I'm probably late to this party where everyone seems to be hating on the President's plan, but I'll chime in since this plan would have had a huge affect on me.
I'm one of those people who didn't apply themselves in highschool and didn't have anyone push me to do well. I couldn't afford to go to uni because my parents made just enough so that I couldn't get any aid. They also didn't have money to spare and were smart enough not to cosign loans for me to go to a university. Who can blame them? Its crazy to spend 10s of thousands of dollars to take intro classes that are basically just substitutes for how terrible our k-12 system is. My parents did encourage me to go to college though, so I went to one nearby right after highschool.
I would like to point out that even though its cheap, if you aren't in district its quite a bit more expensive. I think it ended up being around $100 a credit hour where I went since I wasn't in district. I know that is peanuts compared to universities, but if you have to pay out of packet, it adds up really quick, especially with books etc.
I was lucky that my parents let me use their car and live at home for free. Because of this, I could pay for the classes outright by working 30 or so hours a week at minimum wage. Its really depressing to work for months and all summer, saving virtually all of the money you make, and then blow at the start of each semester.
Ultimately this worked out well for me though, because by getting high grades and most of an associates degree, I was able to get significant transfer scholarships and not have to take a bunch of pointless intro classes. I'm not saying that all liberal arts classes are pointless, but some of them are, and it feels like hell to have to pay for those classes out of pocket, especially when you make minimum wage (which was $7.40 at the time). I would rather just read a book on a subject than take a class in something that I only have passing interest in.
I still have some debt from university due to double majoring and adding another year (which is when my scholarships ran out), but I still got out with < 15k in debt. And hey, that's peanuts when you get a software engineering job right out of school. I would have had so much more debt if I didn't go to CC first.
I will say that I meant quite a few people abusing the Pell grants though. People who lived at home for free and had no ambition would get Pell grants which covered their classes and gave them an overage for living expenses. They would just take the easiest classes and pocket the overage check. It was like a job for them. So I'm sure there will be people trying to do the same here, and there will be sleazy schools trying to get a chunk of the money too, but those are just problems that need to be solved.
To be fair not all universities are the same either. A university may have a great engineering program but have terrible liberal arts professors. Why pay thousands for an English class where you learn to write a basic five paragraph essay (which you should have learned in highschool), when you can pay a few hundred instead.
I don't understand why every time I read an article that has something to do with apples the writer bashes on red delicious apples and acts like people are being manipulated into eating them. I love apples and I eat a large variety of them, and though I don't get red delicious the majority of the time, they are still really good and are a good goto apple because they are so consistent. I love how they are crisp, that they have a thick skin, and that they aren't overly sweet or sour. Plus, they are really cheap and are often good sized. Varieties like honey crisps can be tasty, but they can be quite a bit more money and they are often so sweet that it's almost like a dessert.
Speaking only for myself, the red delicious takes up valuable market real estate that could better be used by some other variety of apple not resembling fresh styrofoam dunked in sugar water--I resent the red delicious for its combination of prominent place, flashy looks, nondescript flavor, and repugnant texture.
The red delicious stands apart for its extreme crispness, and to those sensitive to it, biting in is like nails on a chalkboard. Also, it seems like one chew releases all the moisture, leaving a mouthful of dry bleh-ness with which to contend.
Be fair. Most grocery store fruit is a gamble - you know that going in. But Red Delicious, properly ripe and picked at the right time, can live up to its name. A perfect one is really, really good.
I live in an area that grows a lot of apples - in fact the Honeycrisp was developed only a few miles from my home. But I don't think I've ever seen a locally grown Red Delicious. As a kid I fell for the storyline "they're delicious", but as I got older I realized just how poor those ones from the supermarket are. I avoid them at all costs now.
> I don't understand why every time I read an article that has something to do with apples the writer bashes on red delicious apples
Well, clearly you like Red Delicious apples. And that's fine, I'm not knocking you for that. But I don't think that's a majority opinion. As a result, most articles about apples are written by people who really dislike Red Delicious apples.
red delicious in sfbay area have been uniformly mealy or mushy. My favorite fruit is apples and I can still barely eat them. I think people are just unhappy lots of grocery stores stock only red/golden delicious with maybe a granny smith, or at least primarily red delicious. Plus the name offends...
