I would say if you anticipate any sort of data science and machine learning potential in your application, then you should choose Django (Python) because you'll be in the home turf for this sort of work and you won't have to deal with language context switching... But this is a big if and may not be worth considering.
If your app has data of a large enough size for serious analysis, shouldn't you be building a data warehouse separately and performing analysis on that?
(scientific) Python is definitely better at stats out of the box than Ruby is though.
> It seems it's mostly the US having an issue in education costs.
Are the prices in the US not relative to the GDP per capita? $3k-$4k USD might be cheap in the US but that money means a lot more in different economies.
Go into any Electrical Engineering department at any university and you'll find plenty of students with boxes filled with circuit boards and electronics.
Everybody who's played with electronics knows that stuff is brittle and needs to be protected carefully. One wire coming loose renders your entire work obsolete and unlike software, there's no debugger to tell you where you potentially screwed up...
That's not even the issue to me. It's like fine you "suspected" it. How difficult was it to not suspect it anymore? Like did the arrest and the accusations need to happen. It's almost like attempting to traumatize the kid and his peers for no good reason and for what? Security theater? Because he was brown or a Muslim and did not know that brown or Muslim people should not bring electronics that might be suspected with them to school because they should fear being suspected? Perhaps we can excuse his ignorance for not being old enough.
Well I guess they could logically suspect that he might be doing something more sinister than just bringing around a clock project. So fine get a court order to search his house while keeping him detained at school. Find nothing. Apologize and let him go.
I have a feeling a lot of this behavior from teachers and school middle management is driven by fear of having exactly the same sort of irrational punishment come down on them.
Didn't treat the clock like a bomb? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, apologized? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, uhhh... maybe if I get the police involved I can make this not my fault?
Reasonable errors on all levels are often greeted with harsh punishment and sometimes demonization by news media. It's not just kids who are subject to it. People are rightly terrified of being blamed for errors that anyone could make, and their behavior makes a lot of sense in that context.
It all stems from not having a backbone. Less weasels, more passionate people with some step in their walk. But all the political bullshit that educators have to waft through kills most passion and flare to go against the grain, to do what they feel is right. Unfortunately the nazi-effect is in full swing for most salaried office workers. No one wants to get fired, so everyone just obeys arcane rules and doesn't do anything the least bit outside the box. It's basically raining with grey skies every day.
It doesn't help that the consequences of losing a job are substantially higher in the US than in most other advanced economies. And we're easier to fire, on top of it[0]. It's harder to take a stand over small(ish) things when it can bring financial ruin for one's family.
[0] yes, even many teachers. The power of unions in preserving teachers' jobs is highly regional, and often exaggerated.
Who's the we? These administrators are put their by their buddies in city and state positions. They almost never are educators themselves. In order to get competent caring administrators, who know what education is about, we need reform that actually puts educators in the hotseats.
Right thinking people? Of course it only works to the degree we have critical mass. But it seems worth encouraging, that we might more quickly get there in more cases.
Exactly! Apparently it's really difficult for some people to admit they were wrong. How difficult would it be to just say: "I'm sorry, we screwed up."? Instead they still insist on calling his clock a "hoax bomb".
There were debuggers in the electronics shops that I remember. They were called multimeters. You debugged by deducing where voltage, current, and resistance levels were in your circuit.
I've also made my share of brittle programming projects where one errant line could act like a "loose wire" and take down everything.
To be fair it's a middle school, and most people don't really know what a circuit board is for. I don't think it's outrageous that they asked.
It should have never, however, escalated as far as it did. You're going to handcuff a kid who is cooperating and trying to explain what this thing he built is? Give me a break.
But worse still they're still not backing down. It's suspension of all logic and reasoning. They should have shown the clock to his engineering teacher and resolved the issue in minutes.
Nah, it's a high school. And the reaction really wasn't warranted. He did show it to his engineering teacher before he got nabbed, too. According to the Times,
"When Ahmed Mohamed, 14, brought the clock to MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., on Monday, an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teacher what it was, according to an account in The Dallas Morning News."
That's how it should go, in an ideal world. I think the engineering teacher did the right thing in suggesting he not show it off, given society today. He's aware of racial profiling in a post 9/11 world and how stupid some people are.
> an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teacher what it was
Ok, I can't help but be reminded of my recent comments about English classes in high school.
It's pretty early in the school year, and judging by his stated age he's likely a freshman. Not much of a chance for a teacher to ascertain things like "character".
