Let's replace "code" with "write." Please don't learn how to write. Only writers do this, and we really don't need more of them anyway. There was a time when this wouldn't have sounded crazy.
Learning to code teaches problem solving, new ways of breaking down complex scenarios, and a means to actually build something. It's true that not everyone needs to be a software engineer, but not everyone needs to be a mathematician either, and we don't use that as a basis to tell people not to learn math. Much like math, coding can be abstracted to a form of thinking in a way that plumbing cannot.
I have a friend right now that is using CodeHS to teach 10 year olds, and they're absorbing it like sponges. And I have met so many people that, in retrospect, have wished they had learned to code at a younger age. Maybe if people had told them to learn how to code, they would have.
"Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts."
tl;dr: Praise kids for their hard work, not for being smart.
To some extent education tries to do that, but imo it's pretty bad when it really does it consistently. The person who spent a lot of hours on a-not-really-working project gets a better grade than the person who actually produced an impressive result, but managed to pull it off the night before and made the mistake of not hiding the fact that they didn't spend a lot of hours on it. That's not actually that uncommon in college, since there's a huge range of ability and prior experience in a typical class, and professors do try to base some of their grade on how earnestly the student appeared to work on it: to save face, they can't give an A to the student who did the whole semester project in a day, even if the result was objectively better than most of the others.
End result of that approach is that the kids learn that hard work matters, but results don't. Now you have someone who'll optimize for "hours put in", worrying more about whether they're impressing the boss with their work ethic than about the quality of the end results they're delivering. Sort of a common feature of corporate culture, where the guy who stays late and comes in weekends is praised, even if the guy who went home at 5pm every day is the one producing most of the working code.
The other lesson you learn from that is: if you solve a major problem in two hours, withhold the result and pretend you spent two weeks working on it, then present it later and get praised for working hard on the problem for two weeks and solving it.
There's a significant price differentiation between living in Manhattan and in other boroughs. One really can't lump them all together.
I have friends that pay $6-700/mo for rooms in reasonable apartments in convenient locations in Brooklyn (e.g. off the Lorimer L stop, less than 10 mins from Union Square). Rents have also significantly gone down in NYC in the past two years. I had mine decreased by 12% last year and it hasn't gone up since.
10 minutes to Lorimer? It's 20 minutes minimum just to Bedford. And that's when the trains are running frequently and efficiently. There have been plenty of times when the L train's taken over an hour to get just to Bedford.
And that doesn't include the walk from the station to your home, which could easily be 10 or more minutes away from the L stop.
What strikes me as ridiculous is that you can't fill out a form online and pay electronically. But then again this is the US government. There should be some kind of amnesty for those that do pay the fee now, so as to avoid this kind of trolling.
The funny thing is that this law is on the whole favorable to innovators, in that if you do abide by the requirements, you'll have the safe harbor from getting sued. If Viacom had its way, the law either wouldn't exist (thereby exposing hosts to all sorts of potential liability for the infringements of users) or it would require things like proactive filtering using fingerprinting technology. Thankfully, they have not prevailed in their lawsuit against YouTube.
Exactly. That's what this is all about -- an issue of a technicality where people did not pay the fee and register an agent with the copyright office, even if they did have a link in the footer.
Different countries have different laws regarding safe harbors for secondary copyright liability. But if you're operating overseas, it would be hard to pin you down with this DMCA issue unless you have employees, an office, etc. in the US.