Its weird that this pops up on HN because I have been trying a low carb diet for the last 2.5 weeks (with quite a bit of success). I have run into the same issue as you in regards to snacking. The best snack I found was flavored almonds. They are about 4 carbs an ounce and come in a bunch of flavors (coconut is my favorite).
I have had a huge sweet tooth my whole life but I find the thing that I crave the most is fruit (I know fruit is sweet but not like ice-cream and candy). I've always ate a ton of apples and now that I can't I am craving them like crazy. Also, no bread is really hard, especially since good whole wheat bread seems so healthy and is so satisfying, and it limits your options for most meals like pizza and sandwiches.
I hear a lot of knee-jerk reactions about the diet saying how it must be awesome to just eat steak, chicken, etc. all the time, but it gets real old real fast. Without bread/buns, bbq source, and common high carb toppings, it become really repetitive. Cheeseburgers are amazing but they are a hell of a lot less appealing with no bun, onions, tomato, or ketchup.
All this being said I do not see keto or whatever you want to call it as a long term diet/lifestyle for me. I have been convinced that I used to eat way too many carbs, but I think I just need to balance my meals more and do some portion control. Eating no more than like 20 carbs a day is really hard and for me it affects the quality of my life too much. But, I totally understand that there are people out there where this diet is basically the only thing that works for them, so I think it's awesome that more people are at least trying it.
"I hear a lot of knee-jerk reactions about the diet saying how it must be awesome to just eat steak, chicken, etc. all the time, but it gets real old real fast."
One thing to consider is that while your old diet is obviously bad when you look at it through the low-carb lens, it is also subtly bad as well, because your entire cuisine was bent around carbs replacing fats, and baking, sugars, bread, dough, sugars, potatos, sugars, etc etc etc. If you're going to successfully do low-carb over the long term it's important to also make sure that one does not simply try to eat "old diet - carbs" every day, but that one explores the culinary options that are available to you when you no longer fear fat. Go down your oils aisle and start trying them out. If you haven't been using your spice rack, start trying them out. (Well, first throw away your several-years-old spices and buy new ones, then start trying them out.) Start cooking ethnic foods from ethnicities that didn't go low-fat. Start making your own salad dressings.
(Basic recipe: Spoon a dollop of mayonnaise into a bowl. Pour in some vinegar and mix thoroughly. Pour in an oil and mix thoroughly. Insert ingredients to taste. There's ways around that first step, but this makes experimentation fast (my grandparent's generation call mayo "salad dressing" for a reason), and you can use this to bootstrap up to your own opinions. Your first couple may suck, and I'm leaving the recipe underspecified sort of on purpose, but you'll dial in fast.)
When eating out you may often end up eating "old diet - carbs", such as a bun-free hamburger, but for what you cook yourself it's important to go discover the really quite wide world of cooking options that America just sort of silently turned away from in the past 50 years. There's a lot of flavor and variety in the fats, but it takes some time to explore them, because you're darned near starting from scratch.
And to be honest, there are simply some things in the carb world for which there is no replacement. For instance, I'm well aware of the pains of missing gluten since I've got (proper) Celiac, and there's really no substitute for such a metaphorically and literally flexible protein, for instance. But fats have their own thing to offer that carbs don't.
> Cheeseburgers are amazing but they are a hell of a lot less appealing with no bun, onions, tomato, or ketchup
This is true, but honestly the only one of those you really need to cut out is the bun. The onions and tomato add up to 2-3g of carbs, and the ketchup is another 4g, so the whole burger in a lettuce wrap would be 6-7g of carbs, not at all bad for a meal! For reference, I use myfitnesspal to keep track of my food consumption and to research carb/calorie counts.
> Eating no more than like 20 carbs a day is really hard and for me it affects the quality of my life too much
Would 50g be more sustainable? Or 100g? From what I've seen, the 20g limit is mostly an introductory phase. 50g is still a huge reduction from what most people consume on a daily basis.
Agreed. The 20g limit is not sustainable long-term. Even 50g can be hard or impossible (from a health perspective) for some people to sustain. Diets are not really all-or-nothing -- check out marksdailyapple.com for a more flexible approach to low-ish carb eating.
