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Agreed - why make a big deal out of publishing a "framework" and then not release any data to go along with it?


Why not include both sets of stats? There are a large number of bootcamps these days and I obviously cannot speak to all. However, for the program I attended, I'd say 90%+ of students were interested in full-time dev jobs. I'd want to know if most post-course jobs were not highly technical.

Aside from that reasoning, I see this as a means to differentiate different types of programs, if they do in fact exist. I don't actually buy that argument; while I obviously have not read the entire internet, I do have yet to encounter a bootcamp whose marketing strategy ISN'T centered around the promise of becoming a full-time developer upon matriculation.


I also think this comment misses the point of the article. The author is not proposing that bootcamps reject people based on their career objectives. He's pushing for greater transparency in reporting and urging other bootcamps to publish more than just the splashy stats displayed for marketing purposes. People make huge financial and emotional investments to attend a bootcamp; the author argues that bootcamps should do better by their prospective students by helping them to understand just what they're purchasing.


Do you really think that people spend tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours (away from family, might I add) learning to code just so they can teach their children?


Hey koolba, OP here.

Thanks for the code review - it's always good to see suggestions on how to improve things. If you have ideas on how to make the code better, please feel free to submit a pull request. Thanks for sharing your feedback!


Hey MaxfordAndSons, OP here.

Thanks for your comment. News Genius' site is a bit misleading, as there are a few different ways one could wind up with site annotations.

The first, as you mention, is by opting in. I agree that such a tool could be a useful way to foster discourse on your content. This tool is not meant for people who opt in to Genius annotations.

Further down on Genius' page, it states that any page can be annotated simply by prepending `genius.it/` to a site URL, regardless of whether the content publisher has granted permission. Unfortunately, the comments section of any Internet page tends to showcase some extremely uncivilized discourse. This is why many site authors choose to disable comments. Genius circumvents these people's wishes. Further, unlike a comments section, Genius does not actually notify the owner of a website if his/her content is annotated. Site owners have the option to moderate comments; it took Genius until today to even add a Report Abuse button.

Hopefully this clarifies some of the motivation. Thanks for sharing your perspective!


The readers of the comments need to opt-in to reading the newsgenius annotations. So the argument of "some people might find these comments offensive" does not make sense. If you find the comments on news genius offensive, don't read them.

If you ask me, site owners should NOT have a right to moderate comments. That just encourages silencing dissent and disagreement and publishing misinformation, as others have noted.

Should site owners also have the right to issue takedown notices to reddit or hacker news when someone links to their site? Or to delete comments on those websites?


I haven't seen many people arguing that News Genius shouldn't be permitted to exist (except perhaps on copyright/derived work grounds, which given their implementation is quite arguable), just that it's not a good idea as implemented. And, of course, people are well within their rights to use javascript/etc to prevent the embedding that News Genius does, or to e.g. block referrals from reddit or HN.


Hey, OP here.

I originally intended to leverage Rack all the way through by inspecting headers. However, much to my chagrin, I discovered that Genius does not reveal its identity in the headers, so I had to resort to JS instead to accomplish my goal.


The Report Abuse button seems like it was just recently added, in the past day. It was not present when the tool was originally released.


I'll take your word for it; it's pretty shocking that it wasn't there from day one. As I've written elsewhere, it seems like Genius's vision of universal annotations is not really lined up with the/my/some tech folks platonic ideal of it - Genius seems to want to extend RapGenius to the rest of the web to enable a mix of both factual and editorial commentary, whereas the aforementioned ideal would be much more focused on fact checking, not just providing a universal commenting layer.

It's clearly a grayer issue than I first comprehended when writing my initial response to your work; I apologize for my strongly negative tone.


Hey tkone,

Thanks for sharing. The gem works in a similar way, with a small JS script.


Hey colinbartlett, OP here.

Definitely a good point. Interestingly, I didn't set out intending to use JS to solve this problem. I wanted to use Rack to intercept the request and check the headers and proceed from there. However, when I was playing around with it in Request Bin, I noticed that Genius actually modifies the URL so that there is no reference to them anywhere in the headers. This is generally poor etiquette and forced me to modify my approach.

Thanks for your comment!


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