tag of a degree should not be so high that a career with that degree cannot pay back the debt. This story is unique in that the debt is much older and ballooned due to interest accrual, but there have been a lot of recent graduates with high debt right out the gate with degrees that are much less employable than they used to be.

Thank you for the insightful response to a comment that frankly felt a bit baiting. I admire how you're approaching the problem at HireArt, and am thankful that the current wave of disruption in education should hopefully keep society from feeling the full fallout of the education bubble. It will be interesting to see what the world looks like in 10 years.

However, I think the bubble will persist even if all degrees were viewed as equal due to the economics around cheap financing of degrees and disincentives among universities to compete on price and incentives to compete on ancillary concerns like luxury housing, amenities, facilities, and the like. Of course, even without this warped structure of incentives, the university model is one with huge overhead, a rigid and inflexible structure, slow to adapt to change (though they are trying), and not nearly as well positioned to take advantage of economies of scale as the likes of Udacity, Coursera, or even UOP.

This entire topic fascinates me, and I don't think we've even begun to unravel all of the causes and implications of what these changes mean for society and the future of education. Exciting times!

I think it's a failed attempt to set up a poll by the OP.

I've heard that companies will sometimes pay candidates they know/like to go to one of these programs to learn to code. Seems a bit risky, but I'd like to hear whether someone has had success doing something like this.

hackdesign.org ...hands down.

Awesome. Maybe now high school computer courses will consist of more than how to make PPT presentations.

Ha! That's an awesome analogy, and I've definitely felt that way as well. I would say just the online courses I took (Udacity, Code Academy, Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way) gave me the context to understand better, and even chime in on topics. Learning how the pieces fit together helps a lot, even if you can't do much of it yourself. That CS101 course will help a lot. Have fun!

While I think learning to code is a great thing, I don't know that it will necessarily be the fastest/best path to understanding the core of your products. I'm also non-technical (coming from a legal background as well), and while the process of starting to learn to code I think has been helpful, I think what was most helpful was just asking my technical cofounders a ridiculous number of questions. Stupid questions... ones you might feel embarrassed to ask.

If you are going to learn to code, I think a high level computer science course is a great place to start. I recommend Udacity's CS101 course. It really takes the mystery out of what's happening behind the screen. If you want a good book that will also help lift the veil, I'd suggest "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware & Software" by Charles Petzold.

Learning to code can be a long process if you aren't able to give your undivided attention to it, so I think actually dedicating the time to a bootcamp as others have suggested is a very good idea and something I think I'd like to do myself.

Good luck!

The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results).

Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this."

This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video.

I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).

I'd have to guess that there are significant costs associated with producing a commercial for the Super Bowl, and I'd have to think SodaStream had some sort of arrangement with CBS to air the ad, perhaps even paid for a Super Bowl spot. Even if there aren't breaches of contract, it's still pretty crappy behavior.

This could still work out in SodaStream's favor. The public outrage against CBS and big soda (?) creates the sort of David vs. Goliath dynamic that people gravitate to.

I like this a lot and might even use it myself. That said, the link generated is much too long for sharing, esp on Twitter, but probably anywhere. I'm guessing its a known issue though.