Gather as many friends as you can and get an idea of where the toilet is when the room is vacant. Wait off to the side until the restroom is occupied, ideally by someone who looks like they had to settle.
Completely surround the room and stare towards the toilet. Make sure some of you are licking their lips, raising their eyebrows or slowly groping themselves. Bonus points if occupant is not actually on toilet.
The cameras? Oh yeah, I forgot that we care about privacy.
On my first submission to this site, I acted like an asshole in the comments section to reciprocate the attitude of the comments I got. My opinionated tone earned me more points, when I hate doing that kind of thing to begin with.
This is a cultural issue. I should not be rewarded for being a dick, nor should anyone else. Period.
> "Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people."
I agree, in a way.
The only communities I have seen that associates numbers with human merit or trustworthiness are the ones populated largely by programmers. I feel this is telling.
I always have low scores on these sites because I am just not motivated to contribute to them. While Jeff Atwood was on to something when he said that users can do a good job when they feel invested in the quality of content on a site, we just cannot expect numbers representing reputation or consensus to always be set rationally. That, and I just hate thinking I will be assigned a score for trying to contribute to a conversation when I have no idea how the site's culture will interpret what I do. We may as well carry those 1-10 judge cards around our necks and stick gold stars on outsiders' foreheads. It's absurd... but apparently it's necessary. It shouldn't be, but I know I can't handle 1 million+ users as a moderator.
One of my old jobs was to facilitate a chapter of Socrates Cafe, a national discourse organization. We allowed anyone at all to come in and share his or her experiences. My job was to facilitate the discussion and put out flames fanned by conversations between opposing parties. So, when atheist/theists, right-wing/left-wing wars erupt, I was supposed to take varying measures to restore order without evoking enough negativity to scare away members. That is, I had to try and settle everyone down while making them feel BETTER about everyone else.
I cannot begin to tell you how ridiculously hard this can be, and technology does not help unless you use it for shameless enforcement.
Intuition and context-awareness helps tremendously, and there have been times where I simply could not think of any solution to one particular heated debate outside of, no joke, an air horn. I hated having to blast all of the words right out of the room, but the group we had (to me) represented a community gone wrong that needed flat out intervention. We never once used tools to try and change the rules of conduct. Instead, we used technology as a brutal and unapologetic last-ditch enforcement of existing rules.
Now... That's a group where everyone saw each other in person. Clearly not the same thing as an online group. That's worse. In this setting, technology is the only thing you HAVE to mediate all interactions, even the "human" ones.
I don't have a real solution to the sorry state of large, rude online communities. In fact, if you made me a moderator, I would probably go on a banning spree until everyone was too terrified to stay on their own accord.
Even so, but I doubt anyone else really has a solution either... Including the OP. Improvement can only be measured until online cultures change in a way to push newly set boundaries.
> "Objectivism is objectively the greatest system of Philosophy ever put together up until now."
Please.
Objectivism draws no clear distinction between self-interest and self-worship. Its followers are some of the most unbearable narcissists I have ever had the misfortune of talking to. Many of their arguments can be boiled down to "My pre-packaged belief system says its logical, therefore I must be logical!"
> "Being given incorrect information, and making mistakes, and not knowing you've made mistakes, is not a useful learning technique."
W3Schools has pointed out that users take a risk with its content, and it made no claim over the quality of its code. The only element they have authority over is its clarity, and that is what's important. The information may be lacking, but I stick by my guns when I say that crap code can still make some concept that a tutorial revolves around clearer. If other elements are not relevant to the tutorial, I do not believe it is fair to blame the author for excluding them.
> "Wordpress is great, though, because anyone can set it up and use it. Anyone."
Nothing is wrong with choosing an easy to use tool for the kinds of requirements clearly described in the about page.
> "Decision Tree Generator"
My client for this project insisted on many design decisions that I disagreed with. I also adopted broken code I was not allowed to fix, which includes the markup and CSS for the theme.
Not all of the code there reflects my knowledge, and anything that does might not be there because I wanted it to be. Not even all the bugs are mine. In fact, most of what you SEE there is not mine. Focus on the generator app only.