Playing with carb intake can be very educational: while low-carb diets benefit a lot of people, different folks have different needs. Your athletic pursuits, sex, pregnancy status, thyroid health, etc, are all really important to consider.
"Keto" and "paleo / low carb" are different. Keto goes to the extreme, allowing almost zero carbs, to induce ketosis in your body. Paleo is more "no grain, no dairy, no legume", but fruits are still allowed and encouraged for providing natural, sweet-tooth-satisfying carbs.
There's an old book called "Life without bread" that was a pre-Atkins low carb diet written by a German Doctor named Wolfgang Lutz. He claimed that, after much trial and error, 72 grams (about 6 slices of bread) was the cutoff, and further restriction didn't particularly help patients in any measurable way.
I don't understand the weird obsession with Git. Its a version control system not the cure for cancer. Anytime someone shoe-horns it into a product they talk about how Git is so amazing and solves all these problems, but what they are really talking about is just a version control system, not Git specifically.
Using Git for just about anything other than what it was built for is a terrible idea. I mean the underlying system is incredibly powerful and could be useful in various projects, but the interface is horrific. I swear its like someone tried to make Git as difficult as possible to use. Programmers have a hard time understanding and using Git, non-programmers will just laugh and walk away. Every time a programmer has an issue with Git, whoever helps them has to sit down and explain the underlying system for 20 minutes and draw a bunch of sticks and bubbles. Non-programmers will never put up with this.
(As an aside, I sometimes feel the same way about node.js, where I've seen "node.js is awesome" listed among a project's "features." Nothing against it, I just don't get the obsession.)
I appreciate this comment with respect to Git right now. I've recently spent a lot of "hammock time" trying to come to grips with my views about this profession generally and what I believe is best going forward. One thing I feel strongly about is that while we are still maturing as a field, the pain points are unacceptable. There is still so much work to offload to the machine, requiring fundamental rethinking at many levels. So although I agree in principle with the initiative to help people "learn to code" (so that we can bring system design closer to the domain experts), I also believe that in the current state of things, it's a wasteful effort, since it requires conveyance of ideas that should be deprecated.
But even short of programming, version control alone would be useful in so many other fields. There's no reason why it shouldn't be a mainstream concept even for personal use (e.g., you're working on a thesis). Just an hour ago, during my annual flirtation with Git (I'm a Mercurial user), I wrote in my notes:
> the barrier to entry for new programmers is important. This would appear to weigh in favor of Mercurial — and yet, realistically, is a “layman,” i.e. someone who knows nothing about software development and has never used a CLI, really going to distinguish between these two systems, or will the very concepts of a VCS not prove to be the biggest hurdle?
I have used Git, and I think that for linear history the differences are not remarkable. But the attitude you refer to is crucial: do we want to hide complexity or expose it?
Incidentally, I have several Project Gutenberg epubs under version control for a personal project, and like the OP I attest that their work is first-rate. There's no comparison to any other digitizer in the public domain (that I know of).
> Every time a programmer has an issue with Git, whoever helps them has to sit down and explain the underlying system for 20 minutes and draw a bunch of sticks and bubbles.
This isn't true at all for a lot of people. I know a lot of people that just read the docs and are able to solve the issues. Others will Google the problem and find the solution on stack overflow. Everyone learns differently...
> Anytime someone shoe-horns it into a product they talk about how Git is so amazing and solves all these problems, but what they are really talking about is just a version control system, not Git specifically.
Git is amazing and does solve a lot of problems, but there are problems that aren't solved by Git. Even Linus himself says this here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8).
Using the github API, rather than git, for creating epub books and pdfs is a great. Using git to control changes as the do is perfect as well.
> Non-programmers will never put up with this.
Ermm don't assume that everyone gives up right away. With the GUI interfaces we have today, Git is really simple once you learn it.
>Pretty much everything is simple once you learn it.
I wouldn't say so. A lot of things are designed-by-committee implemented-by-the-lowest-bidder messes that are painful and complex even once you know how they work.
Git may have some weird design decisions but for the most part it's well-implemented and follows a simple conceptual model.
I can't think of a VCS with a better online tool than git and github. With editing books, it is entirely possible to use only the github editor, which effectively abstracts the git command line interface.
