Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating | Hacker News Reader

Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating

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23 pointsAdamGibbins20 comments

You should colorize CLI output. Why is that a fallacy? It’s so much easier to read in terminals that support it. You ever look at a terraform plan or inspec test reports without colors? Soul crushing. It’s like 3 control characters to color text, do it.

Agreed, I much prefer colourised output, _but_ ideally provide a non-coloured fallback. I hate having to pick data out from control characters when the colourised input is passed down through pipes.

It makes a good option for the human eye, but is likely to jack your pipeline right through the roof if it's the default.

Terminals don't render colors and fonts the same way, displays don't display them the same way, people don't see them the same way. You are also not going to colorize output properly keeping consistent perceived brightness and contrast, only making it harder to read, for most people at least (I have never seen it done properly, there is always plenty of stupidity like red letters on black backround). And it's not like it's hard to make colorization opt in.

This is why I like having customizable terminal apps like ConEmu because I can change the color themes.

> It’s like 3 control characters to color text

It's important to note that each specific terminal can have different control codes. The xterm ended up being the de facto standard but it's probably not a rule.

OP must meet hundreds of below-average CS students every year. For myself, I've been consistently impressed with the new CS grads I meet, both in their depth of knowledge and enthusiasm.

Most of these read like the list could have been written in 1980. Question: does this apply to someone like me, who chose to drop out of college after a couple years of CS rather than graduate?

I encountered Huffman coding the first year out of school :P

> 42. AWS is reliable.

This isn't just graduates (says the dude who spent an hour trying to recover half a database cluster that AWS ate)

It's relatively more reliable, or perhaps the least weak link in the chain.

I've never, in all my life of using hosting services or running my own virtualization clusters in colocated DCs, have had a provider eat my VMs.

They won't boot, won't start, won't shutdown- only answer I got was rebuild them and support won't help.

Internally at where I work, AWS is the least reliable datacenter we run workloads in.

Life experience can provide successively better approximations of the truth.

Some of listed falsehoods are reasonable first approximations.

,,Elon Musk is a genius.''

Is it bad that I'm many years past graduation and I still think he is a genius? Sure, he is often wrong, but I'm amazed by his view / vision of the world.

Thinking about the most probable causes of extinction of the whole human species and trying to create startups that decrease that possibility is really unique.

He is a genius. He's also a collosal asshat. I'm mostly thinking of him calling a man a pedophile.

He's also good. Very very good at what he does. Talent+practice have put him in sneezing position to both be innovative with electric cars and making space launch vehicles. He's not a saint

He's not just an asshat, he's arrogant to the point of incompetence.

Did you know he bought the X.com domain back off PayPal for the 'sentimental value'? It's now been sitting blank for 2 years. Fuck knows how much he paid.

I think for him the end goal isn't money. It isn't the advancement of civilisation. He exists to stroke his own ego.

Beware of calling someone a genius, especially in the current technology space and especially in the current capital markets. For reference, here are other notable "geniuses":

- Adam Neumann

- Elizabeth Holmes

In fact for Holmes you were viciously attacked by social media and mainstream journalism if you voiced even a hint of skepticism. I don't think people realize how easily the Elon Musk narrative can collapse and he ends up - at best - persona non grata.

If you look closely at Adam Neumann and Elon Musk, you can see that they are very different people.

What do you think is better for ,,elevating human conciousness'': leasing and renting out high-end office spaces or finding and funding the best neuro scientists to productionize and monatize the brain-human interface that they were working on (and were lacking real funding)?

It's too bad that Elisabeth was that good at manipulating and getting so much power so fast, because she was a great engineer. Still, I don't consider her a genius as what Elon is.

Has he actually personally made any important discoveries or inventions? It seems to me like he got rich off of a couple relatively uninteresting businesses and has since built his personal brand by pouring money into science-fictioney stuff.

He understood that the internet was missing an internet-native payment system and currency and was acting on it. He failed with the original plan as he had found out that centralized systems have to be regulated and boring.

I think that Bitcoin continues the original spirit and vision that Paypal and X.com were about, but the fight is not over: there's still yet no widely spread global easy to use internet-native currency available, though I think it's just a matter of time.

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