Man, I must have interacted with weird middle schoolers at my local hackerspace... Seemed like every last one of them had either some simple arduino project or something with a RasPi they were working on. I'd hate to live in a place where most people have no idea what a circuit board looks like.
Also, asking doesn't need to get the police involved: "Hey, what is this?" "Oh it's a clock I built" 'Why'd you bring it to school?" "Cuz I'm proud of it and wanted to show you"
If there was still doubt, ok, find someone who knows something about it (there's gotta be a tinkerer SOMEWHERE in the school district) and ask them to take a look. Maybe couch it as "Why don't we show it to X, I think they'd get a kick out of it?"
But arresting a 14 yr old tinkerer for a clock? Whatever happened to having sane reasonable conversations?
We're trying to promote stem in the U.S., not say, "middle school is too early"
Anecdotally; I was wiring together simple switches, electric motors, and solar panels in and out of the classroom in elementary school in the mid 90s. I was programming timers and games in middle school by the late 90s.
Paypal owns Venmo (via the Braintree acquisition). How is this not cannibalizing on Venmo (whose primary existence is around sending money btwn friends)...?
The Venmo team is a different team, located in NYC instead of California, has a brand that people actually like, something something middle managers. This kind of nonsense is standard issue from eBay and I don't think it would have changed in a month of separation.
Venmo has a team in SF now, and eBay doesn't own PayPal anymore.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense. This seems like a lower-friction flow, especially when requesting money from people who have never heard of Venmo – not everyone trust a payment processor they've never heard of, and PayPal has much broader awareness than Venmo.
"You’ll not be eaten by computers any more than folks were eaten by electricity 100 years ago."
Although I enjoyed the post and agree with a lot of it, I disagree with comparing coding skills to humans having access to electricity. In think coding today is like writing was 500 years ago.
In the past you would hire a literate person to read your documents, write you letters, and so forth. Today we hire programmers to help us get the most of our computers. I think reading and writing code will be the new way to make the most of computers in the future. It may not necessarily be through the coding tools and languages we have now.
I'm now going back to my daily writing routine that I've scantily kept up with. But I have some concerns. How does one improve their quality of writing when they are not at school? What I mean is, I can write, write, write and I know after a period of time I'll "better" than I was before. But without having people who scrutinize your work, who critique your grammar, and do all the things that teachers used to do for us in our school years, we might only be able to get so good before we plateau. Am I wrong about this? How do you know you're writing "correctly" if you don't have the feedback mechanism that we had in our schooling days -- aka grades, peer reviews, draft 1, draft 2, etc etc...
I plan on writing for myself and for my blog. But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".
>But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".
I'd reconsider that position for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that it is a logical contradiction.
Nobody is born knowing how to practice things. This is something we learn as we acquire skills, learn about goals, learn how to channel our energies towards meeting said goals, etc.
Thus practice is itself a skill that requires practice to develop.
Since our practicing of practicing will necessarily not be perfect, we will not be "practicing practicing perfectly". So we will never achieve the state of "perfect practice", and thus we will never be able to make our practicing "perfect".
Thus the statement "perfect practice makes perfect" becomes equivalent to "perfection is impossible, since we can never achieve perfect practice".
In my experience people who think like this end up paralyzing themselves with doubt and never produce anything of value -- not because they are incapable, but because they think themselves into a cage of inaction. They become so terrified of not doing things in the "correct" or "perfect" way that they just end up doing nothing at all.
You can't practice anything perfectly, as you unwittingly proved, so just do something. If you require external feedback to validate your work, put your work out publicly and feedback will come. The process is write -> publish -> critique -> polish, not become perfect writer -> publish -> everyone loves me.
The reason I posted this article to HN, although it does not directly contribute to "programming, startups, entrepreneurship, or business" is because there are many self-help/improvement related posts on HN.
I'm starting to see a trend in HN being a place where people learn more about many things. Maybe HN should not have these kinds of posts, I can't answer for what HN should be. I do think this post can help people be better individuals, and in turn be better programmers, entrepreneurs, business persons, etc.
Hey, thanks for your feedback. I debated with myself about posting this article on HN. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that, this article shouldn't be seen as appealing exclusively to men but rather this article contributes to the knowledge and self-awareness of individuals and their society. I read content which deals with information that applies to many things that don't apply to me -- e.g. struggles in other countries, womens health issues, K-12 school issues and more --- not for the sake of gaining practical knowledge to implement in my life, but just because I'm curious. I think your statement, "appealing exclusively to men", does not describe every persons personal interests. Sorry if this post offends you.