Git, in spite of the horrifically complex interface, is in essence a really dumb version control system (I mean that in a non-insulting way). This means it's fairly neutral about what kinds of data you can throw into version control. And more importantly, it almost never complains about what you give it.
I think that's why people are now starting to think about applying version control to domains outside of code and choosing Git to do it. For example, I had an idea a few years ago to make a CMS on top of Subversion as the data store (never got around to building it though). Now there are lots of projects like that built on top of Git: CMS, Wikis, you name it. Generally anything that can work off flat files is very easily converted to use Git as a back-end, giving you advanced version control features more or less for free.
From a practical perspective, the difference is not just that Git is a trendy new silver bullet, it's the "dumbness" that makes it actually easier to do that kind of work than it would be on older version control systems like SVN. Interestingly, for the most part, most of these projects do not really benefit from the distributed nature of Git (although for things like wikis and CMSs it can offer yet another feature: content migration between instances). It's more about the ease of use for getting data into a repository and under version control without it exploding when something unexpected happens, like a file getting renamed.
You might not get the best front-end experience for actually doing stuff with that version history (as other comments have noted wrt diff tools, etc., which tend to be geared towards code rather than other types of content) but that's the fault of those tools rather than Git (which is dumb enough not to care about content types), so it's just a question of incrementally building up a better toolset for your particular content domain. That's much easier to do and more approachable than building the whole infrastructure from scratch.
As for Github, it happens to have a nice interface, toolset, documentation and mindshare. Developers are familiar and comfortable with it, so there's no need to research and learn "yet another tool". And because it's cloud based, you can get up and running very quickly without worrying about hosting, etc. That's just more icing on the cake really.
Writing version control software is hard. There are just so many potential use cases, not to mention the differing perspectives on how users interact with each use case as well as how they're applied to specific projects a user is working on, increased complexity is inevitable. On balance, I think Git manages to strike a good balance with most things even with its unique eccentricities.
Git's popularity isn't because it's the best tool out there for all scenarios. It's popular because it's a distributed system that helped communities grow around code managed with it while removing barriers to entry. In my opinion, that more than anything will be Git's lasting legacy.
I have asked before, how many projects need a distributed version control system? It adds extra complexity to the concepts, and is probably rarely needed. (Distributed, not remote version control, which I can see as being useful).
> Every time a programmer has an issue with Git, whoever helps them has to sit down and explain the underlying system for 20 minutes and draw a bunch of sticks and bubbles. Non-programmers will never put up with this.
But from my experience, they have to do this exactly once per (non-stupid) programmer. The moment you grok underlying structure (basically all graphs and pointers), the apparent complexity disappears and most of the things in git become obvious. I see no problems with explaining this to non-programmers as well, you just have to spend a little more time, because they probably aren't used to think in terms of graphs.
How are people too sensitive in this case? The things he said were absolutely horrific. Making flippant comments about a disturbed kid who went on a murderous rampage within the last week is absurd for someone in this guys position. If I had vested interest in the company I would want him fired just because this incident proves he has terrible judgement.
Also, what is the deal with people's obsession with rapgenius? Its a lyrics site. I don't understand how they got all of this funding for a lyrics site. There are like hundreds of them that work fine. In face, songmeanings.com is particularly good. People can say rapgenius is the best designed site blah blah blah til they are blue in the face, but I bet it doesn't matter for 99% of the people who use these sites. I would guess most people who look up lyrics do what I do and just Google the song/lyrics and click the first link. I have literally never used a lyrics site's interface, and I have never thought, oh man I wish there was a better lyrics site out there for me to use. The valley is crazy.
YouTube did something like this a few years ago for April Fools. I think on a modern Retina-level display it would look even more impressive due to the higher resolution and smaller character-pixels.
Hey I'd just like to tell you that your site is an awesome resource and was useful to me as a student when I was talking my OO design courses. As someone with a gamedev hobby background your site made learning about patterns much easier for me. I will be sure to buy the book when it comes out. Thanks for putting in the hard work and making it available.
> As someone with a gamedev hobby background your site made learning about patterns much easier for me.
This is really reassuring to hear. One of my hopes with the book was that framing architecture in terms of games (which are graphically and conceptually very concrete) would make it easier to understand the more abstract concepts it's about.
