And yet, her comment itself is clearly an exaggeration (let's be real, no one is going to take up the $10K challenge), and is just as toxic as anything she mentions. It just shows that it is always far easier to see problems and possible fixes in other people's behavior, than in your own.

I would actually agree that there won't be many poor/minority people participating, but that has more to do with the challenge itself, not the fee. Poor people buy a lot of lottery tickets, particularly when the chance of winning is high. The issue here is that the chances of winning are not high, so the only reason someone would try and go after the prize would be to prove a point, and spending a lot of time and effort to prove a point like this one is a luxury many people don't have.

Of course the reason some people are upset is because they would like to see restrictions on advertising, and were hoping another study would give them another argument in favor of such. But a positive result does not imply that such restrictions are necessary.

For one, constructs like loops that we have mostly internalized as natural, can look a bit intimidating to non-programmers (they are not found in regular language either though!). Even among fairly experienced coders, for example in statistical programming, people who come from general-purpose coding background sometimes find loops easier to read and write compared to "vectorized" code, and vice versa.

Thinking about it, the way say much Java code is written is not what I would call a linear language either, although that I suspect might be more a result of path dependence and optimizing for "large teams of replaceable programmers".

I think some people just naturally like rules and would prefer to live in a more orderly, rule based society, and some people don't like the idea of being constrained. Both groups act quite sanctimoniously though, as if their personal preference is somehow the holy truth.

A lot of the discussion revolves around friends data -- was all friends data accessible regardless of the friends' own privacy setting (this would be deeply troubling), or was it the data that friends shared with the app users (a bit less troubling, but still very questionable), or was it friends' data that was openly available on their public profiles open to any internet user?

I was responding to the parent comment calling the arrangement as described in article unfair.

Also, in practice today there are not many people anywhere in the world who are not at least somewhat familiar with the Latin alphabet to the point they wouldn't be able to recognize/read/write the letters, and (possibly excepting a few old typewriters here and there) people would generally be able to enter letters of standard Latin alphabet into whatever devices they are dealing with.

I think it would be better to use only letters for the first 8 symbols (perhaps after getting rid of some particularly confusing ones like "I"), and only numbers for the rest.

This way you don't need the plus, can use all 10 digits without a chance to confuse them with a letter, remove more potential letter-digit mixups such as 6/G or 7/F in some handwritings, and most importantly make the whole thing a lot easier to say (e.g. over the phone), write (on a phone keyboard you would need only one switch between numeric and alpha layouts, you do want this to be easily texted!), and remember (it's easier to remember a sequence of just letters followed by a sequence of just numbers, imo, even if it's one or two characters longer)

Regarding the efficiency though, I would think (even disregarding new users of LaTeX) it would really depend on the length and content of the paper.

For longer papers with many formulas I'd pick straight LaTeX any time. Beside the formulas and look, this way once something looks good, it probably won't break in many unforeseen ugly ways when stuff is changed or added elsewhere. This in my experience is not the case with word processors, where you really need to review the whole document after any edit. Plus, working with text in a text editor is so much more efficient and enjoyable.

For things like slides and notes though, particularly when there are a lot of screenshots/graphics/tables/etc. in proportion to text, it's somewhere about 50/50 between Word and org-mode, which I then compile into pdf through either LaTeX or html. But I have accumulated a lot of templates and customization for the latter option to work well; without them, I would just be using Word.

Another factor is whether, and how often, it is going to be necessary to update the document with changed figures/tables/etc. This depends on how they are generated: if they come from an Excel spreadsheet, things work much smoother embedding them in Word; if they are generated by some code running, it's much easier to have the LaTeX document pick them up.