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It has to be STEM degree: http://www.ice.gov/sevis/stemlist.htm

Don't know about you, but my heart needs a charge every six hours and it goes in hibernation mode every 12 hours.

Can I upgrade to yours? :-)

The title makes it sound like a Scientific American editor is a female writer that harasses people.

"Aspiring female writer reveals that Scientific American Editor harassed her" is what you should have named this to be clear.

I really like how this manages to introduce some object-oriented principles stealthily while mostly focusing on linear logic. Great job!

The invitation flow is very roundabout (even if you sheepishly admit it :-)), and the group account invitation doesn't seem to work at first. I tried to authorize a third-party account (inside of an anonymous tab) three times and the invitation didn't seem to be redeemed when I was redirected from Twitter to Echelon.

At first I thought something was wrong because, perhaps, you didn't set a "return to" URL to complete the invitation acceptance (which you should do if it's at all possible, to prevent your users from having to repeat an action). That was the behavior I expected since the invitation URL's log in prompt said "Sign in to accept".

What really happened is that the Twitter authorize call doesn't — in fact — trigger the acceptance of the invitation, it simply creates an Echelon account. I had to hunt down the "Notifications" section through the Menu while there was no sign where I had landed after the OAuth trip that there were any notifications waiting for me.

You should find a way to surface these notifications where you users are going to land after the Twitter authorize call, otherwise the experience is going to be as frustrating for them as it was for me — that is until they do the work your application should be doing for them: letting them know what actions they need to proceed with next in order to have a fully functioning account.

Now I have to say this is a cool app, I especially like the fact that individual user accounts are used and therefore everything can be logged so the whole team can be aware of the outgoing Twitter activity for each "group account".

The researcher set out to prove his own pet hypothesis, several of the experiments quoted are based on self-reported results (of "feeling warmer"?) and the whole thing seems wholly unquantifiable.

People "felt loved" and "that life is worth" living. Who asked them? Were those leading questions? Did they spontaneously report? What was the protocol? What about control groups?

This is an interesting article, and it does link to several (sometimes inaccessible) papers, but despite curiosity for the topic, I can't help but be surprised at how superficially some of the research mentioned seems to be substantiating the claims made.

I guess I expect more rigor from the NYT.

Anomaly Hunting: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anomaly-hunting...;

Not to be confused with investigating.

Where in this article is it acknowledged that the mechanics of supply and demand are radically impacted during a recession?

Where in this article is the rate of employment and remuneration of STEM workers compared to the mean employment rate and remuneration of all American works?

It's true based on what data, exactly?

> What did I say that isn't true?

Actually, I was wrong. The terms incorrectly stated that past subscribers couldn't have access to the Free Weekend. That's what was untrue and has now been fixed.

We didn't plan for it but it's going to make for a perfect little refreshing break for people between courses and we're definitely going to have Netflix playing in the office while we work to keep everything running smoothly.

I don't think this was a huge mistake. ;-)

We try never to make assumptions that would exclude beginners in our intro courses. As someone already mentioned, it's easy to jump ahead if you already know that stuff.

If someone isn't as familiar as you are with variables and we don't cover it, they might give up because too many things go over their head. That's not what we want.

Bear in mind, you're judging Code School based on our more beginner-oriented intro courses, whereas most of our paid courses are aimed at the intermediate level. That's why we like having an event like the Free Weekend, so you can get a good taste of all that we offer.

Or you could skip iTunes U and check out Try Objective-C for free right now: http://tryobjectivec.codeschool.com/ ;-)

We meant "Code School newbs" as in people who haven't tried Code School before, not programming newbies.

You should receive a confirmation email soon, and you'll receive a link to access your Free Weekend next week when it starts.

That sounds like a bug. If you want to help us resolve this for you, reach out to support@codeschool.com with your account details and I can look at what happened. Otherwise, sorry to lose you on such a sour note.

That's a rather bold statement. We've helped quite a few people with prior programming experience learn new technologies and languages.

It's certainly possible that you're too experienced for the levels of expertise we aim for. In that case, of course, there are surely more appropriate resources for you out there.

What you say simply isn't true. The Free Weekend is offered to all users (past or present) as long as they don't currently have a subscription to Code School.

Time extensions aren't stated because this is a limited-time event.

New Relic is our sponsor, in exchange with the agreement to be contacted by them via email you obtain access to all our content for 48 hours — something that would otherwise cost you $25. Is that really unreasonable?

After trying to find follow-ups on this story I'm amazed at the fact that not a single news source I could find even bothered to do one.

There seems to have a been a release from TSA citing 'inconsistencies' in Gross' story. They claimed having launched an investigation the results of which don't appear to have been reported anywhere, including on their own website.

Someone purporting to be a flight attendant commented on one of these news sites that there is no way the TSA couldn't find camera footage of such a highly secured area in an airport like MCO. I'd be curious to know if that's accurate.

From some more thorough reports, the TSA seem to have reached Gross to apologize (despite attempting to discredit his claims).

What a fucking mess.

It's a terrible product that rusts and jams extremely easily, requiring a saw or bolt cutters. Good design is about more than ingenuity.

