As someone who has mostly unsuccessfully looked for junior positions...

I see some, but not many, junior positions on job sites like 37signals' or Stack Overflow's, or Monster, or Dice... A lot of the 'junior' positions want things that don't seem terribly junior- several years experience in a certain conjunction of technologies.

My computer science education has largely come from books like K&R and Programming Pearls, C2Wiki, Wikipedia, and a whole bunch of personal projects in Python, C, and occasionally C++. It's not exactly conducive to the commonly posted requirements for a junior position.

My limited perspective suggests it's a lot easier to make a good junior engineer than it is to find one that meets your requirements.

Anyone in Prince Edward Island, ideally Charlottetown, with some sort of entry-level technically-oriented job?

Check out www.otherocean.com.

Also my Dad just moved out to Charlottetown last year (from Toronto) for a job. I will post again when I remember the name of the company.

You're mincing words to tell us about Japanese. Your examples seem to indicate that Japanese more naturally conveys social situations and basic descriptions at the same time, making it more effective, not less. Russian has no future first person singular conjugation for 'to win'- this doesn't make Russian 'less effective' at communication, nor does English's use of "I will be able to" in place of "I will can".

If you want to make an argument on the effectiveness of communication, please use a quantitative or otherwise qualified argument, rather than exotic anecdotes.

This is simply a problem with definitions, though. Whether mistake or habit, or language, dialect, or idiolect, what matters is the part that comes after. People still study the Akkadian language, despite its lack of speakers.

This sounds more like sour grapes and less like analysis. The article doesn't even mention the FAFSA, but it does say that at UCB, "as tuitions have risen this past year, those from the poorest families saw their financial aid packages rise almost dollar for dollar". Do you have any data on how the FAFSA actually accounts for household debt or sibling tuition costs?

You in no way respond to the point in the article, which is that price discrimination (as enabled by high tuitions and generous financial aid) allows you to extract more money from those able to pay more money (allowing generous financial aid).

1. Why is it a good thing to extract money from those "able" to pay more. Because the money you are extract is necessarily paid by reducing the payer's expenses elsewhere. Such a dysfunctional system already exists for healthcare. Do you want to read about college-induced bankruptcies?

2. Define "able". Are you really advocating for a situation in which middle-class family routinely scrounge to save for college, or in which parents sell their houses to pay for college?(Btw, some countries (e.g., India) have a dowry system which requires parents of girls to save from the day the child is born and obviously it sucks to be those parents).

3. The original article seems to using the poor as a "human shield" to effect an arbitrary hike in fees. The reason the universities are not supported well is that govts are wasting money. I hope that resisting tuition fee increases will also pressure govt to reduce waste.

>Why is it a good thing to extract money from those "able" to pay more.

Because this is a state-supported system; the state can educate more students if they can get the rich ones to pay more and subsidize the poor ones. If its purpose is to educate more students, then price discrimination helps that purpose more than a "fairer" system would.

>Such a dysfunctional system already exists for healthcare.

In healthcare the uninsured pay more than the insured (and his insurer) pay. That seems more dysfunctional than a progressive system like this.

Your argument seems poorly aimed, as I merely pointed out how poorly aimed the original comment was. I'll treat you as a top level post as a courtesy.

As you rightly acknowledge, "able" can hide a lot. I'm able to live several days without food, but it's hardly a thing to aim for. The article explicitly mentions "rich", and you should feel comfortable assuming that "rich" does not mean "middle-class". Failing that definition, consider "able" to be taken from "luxuries", rather than "necessities". You don't need to bring India into it. Sufficient?

You'll have to explain further how the poor are being used as a human shield here. Additionally, I'm not convinced that any protests based on increased tuitions will have an effect on government waste. It seems like effort better spent campaigning for reduced government waste (which is admittedly very likely a waste as well).

The poor are used a human shield because if the article had said something like:

  education is a good with almost-inelastic demand, hence
  we can raise prices arbitrarily and in addition
  eliminate government support for it :)

then they would not have been taken seriously.