I feel similarly, I'm just not sure where I draw the line because it makes me feel like a hypocrite. I see a lot of people on HN criticizing the Obama administration for drones, NSA, Guantanamo, etc., but how many of them have stopped using tech companies whose leadership contributed large amounts of money to Obama's campaigns? I can't help but feel like there is a something deeper resonating with people when it comes to this Condi issue. I'm guessing if Hilary Clinton quit tomorrow and joined DigitalOcean,the people up in arms about this wouldn't be outraged.
This is an overt support of someone that is highly controversial. The aftermath of the Iraq war isn't going way because the US isn't involved as much anymore. There is already a sense that accountability hasn't really been high with the Iraq war. Oops, we made a mistake doesn't cut it too much. With this appointment, it further amplifies the sentiment that there is absolutely no real accountability. I would say this is why a lot of people would feel strongly about this.
Well, it's actually quite simple some people want to turn Silicon Valley into an arm of their preferred political party. Oh, they don't want that outright, certainly, but they certainly want it and everyone in it to be aligned with the party's principles, especially at the leadership level.
Believing in legal tolerance (most people who are described as "tolerant"/socially liberal) is not the same as believing you cannot say anything negative about someone or make judgments based on their actions and beliefs.
I find it difficult to explain how it is permissible to fire someone for campaigning against gay marriage, but not permissible to fire them for being gay and married, or being from an opposing political party, or any other personal reason. Could you please explain the principled distinction for this dichotomy?
I fail to see how it's a black-list if the means of ejection is extremely public and based on pure market motivation? Conservatives with awful views tend to get "freedom of speech" and "freedom from social and business consequences" mixed up a lot.
I would contend that the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s is comparable with what is we see here; then as now, a group of people with certain political and social views are being excluded and ejected from jobs solely because of their activities outside of the job being denied to them.[1] Those blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s had "freedom of speech", but not "freedom from social and business consequences". It is difficult to make a principled distinction between what we see happening now, and the 'McCarthy-ist' wave of the 20th century, which is oft described as ideological intolerance.
I'm baffled by this opinion. Comparing a voluntary boycott of Condi to the government blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten is so far off base that I honestly can't understand how you can compare the two.
I'm one of those people who didn't apply themselves in highschool and didn't have anyone push me to do well. I couldn't afford to go to uni because my parents made just enough so that I couldn't get any aid. They also didn't have money to spare and were smart enough not to cosign loans for me to go to a university. Who can blame them? Its crazy to spend 10s of thousands of dollars to take intro classes that are basically just substitutes for how terrible our k-12 system is. My parents did encourage me to go to college though, so I went to one nearby right after highschool.
I would like to point out that even though its cheap, if you aren't in district its quite a bit more expensive. I think it ended up being around $100 a credit hour where I went since I wasn't in district. I know that is peanuts compared to universities, but if you have to pay out of packet, it adds up really quick, especially with books etc.
I was lucky that my parents let me use their car and live at home for free. Because of this, I could pay for the classes outright by working 30 or so hours a week at minimum wage. Its really depressing to work for months and all summer, saving virtually all of the money you make, and then blow at the start of each semester.
Ultimately this worked out well for me though, because by getting high grades and most of an associates degree, I was able to get significant transfer scholarships and not have to take a bunch of pointless intro classes. I'm not saying that all liberal arts classes are pointless, but some of them are, and it feels like hell to have to pay for those classes out of pocket, especially when you make minimum wage (which was $7.40 at the time). I would rather just read a book on a subject than take a class in something that I only have passing interest in.
I still have some debt from university due to double majoring and adding another year (which is when my scholarships ran out), but I still got out with < 15k in debt. And hey, that's peanuts when you get a software engineering job right out of school. I would have had so much more debt if I didn't go to CC first.
I will say that I meant quite a few people abusing the Pell grants though. People who lived at home for free and had no ambition would get Pell grants which covered their classes and gave them an overage for living expenses. They would just take the easiest classes and pocket the overage check. It was like a job for them. So I'm sure there will be people trying to do the same here, and there will be sleazy schools trying to get a chunk of the money too, but those are just problems that need to be solved.