Comment by mightybyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mightybyte | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I taught a high school typing class in a K-12 school. The school didn't have the funds to get a commercial typing program so I wrote my own typing program. It evolved over time with features to help me track the students' progress etc. One day we had a school open house where all the parents could come to school. We had a bunch of different activities set up in different classrooms and I ended up getting assigned to the 3rd grade classroom to set up my typing program so anyone coming through could test their typing speed. It was a DOS program and I didn't want people using anything other than my typing program, so I modified it so you couldn't quit the typing program. Over the course of the day the 3rd graders were hanging out in their homeroom not really doing anything productive. Of course the computer was a novel attraction and they were just smashing keys and exploring my program's UI. Eventually at one point I noticed that they had somehow crashed my program with a segfault in what had otherwise become a pretty stable piece of software. To this day I have absolutely no idea what the bug was.

> The school didn't have the funds to get a commercial typing program so I wrote my own typing program.

Off-topic, but:

It seems absurd, to me, that such a conclusion could ever be reached. Obviously, from my perspective, the economies of scale, the infrastructure, overhead, and institutional resources available to programmers at a dedicated software development firm would produce an application at better quality per dollar (however you measure it) than a high school teacher in their off-hours. To me it seems that it's certainly not cheaper for us as a society, as a species, and only appears so because you are under-paid. If you were paid your actual worth, the school would say "we don't have the funds to develop this in-house, and had to buy a commercial typing program off-the-shelf, despite its loose fit for our use case."

How can we, as rational members of society, abide this?

Agreed.

Where I work there is a tool that's used in hundreds of our internal services. It was written in-house during one of our hack weeks years ago, and later we open-sourced it. Despite the fact that the org relies so heavily on it, it's completely unfunded; two employees improve and maintain it in our free time. (We do have a few outside contributors, too, which is awesome!)

That's not exactly the same situation, but I think this kind of short-sightedness is pervasive in our culture, in every walk of life.

How do you commercially produce "better quality per dollar" when the high school teacher's off-hours cost the school $0 and they get infinite quality per dollar?

Calling work done in off-hours "$0" is magical thinking. That teacher costs a lot to maintain. Those of us who are employed full-time don't really have "off-hours", and regardless of the intensity with which we focus in a given 60-minute period.

Sometimes, while at work, I am thinking of leisure. Sometimes, while at leisure, I am thinking of work.

At the end of the day, the school pays their employee. And the rest of society pays them during "off-hours", e.g. in depreciation of common resources if, say, they drive on the road.

My point is that people cost society to keep alive, but some of those people are better equipped for certain tasks than others. The question is only where do those costs come from, and to what particular efforts are the particularly-equipped assigned.

To go in another off-topic direction...of course I mainly did it because I wanted to. I had a view about how to teach/learn typing that the popular typing programs then didn't seem to have. When you're learning typing for the first time, IMO it's fundamentally a kinesthetic endeavor. It's more important to focus on burning the motor pattern of moving your finger from the home row to the key you're typing and back to the home row than remembering where the letters are placed on the keyboard. (Of course you have to also remember where the letters are, but that will happen automatically in the process of doing the former.) So I wanted to take this into account and have my students type things like this:

fff ggg fgf gfg ffgg fggf gffg

jjj hhh jhj hjh jjhh jhhj hjjh

This forces the student to exercise that movement pattern in a way that just telling them to put their fingers on the home row and type English words does not.

So the above sentence you quoted was a an over-simplification for story telling purposes and not the whole story. :)

> Obviously, from my perspective, the economies of scale, the infrastructure, overhead, and institutional resources available to programmers at a dedicated software development firm would produce an application at better quality per dollar (however you measure it) than a high school teacher in their off-hours.

If you measure it by cost to the district (for which a teacher doing it in their off hours is $0), it's clearly not, even if you only consider the sticker price of the commercial software and not the other costs associated with purchasing in a school.

> If you were paid your actual worth,

The school would fire about half it's teaching staff in order to make budget, and still not have money left over to either develop or purchase the typing program, probably.

Are you sure it was a segfault? DOS did not have any memory protection, so segfault would be impossible. Or maybe you used some protected mode DOS extender?

What happens if you try to read from a null pointer in DOS?

You get what is at 0x0000 ?

I haven't actually tried this, but based on my understanding of the MS-DOS memory model it should read the contents of memory at address 0.

This is correct, and address 0 is the start address of the interrupt vector table, so there are good reasons why you might read from it.

My memory is getting a little fuzzy. I think the machines we were using were running Windows 98 or perhaps Windows 95. But I didn't want people to be able to do other things on the computers that day as the whole point of the endeavor was to emphasize typing skill, so I looked for some kind of way to make it impossible to do ALT-TAB to switch to a different program. I was thinking I booted it up in DOS only but I also might have run it full screen in Windows and just hoped nobody knew about ALT-TAB. :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com