I signed in just to upvote this. I've lost friends and relatives to this. I couldn't agree more that I fear this cancer more than any other- because it is so untreatable by the time it's caught. An inexpensive test would be incredibly helpful towards improving the survivability.
I had the same thought. I think approaches like this would go a long way to closing gender disparity gaps. The bottom line is that this is simply more information.
Another side benefit of this approach is recruiting. I've always felt that "salary negotiable depending on experience" is such a waste of ink. Being transparent let's individuals who have expectations way out of alignment opt-out entirely. Then you get a nice clean signal for when your pay is out of alignment with the market...good candidates don't apply.
I think it looks promising. Like the comment above, a searchable drop down, where I can type in the partial name of the course and it shows all courses containing that text, was the biggest factor in not singing up. Without it, you are asking your users to go to another site (perhaps after googling first), find a course, find the number, and then come back to your site.
Another idea to add a veneer of legitimacy...at the bottom of the splash page, have a scrolling list of recent courses for which users signed up. If you are just getting started, create a list of 15 courses you THINK your likely visitor might be interested in (i.e., "fake it tell you make it").
While I agree with most of what has been written, I think it's necessary to point out one of my key tenets with software development: code (good or bad) must earn the right to be improved (i.e., optimized, de-suckified, etc.).
For an entrepreneur this means that 99.9% of the sucky code written should stay that way...because no one will ever use it. Write something that "works" and then see how and how much it is used before going on to optimize.
It's not a binary question of sucks vs. doesn't suck. It is a question of how much of an issue the suckiness is creating. I'll spend 100X the time trying to improve beautifully written code that is taking up the largest chunk of CPU time rather than focus on a function that is rarely used but makes me throw up in my mouth when I see it.
I think the intent is for the candidate to show that he/she has not been involved in illegal/suspicious activity. Back in the 70's a sitting VP had to leave office due to charges of extortion, bribery, and others (see Wikipedia on Spiro Agnew). It was Mitt's father, George, who began the voluntary practice of disclosing tax records.
OK. I'll weigh-in on this. I identify as an African American, developer, and aspiring entrepreneur. I'll post here the message that I give to my kids and will continue to hammer as long as they will listen. IT DOESN'T MATTER if it's a meritocracy or not. Go succeed. If there was an envelope that had a provable answer as to whether things are harder/easier for me to succeed with a new venture...I'd rip it up without opening it. What I love about Silicon Valley is the number of people who don't care to be told by other people what's possible.
I'm also a fan and I expect (and hope) they are vying to be a part of it. I watch a significant proportion of my Theisweekin content straight from YouTube. Above all else, this announcement (even a the rumor stage) is a huge validation of the internet as a distribution channel for professionally produced original content. I believe Jason Calacanis bought off on that a while ago with the investment in ThisWeekIn.
Having launched web applications in both markets I can say with a high degree of confidence that both systems are far from perfect. However, I think the US system suffers the most because it is "stuck in the middle". It struggles to benefit from innovation because antiquated payment models often delay (if not outright discourage) it. E.g., use of e-mail is a NEW phenomemon for many US docs. So we don't get the benefit of truly free markets working quickly to highlight/exploit inefficiencies. On the flip side, we get the bloat but not the benefits of a single payer system- even though most care is paid for by the government. I think a single-payer system would be a local maximum but a truly free market would be the most optimal.
Please explain the intent of that graphic? Or, rather, what does where the electicity is have to do with voting power, aside from the congruence with cities?
No. There are already vastly superior anonymous e-voting schemes. The only usecase would be if you wanted to put some restriction on voting but still leave it open to everyone in the world, so it'd be kind of like Namecoin but paying for votes rather than DNS.
