Joke or not, pretty much. And that gives some major bias. Depending on how studies are done, things with very close metrics like effect of genders on XYZ can go either way. But since you can only publish those that show women are better, it ends up that all studies show women are better at everything.

Every so often you'll have a study that shows the opposite for some specific or another, but that will get spinned somehow. ie: I read a study recently about how women don't do well in competitive environments (when talking about how to get women to participate in hackatons, you remove the "contest" element of it). It was spinned somehow as a great thing.

It originally was mainly because people would just call someone and quickly ask them to call them back, which kind of defeated the purpose.

Now its pretty irrelevant since most people have unlimited plans and stuff, and only the cheapest of shittiest plans will have charges for incoming calls.

But it makes for a good argument against shit like robocalls, thats why it sounds like its much more common than it is.

Go in any of those "evil socialist" countries that have all those things, and see if parents get in trouble for letting a kid walk a mile. It has nothing to do with it.

This is a state of black/white strong opinion. Thats where the problem lies and why shit like this happens.

that's it really. All the child molesters, rapists, kidnappers, etc, didn't just magically pop up. They're just far, far more visible. There's definitely some cities that are less safe than the were...but some are more. So parents just have to use discretion.

I walked home from school when I was 10 all the time.

I could be wrong, but isn't there a visa category for investors already?

Its generally a matter of what the community/ecosystem is optimized for. ie: Python is pretty damn good at math stuff. But it has nothing to do with Python itself, its just the community built fantastic math libraries in python, generally because of historical reasons.

In the same way, an obvious example, if you want to do web sockets, while you can make them in any language, Node is a prime contender there. Examples like that exist for any language.

No, he's right. The vast, vast majority of node.js use is as a glorified scripting environment as a build system for static resources. Its its gateway drug in a way. People use LESS to minify their javascript or something in their language of choice's assets pipeline. Then they go "Hmm, what if we used a real build environment for these?". Then they start using node in their build system. There's also stuff like Atom and all the node-webkit applications that use it as desktop apps. Those are the common usages.

Then sometimes, they go "Hmm, node is pretty cool, maybe we should use it for this micro-service in parallel with our existing stack". And then maybe, just maybe, it ends up on the server. Its pretty popular lately, but the percentage of people who use it as a web server is far and few in between, though growing.

oh yeah, thats working so well for Amazon /sarcasm.

Thats a weird comparison, since they don't target the same audience at all. Rails maybe, as it has a lot in common, but even then.

What makes node interesting is that its asynchronous-first, single-threaded-by-default model has interesting performance characteristic and lends itself well to specific architectures. Bonus that it also works amazingly well for web sockets. There's also a lesser point that still matters, its JavaScript and some people like that a lot.

The tradeoffs however are pretty massive. There's a lot less literature on how to maintain a node production environment. How do you handle memory dumps, how do you instrument it. Also, error handling is terrible, and debugging obscure issues is hell. There's a lot of minor bugs and quirks that you just have to "know".

That makes node.js only really suitable for fairly advanced developers/sysadmins (even if you host it "in the cloud"). Those that have "gone around" and have dealt with shit enough they'll know what to do when that shit happens, even if they can't find the answer on stack overflow. They also benefit from the interesting performance characteristics I described above.

On the other hand, PHP was always a "easy to pick up and run, forget about it" environment.

Those 2 couldn't be further apart.

Absolutely. I was just saying that it was basically the only time anything other than UTF8 matters (especially since in the time when it matters, switching from one to the other is HELL).

My wife used to work on a faceted search system made to handle a few petabyte of data... the difference was pretty huge.

Since I personally never did something like that, I never had issues just using UTF8 :)

for ease of use and storage efficiency with flexibility, yeah, UTF-8 is always best.

For certain type of work with specific performance characteristics however, not so. Thats usually the problem.

Because I'm too busy "reading the source" and fixing shit in a bunch of other projects. One person can only do so much.

If a big part of the service is actually manipulating your data (email, database, charts, data analysis, etc...), then it needs to get decrypted somewhere at some point. The data can be intercepted then.

Ever worked in an office, and one day someone reports their expensive headphones got stolen by the cleaning staff? Then _IF_ you are lucky, someone looked at the security tapes and found them out? Usually the camera's not pointing in that direction though...

Now, thats easy to see on camera, someone running away with something big. Someone clipping a tiny little device to a lap-top thats barely in sight, while cleaning? Even rewatching the security tape 10x, you may not notice it. You also may not realize the computer got owned until after the security tapes got rolled over.

Someone picking a lap-top, flipping it over, opening it up, and messing in it...thats easy to see, but this isn't. Thats the big difference to me.

There's other things they should do first though.

Not everyone is fit to go get a bachelor degrees. Some people don't have the aptitude for it. Some are just not interested. Some don't have the patience. Some made mistakes and are stuck with kids and can't commit that far. Some just don't feel like it.

The US is messed up in that its a country where if people don't recognize the college you went to, they make you feel like you're a nobody. That leaves a significant portion of the population feeling like they have no meaningful option. A lot of people seriously beleive you're better off with an barely passing grade in liberal art at Harvard and working at McDonald's with insane debts than being a successful carpenter who owns his/her own business.

Thats ridiculous. Yes, virtually all other first world countries have free upper education. But they also have a LOT more respected (I stress that word) options for people who don't want to go that route. Apprenticeship, useful lower level degrees, adult continual education... Sure, you can do an Associate degree in the US, but its barely worth the paper its printed on. And even if you are successful, no one respects you for it.

So IMO, the first step is to have more _respected_ options. Thats a lot harder though, because it requires a culture shift. Stop making fun of the guy who choose to become a plumber or repair rooftops because he didn't go to MIT. Encourage people with non-academic, yet useful skills. Yeah, they're not going to buy a 5 million dollar penthouse. But they're going to be able to feed their family and save for retirement with money to spare, AND their job is hard to outsource.

Once that happens, then you can start looking at how to elevate the average.