This article frames the question rhetorically. Of course we should not disadvantage gifted children by depriving them of tailored learning strategies etc. Why on earth would we even consider it?
But it's not so easy to define what this means in practice, particularly in the UK where the debate over selective schooling is bound up with issues related to class and wealth.
I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.
Of course I'm speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else's expense.
There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract recruiting agents - if indeed they aren't already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.
But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.
>I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.
I think almost the exact opposite. Linkedin is still missing many features that could turn it into a bit of a game changer for business.
Maybe as a recruiting tool it's currently trash. I can get behind that. But if Microsoft manages to bring in a fresh set of users with some new features it could expand into something actually useful instead of a marketing hellhole.
Not to say it won't happen, but which fresh set of users would Microsoft bring? Who do you know that isn't on LinkedIn (registered, if not actively using)? And of those people, what features do you think would make them want to start using LinkedIn?
1. Mash Linkedin and Skype and create a Slack/Facebook For Business Competitor.
2. Integrate that with Office 360 for Business.
3. Create a much more appealing Resume/CV that either integrates well with hiring tools or competes directly with them (monster, indeed, so-on) by creating your own backend for recruiting.
4. Make it very simple to migrate your MS Live/Outlook/Skype profile to a Linkedin profile (or do it automatically ala Google+).
This makes advertisers happy. This makes any corp using Office 360 immediately integrate to Linkedin. This makes Linkedin much more appealing to candidates and recruiters. This could bring people over from competitor services. This actually makes the entire MS Office suite more appealing.
Isn't (3) what they've been trying to accomplish for years? I believe what you see now in LinkedIn is their best effort at tackling that problem (and I'm not impressed).
Has their "resume" representation even changed in 5 years? I doubt they're seeing it as a problem to be tackled. Everything I know about the company says that the left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing, and they have a lot of hands.
I don't have a LinkedIn account, and I would probably reopen one if I heard that they stopped their incessant spam emails. I'm surprised that they haven't been sued to MySpace and back for those email policies, which almost certainly are illegal in the United States. (This based on my experience, which ended 2 or 3 years ago when, after months of failed attempts, I managed to close my account.)
iirc when you sign up, they sua sponte take all your contacts from [fb, Google, your phone, etc] and message all of them saying you have invited them to join LinkedIn. This is the scummy behavior I assume the poster is talking about.
I signed up with a fake name and throwaway email the other day and I couldn't believe the process. There were about 8 steps for entering more and more personal information and one of them was definitely allowing linked in access to my email account.
My 2 cents... It's an underutilized resource. They have career data for the highest value people in the world. Yet their technology and interface are woefully dated. The mobile search is awful, and it should be a tool that everyone uses before every meeting. The "You may know X" ability to find new contacts goes down dramatically. It would be beaten by a heuristic that just checks people who work at your current or prior company in the same city.
The thing that most turns me off from LinkedIn is that it leaks your browsing information to the users you are browsing, through their "who viewed my profile" feature. If I want to just brush up on a contact's background before a meeting without announcing to him that I'm stalking him, I need to log out and re-browse. Major pain in the butt.
It's pretty easy to discover--under privacy in your profile. But, yes, the fact that a number of these types of settings are opt-out rather than opt-in is a pretty dark pattern.
Interesting, I am a recruiter turned software engineer and have the exact opposite feeling. When I was a recruiter it was a fantastic way to find niche candidates and just maintain a casual discussion with my best candidates in general, as well as publish relevant news to my connections.
As I was undergoing the transformation to engineer, it was a fantastic platform for me to reach out to people in my new industry and city, people who had gone down my path before, mentors, and etc. Then when it was time for job search, LinkedIn and Angel.co had the highest quality postings. Also, on LinkedIn when looking at a job posting I could see if someone from my bootcamp or university worked there, as a link right under the job posting.
> I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.
One of my coworkers talked me into playing this game. We look for the most professionally pointless endorsements our contacts have and add to them. So maybe someone ends up 3 endorsements for Econometrics and 18 for Microsoft Powerpoint.
