quincyla

I use Mail for Good every week to send my email blast to 3.5 million people. It works fine and is stable.

We haven't made any big changes to it recently because it hasn't broken. There is definitely some maintenance we could do as far as updating libraries.

We're hoping to re-write parts of it to use AWS Lambda instead of a Linux server, so we can further simplify use of it for less-technical users (a lot of nonprofits don't have developers on staff).

Please delete this post. This is a private email I sent to the author. It was not intended to be shared on Twitter.

We just want to move on and focus on the future.

I've written a detailed argument for why passwordless auth (using email or some sort of reliable auth) is more secure than using passwords: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/360-million-reasons-to-destr...

The risk factors associated with how humans use passwords vastly outweigh the risk of data being captured in transit.

I'm the guy who created freeCodeCamp. This article has some nice visualizations and insights, but gets one important thing wrong. Read it, but also read my response to it https://medium.com/@quincylarson/i-love-your-graphs-and-anal...

If you create a GitHub issue asking for this and explaining the use cases involved, then sure - we can look into creating this. https://www.github.com/freecodecamp/mail-for-good/issues/new

Thanks for the heads-up on Twitter that someone submitted this to HN. Yes - we'd welcome your help improving the UI. We have a Gitter room: https://gitter.im/freecodecamp/mail-for-good and introduce yourself.

The FCC refuses to comment and all Verizon says is: "Mr. Nugyen (sic) is mistaken.”

They are buying time because they know that once they repeal the 2015 net neutrality protections, none of their crimes will technically be crimes anymore.

Gitter has been a huge part of freeCodeCamp's community since the beginning. Thousands of people have asked questions there, and most of them have gotten helpful answers quickly. This is thanks to the experienced developers who contribute their time and expertise in there.

Like IRC, it's a great platform to ask and answer questions on. Find the right rooms and talk to the right people.

This is Quincy with freeCodeCamp. Congratulations on your new job, and your diverse portfolio.

Getting a job as a new developer after only 4 rejections is a great batting average. Sean Smith rejected 192 times before getting a job at Trustar. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-learned-to-code-and-ea...

This is explored in Tim Wu's book, which I strongly recommend reading. "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires": http://amzn.to/2cjtFDH

I just used the term "freecodecamp". I think they showed the ad based on geolocation.

Author here. I just realized someone had submitted this to HN. I spent a lot of time researching and writing this article, and am excited to read any feedback you may have.

Also, here's how you can contact the FCC directly:

1-888-225-5322

press 1, then 4, then 2, then 0 say that you wish to file comments concerning the FCC Chairman’s plan to end net neutrality

Or on the web:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express Under Proceedings, enter 14-28 and 17-108

Suggested script:

It's my understanding that the FCC Chairman intends to reverse net neutrality rules and put big Internet Service Providers in charge of the internet. I am firmly against this action. I believe that these ISPs will operate solely in their own interests and not in the interests of what is best for the American public. In the past 10 years, broadband companies have been guilty of: deliberately throttling internet traffic, squeezing customers with arbitrary data caps, misleading consumers about the meaning of “unlimited” internet, giving privileged treatment to companies they own, strong-arming cities to prevent them from giving their residents high-speed internet, and avoiding real competition at all costs. Consumers, small businesses, and all Americans deserve an open internet. So to restate my position: I am against the chairman's plan to reverse the net neutrality rules. I believe doing so will destroy a vital engine for innovation, growth, and communication.

This information is taken from this thread on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6894i9/heres_ho...

The EFF explains how this was done here:

Back in 2011, several ISPs were caught red-handed working with a company called Paxfire to hijack their customers’ search queries to Bing, Yahoo!, and Google. Here’s how it worked.

When you entered a search term in your browser’s search box or URL bar, your ISP directed that query to Paxfire instead of to an actual search engine. Paxfire then checked what you were searching for to see if it matched a list of companies that had paid them for more traffic. If your query matched one of these brands (e.g. you had typed in “apple”, “dell”, or “wsj”, to name a few) then Paxfire would send you directly to that company’s website instead of sending you to a search engine and showing you all the search results (which is what you’d normally expect). The company would then presumably give Paxfire some money, and Paxfire would presumably give your ISP some money.