Wrt "rich", other posts indicate that $70K/yr household income as the upper limit for financial aid in CA. That's hardly "rich".

The piece claims to be originally from 2000: "This is a reproduction of a manifesto drafted anonymously in the year 2000."

It's also somehow not surprising that a business founded on the principle of making games in a not business-like fashion failed as a business.

However, "scratchware" still wins, in the form of freeware games like N, Cave Story, or La Mulana that become sold on consoles, the now donation funded behemoth Dwarf Fortress, or as the directly commercial games like World of Goo or Braid. The piece touts "scratchware"; it was only the introduction that touted Manifesto Games.

I don't think you've defended your position as well as you think you have, and you didn't need to stoop to the "liberal Godwin". He implies a pretty basic definition of evil- that which hurts everyone else. It's not given that this is better for newspapers than open search engine access, nor that this preserves the production of "beneficial" news.

It is interesting how this modern Godwin ("You know who else abused the term 'evil'? That's right, Bush did!"), which itself is in a way a Godwin as it 'ends the discussion' by equating Bush to Hitler. If that is what you want, it is mission accomplished. Oops, that doesn't mean what it used to.

You've made no effort to argue with me, you've merely tried to deconstruct my argument like I was writing a proof in a ethics class.

Unfortunately this is hacker news, not philosophy news. Provide a counter-argument that is based on the topic because I have no desire to argue with a troll trying to sound smart.

You're hasty applying the troll label, and slow to support any of your arguments.

As I mentioned above, "It's not given that this is better for newspapers than open search engine access, nor that this preserves the production of "beneficial" news."

Can you explain why media companies "greatly benefit" from being excluded from major search engines? Can you show why this means that "beneficial" investigative journalism continues, increasing the overall welfare of citizens moreso than open access for search engines? For that matter, can you show that newspapers do more "long form" and expose more government corruption than bloggers do in aggregate? What if newspapers accept this deal and transition to more "blog" articles and fewer "investigative" articles, leaving citizens with "no" investigative articles and no single search destination?

Being first mover doesn't give you the right to assert every piece of your argument.

Whoosh.

Can you explain what apparently obvious point you think jrockway has missed?

jrockway bromidically responded to a throwaway joke that in itself already acknowledged the content of the response.

Judging from various codebases I've had to maintain, most programmers don't think this is a joke. They really think this guy wasted 8 hours learning how his code is supposed to work. They would have just reverted to last night's version and moved on to adding some more technical debt. (It's OK because it's test-driven development. If the tests pass, the code is fine!)

I'm sure most of the people here feel the same way. It just seemed like an audience mismatch, and if you acknowledged it (either the joke nature or the audience mismatch), I wouldn't have felt the need to "Whoosh" you.

I agree with your point but the TDD comment tacked on at the end is wrong and adds nothing.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak in support of TDD say that the code is fine if the tests pass. The canonical process of TDD explicitly calls for refactoring after the tests pass. That step is crucial and lasts as long as it takes for the programmer to be satisfied with the code (e.g. 8 hours).

I also found no evidence in the article that there was TDD involved. Perhaps I've misunderstood either the article or your comment. If that is the case I'd gladly retract my criticism.

If you google "bromidically", this response is now number 2 in Google - after dictionary.com.

Drug addiction is serious. Can you get paid sick leave for drug addiction?

Possibly. I'll assume that you're really wondering this and not just being sarcastic. If you are being sarcastic, then why don't you look up whether or not drug addiction is a disability under a Canadian insurer instead of making a comment that doesn't add too much to the discussion?

The answer to that question in the US appears to be "no".

Canadian EI sickness benefits are paid, at least in some cases, to workers who are residents at inpatient clinics for addiction.

... but not, apparently, by Worker's Comp in Manitoba. Nor is mental illness in general, unless concomitant to a physical trauma.