Well it's pure JS in that it's been running the C tesseract through emscripten. So in a way it's pure JS just as much as the original lib is pure assembly when compiled ;-)
As another commenter mentioned, Tesseract.js won't perform very well on 'natural' images (e.g. the very light text you tried).
It should work better if you feed it a screenshot of the black text at the top of the demo page though (Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port etc...).
> after contacting Microsoft and AT&T to get my IP removed from their block lists
Yikes.
Isn't this exactly the problem with running your own email setup? And have you not found that keeping on the white side of mail server lists is a constant and moving target?
May I ask, do you send a lot of mail and have multiple accounts? (I do, so this overhead would be impossible for me to manage personally)
Not OP, but I moved all of my email from free Gmail to paid Fastmail about 2 years ago, and I've not had a moment of regret.
I send quite a lot of email for work and other things and I have what I think is a higher-than-average number of email addresses to manage.
One adjustment I made - I now archive older emails to avoid extra storage costs, which in turn means that searching for older emails is slightly more hassle.
Fastmail's web interface and mobile app are not quite as slick (as gmail) but this isn't a big deal for me personally.
I used K-9 for many months and it was just OK. The FastMail app was not a huge improvement (over K-9) but it was still an improvement, at least in my experience. From memory K-9 didn't handle multiple "send-from" accounts as competently as the FastMail app, and there were other quirks that became more irritating over time.
We need more articles like this, we need a flood, until all the non-technical people in my life take their privacy more seriously than they do at present.
Pointless. They do not care. Even in totalitarian states like the former DDR, most people didn't care. People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.
Besides, the technical people don't care either. Many of us may care about our own privacy, but on the whole, we really don't care about what we do to others.
Most of us work for or own companies that directly or indirectly willfully violate people's privacy without thinking twice about the consequences. If only by adding yet another tracker to our apps.
We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?
People have empathy. Non-tech people can understand the issues when they're presented like this. And an article like this makes me think seriously about the ethics of my job. Not that it carries real weight, but see: http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
Maybe empathy alone will be enough to effect change?
> People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.
You might be right but I prefer to be less fatalistic. If an article (like this one) hits close enough to make someone think "it could have been me" then perhaps that is enough.
I think he's saying that (some? most?) programmers are unknowingly being hypocrites if they add Google Analytics [1] javascript to their web pages while at the same time trying to educate people on being aware of privacy leaks. Adding tracking analytics not only provides the web authors the traffic insight, it also provides Google Inc with another vector to gather more data about users.
Even non-web programmers do a variation of feeding the google beast. The IT support staff have contempt for stupid user questions and think "can't they just google that?!?! That's what I do!". User: "how do I disable Adobe flash?". ITGeek: "let me google that for you"[2]
The xkcd comic[3] about it is also well-known.
When you send helpless users to google.com, Google Inc also adds users' searches to the profile they're accumulating. What do we expect IT advice to realistically be in response? Is it reasonable to advise people like this: "If you want to know how to disable flash, first install Tor client, and then a VPN client, sign up for a VPN provider, then start your web browser in private or incognito mode then use that as tunnel into google.com and then type in 'disable flash' as the keywords."
I think we should let people not care without us aggressively trying to change their lifestyle. Are we so superior that we can decide what they should think? Or are they too dumb/uniformed to make their own choices? That's just as condescending. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are perfectly aware of all this and still choose not to care about privacy.
It is called advertising, making propaganda, lobbying. It works for a wide range of topics along any axes of the moral compass. For why it works, you probably hinted it in your post, but I don't see why it shouldn't be used for a good cause.
This video is about the applications of soft/flexible materials in robotics and other hardware. It's not (as I mistakenly assumed) a teardown of the SOLID principles.
I assumed it wasn't about SOLID principles due to the "Hardware Engineering" bit in the title but I can see why there would be confusion due to the capitalization of SOFT and SOLID.
Examples;
- CollAction [http://socialcoder.org/9dy]
- Fight Back Wisely [http://socialcoder.org/80s]
- Carpool Vote [http://socialcoder.org/8qv]