Also, I am writing a new version of that as we speak. It actually took a lot of convincing to abandon the horrible pop-up stateful form. Point is, I got repeat business because the code I wrote was well-tested and appreciated.
In short: The design of the site is not my own, but the generator itself is. Even so, I could not decide how it looked so I just pulled the levers. Whether you like the code or not, I am always in a process of learning and improving my craft regardless.
> "OmicronAlpha.org: This site is down."
I was the webmaster for one year and passed the title over as per the rules of the organization. I am no longer responsible for the site, so the listing shows only that I made it. Should it ever come back, it could be all blinking text for all I know.
I do appreciate you pointing out an outdated LinkedIn entry though. This has been fixed.
> "I don't know any serious web developers who would use Concrete5"
This is not an argument. I looked over my requirements, I wanted to use something new for my personal web site, and I picked something I'm happy with.
> "My point is that you're still a beginner. As a beginner, you don't know as much as the people you're arguing with."
I am certain I am still extremely ignorant, but that comes with the territory. I won't make an attempt to rank you, because I am sure you have your own experience to bring to the table. I respect you, and I have every right to ask that you respect me.
I don't aim to be the cock of the walk, but I will not allow you to push me to the level of a beginner in a public forum. While I am by no means a guru, I am competent, and am willing to have opinions you don't like even if I risk looking silly to those who misinterpret my claims.
I've been working for six years, and I have been doing more than what is listed on my profile. I am happy, my friends are happy and my clients are happy. I'm not rich, but I make enough money to support a good, healthy lifestyle and invest in my own retirement at an early age. I have used plenty of languages and tools, although I do not always take the time to share content because I tend to keep my services local. What you see online is only parts of me, and I am sure we would get along great if we met.
Now, my article goes beyond W3Schools and challenges what it means to effectively teach coding. I don't think you need good code to be a good teacher because there is a human element of making something understandable that goes outside professional standards of code quality. We can debate that until the sun goes down.
Being supportive of an inaccurate source for unconventional reasons does not invalidate my actual, relevant experience.
The problem is nuance, which involves all those little wow-I-wish-I-knew-THAT tidbits that students never learn about until a forum member or colleague hollers at them.
Languages cannot eliminate every subtlety in their use, and there will always be issues that call for more articles explaining how to sidestep them. Novices won't normally get to see this content, and it won't help them to shove it all down their throats at once back at the introductory level courses.
There's a reason most physics students hear about Newton first.
I did. I am fully aware of the inaccurate content I ran with from w3schools, which is why I corrected myself. That does not change the fact w3schools was there when I needed a source that was easy to understand.
> "I think the author is about 7 years too late..."
If Hacker News participants ran the world no one would care about history. We can discuss things that happened in the past. It sure as hell sparked discussion here.
> "Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose..."
And it does. It's easy to understand, which is not something you find often in sites trying to teach something. As I said elsewhere, good code makes crappy tutorials since it introduces more concepts that can confuse and overwhelm a inexperienced reader.
> "you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here"
Sorry about that. It is not my intention to be rude or troll, but I've got a lot of discussions to manage. I went ahead and edited out some needlessly harsh bits here and there, but I'm not touching ones where I am just reciprocating the same attitude as the parent post.
I'll watch myself more carefully, so thanks for the reminder.
> "The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain approachable, beginner-level texts."
Yes, but they still promote outdated and insecure approaches. As a beginner, I actually got yelled at for using an image map for obvious reasons. The edition of the book I used did not discourage them, but I still swear it was a nicely written text.
As for inaccuracies... W3Schools has been addressing them if the cited sources were reliable.
Gather as many friends as you can and get an idea of where the toilet is when the room is vacant. Wait off to the side until the restroom is occupied, ideally by someone who looks like they had to settle.
Completely surround the room and stare towards the toilet. Make sure some of you are licking their lips, raising their eyebrows or slowly groping themselves. Bonus points if occupant is not actually on toilet.
The cameras? Oh yeah, I forgot that we care about privacy.