In other words, ISPs were hijacking their customers’ search queries and redirecting them to a place customers hadn’t asked for, all while pocketing a little cash on the side. Oh, and the ISPs in question hadn’t bothered to tell their customers they’d be sending their search traffic to a third party that might record some of it.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/five-creepy-things-you...

I also wrote about the Uber, Zenefits, and Volkswagen scandals, and how companies seem to be getting bolder about pushing developers to circumvent regulators: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/dark-genius-how-programmers-...

Methodology here: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/women-only-said-27-of-the-wo...

For what it's worth, FreeCodeCamp.com has 1/3 the page views that Medium has, with only 3 full time staff. https://www.similarweb.com/website/freecodecamp.com?competit...

I love Medium and I hope it succeeds. It sounds like their headcount was substantially higher than it needed to be and that this layoff was the right move.

I wish Ev had mentioned all the additional facts that are in this article by one of Medium's investors: https://500ish.com/long-medium-b9ddfe2c3a0a#.ch2benant

I'm a former English teacher and school director, and I created FreeCodeCamp.com two years ago specifically to help people transition into web development as a career. We have a large community of career-changers, more than 5,000 of whom have now gotten their first developer job.

Thanks for the clarification on TOR. I guess I should change "virtually impossible" to something more moderate like "extremely difficult" as colluding with a network to gain access to the network.

How reliable would this approach be if, say, 100x the number of people who currently use TOR start using it?

These seem to be non-interactive (text with occasional videos). Free Code Camp is fully interactive coding, with test suites, in the browser.

Also, this is 35 hours including projects. Free Code Camp takes closer to 2,000 hours with projects.

My main takeaway from Yahoo's decline is that you should promote leadership from within. Hiring CEOs from the professional CEO circuit probably killed Yahoo.

This list was determined by a Bayesian average of ratings from class-central.com for more than 6,000 MOOCs.

Recruiters aren't all bad, but the vast majority you're likely to encounter in the wild are.

Free Code Camp's forums exist specifically for discussing programming-related questions - literally anything related to programming, open source, or getting a developer job: http://forum.freecodecamp.com

I wrote this article to explore why anyone would ever think that learning to program is easy, their incentives behind doing so, and the effect on people new to the field.

Our "business model" is to keep costs as low as possible and sell merchandise. We will never charge for our curriculum.

We have turned down all offers of funding specifically to avoid a situation where an investor could try and force us to do otherwise. We will remain free and open source.

If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand, instead of trying to monetize courses and certificates, people could continue to have this content for free. Unfortunately, universities don't exactly exemplify long-term thinking.

Most of the content for these MOOCs is created by professors as part of their jobs, so this content is owned by their universities. I bet a vast majority of professors would prefer their MOOCs to stay open.

Most of the work has been done already, and the quizzes and exercises are automated, so there's no practical reason these videos couldn't be hosted on YouTube and thrown into an open source MOOC framework like EdX's and continue to serve millions for a few hundred a month in server costs. Except that Coursera is explicitly forbidding non-private use of these courses.

For what it's worth, Free Code Camp gets about 1/8 of the traffic Coursera does, and our (non-opportunity) costs are pretty minor. I don't think hosting these MOOCs would add much to the burden.

If only the individual professors who created these MOOCs could give us permission to host these courses. But there's no way we're going to get anywhere with the university bureaucracies themselves.

I did my best to boil a lot of conventional wisdom about negotiating, securing multiple offers, and eschewing equity compensation for cash. Did I leave anything big out?

There is wisdom behind these bullet points. This wisdom could be better communicated through a series of fleshed-out articles with real life examples.

Otherwise, these points are difficult to contextualize, retain, and apply.

In light of all the recent data breaches, and waking days of my life spent reseting passwords, I think there is only one solution to this mess. Let's destroy all passwords. It starts with developers.

These are all things you can filter for in the data. 13% of respondents, for example, were computer science grads, so filter just for them and you still have what will be statistically significant dataset for most questions.