I like the way you time your releases, boy.

This article is not nearly as bad as it makes itself look at first. Speaking of appearances.

Saying you're giving lousy advice isn't an excuse for giving lousy advice.

> "I want to make my sites look attractive."

Sure, but you should worry about making them usable and solving a design problem first: how do I best convey the usefulness of this product to its potential users?

> "Design seemed to consist of complicated rules that weren’t written down anywhere, plus an unlearnable sense of taste, possessed only by a black-clad elite."

Design is about solving problems elegantly, I'm tired of fellow programmers rehashing the idea that (interaction) design is like modern art, it couldn't be further from it. But "seemed" makes it sound like that was just the past, how about today?

> "I decided to do my best to hack what it took to make my own projects look vaguely attractive."

Let's make thing "vaguely attractive", that's the ticket.

> "And too often now, I see excellent programming projects that don’t reach the audience they deserve, simply because their design doesn’t match their execution."

Couldn't agree more, except their design is their execution. If you mean to expose your work to the public and fellow professionals, it's your job to make it compelling.

> "I really think that Bootstrap is one of the most significant technical achievements of the last few years: it democratizes the whole process of web design."

Because web design was such a dictatorship until now. Yes, I'm nitpicking, but if you make no effort to learn HTML & CSS, I highly doubt you will by using bootstrap. Why would you? It looks "half decent" enough as it is. I hope I'm wrong.

The rest of the article, as others notes, is not nearly as wrongheaded as its introduction makes it sound. Still, I wish developers would stop trying to "hack" design and actually have the guts to learn it, as designers do with programming.

I guess the title of this HN post does mention that it's a concept, so that part is in fact clear here. Not on the site.

"Lightbulb image by Svengraph. No affiliation with me or this project."

Surprising at least, why are you using branding that doesn't belong to you?

Is this a concept? A series of interesting mockups of a mockup app, or are these shots of a working prototype?

I get out of this presentation with more questions than answers about this app, and no way to find out more, or be notified.

Born and lived in Paris 23 years. Score 90% on the test.

Paris is a mish mash of styles that was pushed into the heavily predefined "Haussman" style which too many idiotic Parisians try to preserve. There are specific cues you can look for: building numbers, park meters, road signs, street lights, trees, post boxes, metro entrances, intersection styles, colors, window styles, roof styles, cars, doorways, construction, trash cans, lighting, street lamps, even the style of graffitis depending on the era.

I'm actually surprised I managed to get such a high score, but I think this test is skewed by having a default answer. I feel like a great majority of the photos presented are from Paris, too. And that seems like poor methodology since you can discover a certain coherence from the quantity.

I've been living outside of Paris for the last 3 years and the more I see images of it, the more I realize why foreigners think it's so special. It's just so different from anything else out there.

That said, I see almost as much conformity and repetition in Paris as I do in the cloned strip malls of suburban America.

This is a great point. But before you can make people work at understanding something, you have to make them realize that they have a stake in trying to learn.

I don't think everyone (and certainly not myself) was able to understand the value of Git at first glance and decide to invest time and effort into learning about its inner workings.

Normal Code School courses and Ruby Monk challenges are made for people who already have somewhat of a vested interested in learning. Something that pushes them to challenge themselves beyond a simple demo/interactive tutorial. People like that are (sadly) a limited subset, we're trying to broaden that.

This is beginner-level content, which makes a lot of sense as a free resource. We're working on a Code School "Git Real" course for the end of July that will go much further than this and be at an intermediate level, just like most of the courses we offer through a subscription or individual purchase.

I suggest you check out the first level of that course when it comes out. I doubt you'll think it's an unnecessary indulgence. In the meantime our Node course is good example: http://node.codeschool.com

It's hard to know how well it works for non-developers until we've had hundreds of non-developers going through the course. Which should hopefully be happening now.

I can't speak for GitHub (I'm from the Code School team that built this), but we were very cautious not to introduce too many concepts in that course (you can see below someone saying it's too basic, yes, that's the point), simply the absolute basics we thought people would need to know to understand Git. We also did our best to not introduce Unix concepts, which open another can of worms.

The point is that a very large amount of people working on and around the web today are terrified of the command line. There are plenty of tools that attempt to abstract away the Git command line interface, and our goal with Try Git was not to do that. To give people the real Git experience and try to ease them into it.

I'm sure we can improve it over time to ensure that fewer people "freeze" in front of a command line. You're right that we may need to be more explicit as to what people should do after entering a command, but we need to stay as consistent as possible with the actual command line.

Please feel free to give more feedback, I'll be going through everything that's posted here.

— Olivier Lacan

Actually, second. :-)

http://blog.envylabs.com/2011/09/we-aint-got-no-rspec/

That you are. If you have any other feedback regarding your experience with Code School, we'd love to hear it at support at codeschool.com

We work every day to improve the educational flow of our courses, and while our weighted hint & point system can be a great motivator for some students it can also be frustrating for others, as we've discovered. We have plans to improve it in the future as Eric mentioned above.

I can't stress enough how valuable honest criticism like this is to us, thanks.