I took on 6 figure debt to go to school. I'm happily employed and grateful for the life I have.
The way I see it: every option available to me coming out of high school had risk. Taking on debt to go to college is a risk. Not going to college is a risk. For some, these risks are low, due to a fortunate upbringing with financially stable parents. That wasn't the case for me — but I can appreciate having the choice at all, which many people don't.
I achieved the goals that were important to me given the risk I took: to get a job doing something that challenges me, makes me happy, and allows me to live comfortably. The debt is the cost I chose to pay in order to achieve this goal — one of many I could have taken, but there was always going to be a cost.
The article meanders a bit but I think the story is a pretty common one for those of us in a lot of debt: it's a long term partnership. The "amount of debt you're in" is abstract and barely fathomable. It manifests monthly as a force that pushes against you and your bank account, and how you choose to respond to that reflects your priorities at that moment.
This is a bit pedantic, but I believe what you mean is that she understands that the problem is a few bad apples. The full phrase is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch" — it only takes some minority threshold of underperformers to threaten the entire culture.
Poetic and engaging writing, but ultimately dishonest. It relies on the symbol of the hoodie to carry the speech through pathos, and that does take it quite far, but no argument is given. Are we expected to fear Zuckerberg, or the consumer website Facebook? The author stirs drama but does not direct it, and the resulting flatness feels disingenuous -- yet another Facebook piece that feels important with no insight. The author has identified that there is something significant to culture in Facebook's work that is also frightening, but can't quite articulate it, because that is actually difficult to do given how bleeding edge these issues are; instead, lazily, the author appears to give up. Disappointing. I'd love something with more teeth.
Well, that's the thing: I don't find that interesting, I find it lazy. It's already lazy to write about Facebook, especially in a negative or fearful tone. (How much of that mongering do you see in a day? One article on the frontpage a day on average, yes?) When a writer chooses Facebook's ethos as a topic I'm looking very critically for true insight, but most end up punting on this -- this author included.
I don't think it was really about Facebook's ethos at all, and I think people are going to continue writing about Facebook negatively until we all find some way to solve the problems they're causing.
It's not just going to go away because it's a dead horse. That's like saying that anti-war protesters should just stop showing up, "because, duh, we all know war is bad, so just put your little placard down, already."
That's not a fair comparison. A protester's purpose is simply to make it known that they are for/against a certain cause – to increment the number of visible proponents/opponents.
A blog post needs to do a lot more than that if it is to be deemed a success. Especially if it is quite long. It should bring some insight. @nkwiatek thinks this particular blog post didn't bring much insight. If this is true, then it's valid to use this as a criticism. A long blog post with a reflective tone implicitly promises to bring something more to the table than "I think X is wrong".
ITYM "People who live in Palo Alto who like Sushi who aren't my Grandma or my one friend bob who has horrible taste or oh crap that one guy fred who i accidentally friended or ..."
I don't know anyone who has a very clean social graph that they can formulate sane preference queries about.
I did at one point organize my FB friends into groups like Family, Close Friends, Acquaintances, Distant Friends, People I Know From That One Club, etc. If I were going to use this, I'd probably just filter it to use the Close Friends group. Or if I know I have similar taste to one or two friends, I'd just limit it to them. I dunno, I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, but I can certainly see some ways I could use it.
Indeed. Which is exactly why you're better served using a dataset that includes people you don't know (and ideally who aren't like you or else everyone will segment off into the same couple spots like middle school). The wisdom of crowds doesn't mean the wisdom of your rolodex.
Proof?
Most of these algorithms build models that do affinity weighting, and then try to guess at how the same some other person is as me (which is hard across such a variety of attributes).
There is no magic, so please explain the math/algorithms you think would work here.
(Sorry, it's just a lot of people wave the magic "algorithm" flag when faced with hard problems)
Well, Facebook can tell how often you interact with certain people. They can determine certain things about the content of those interactions. They can detect how similar your friend graph is to another person's. They know that your grandma is your grandma (if you have told them, of course), and they know, for example, that most people don't want to hang out with their grandma.
I haven't given you pseudocode for an actual algorithm, but I can imagine that Facebook could combine all of these metrics into an index that can tell them roughly how likely you are to want to hang out with certain people.
without you telling explicitly who you want food recommendations from or tech product recommendations from its an incredibly difficult problem. Just because you talk to someone everyday doesn't mean you want their opinion on food or tv shows.
Their "Close friends" algorithm does a pretty good job already. And even if it doesn't I'm sure most people have already removed / added friends as appropriate from that circle.
Facebook also has a bunch of data on how often you've interacted with various friends there .. so that could be one data point. (How often you're tagged in a check-in / photo, how often you've liked a post made by someone else etc.)
Your Your mom / dad / school friends generally may not be a good data point, while your college friends might be.
It'll take a lot of beta testing and tweaking, but I think it can be done.
How much information on sushi places in Palo Alto is your grandma pumping into the system to dominate that sector? Is she checking into multiple sushi places dozens of times a day? It's like supplementing every google query with -site:4chan.org on the off-chance a search for a camera lens spec or node.js tutorial would lead to 4chan.
This is a great strawman that you've knocked down.
I think it's closer to #1 with "popularity" replaced by "preferences". But that has the problem that i don't care what all of my friends think about most things, or even most of them.
Or, that whether or not you happen to like skeuomorphism is a necessary condition for being "the next Steve Jobs".
If the most important part of being Steve Jobs is making sure your app has leather in it, then you can witness the work of a few hundred-thousand "next Steve Jobs's" just by browsing the App Store.
I'm not a huge fan of the current Markdown mark. I'd encourage the creator (dcurtis) to push it, because currently it feels like a first-stage idea — or perhaps, an execution without an idea at all.
There are many questions — "What is Markdown?", for starters — that feel unaddressed by the mark. Instead, we get the brute force approach: splitting up the word into smaller word parts, which is what you do with a word if you don't know what it means, or you have to gesture it in Charades.
Rather uninspiring for an idea so beautiful that Jeff and others can get so excited just thinking about it, but what else can you expect from such a mark whose approach is so stubbornly literal? I take that back — only one word part actually gets to be represented literally... the other only managed to become a letter, in a moment I can only imagine involved the creator muttering "good enough". He must have found this mark uninspiring as well, given that he sought to put a box around it.
At least consider that the down arrow on its own is an overloaded concept, particularly on the web. Without context — and a mark should not need context — M↓ could read like a hotkey or command of some kind. This kind of ambiguity is utterly unnecessary — you're making a mark; it can be whatever you want it to be. Push!
"Flat design" is, yes. It's just a horrible label for a much broader concept, which is "form follows function", "clarity", "honesty".
Skeuomorphism is an easy target because it is dishonest by definition. Things that appear "cutting edge" or "high quality" today will, in a few years, seem dated, clunky, and pointless.
By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today. Skeuomorphism is a symbol of the Old UI. What we need is the New UI.
> By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today.
Dieter Ram's designs also hold up. Honesty is at the center of it all. This is also the reason why people still quote Confucius. Honesty is simply living and experiencing in the purest way possible.
