EsotericAlgo

I thought it was off the record like the old Pidgin plugin or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging.

That's a valid point. It's possible everything else was on his own time and it was just his way of saying no. I end up reading the "how much will you pay me?" as suggesting other things posted may be paid. That's not a fair read.

The implication is that this article was paid for by OmniSciDB or someone with an interest. This changes the presumed context and should be noted upfront by the author if that is the case.

Yes, but a path of heartache if the interfaces between systems aren't robust.

Say W sends a message to Y but doesn't record the message was sent Y or wait for any sort of ack (say a process that drops a flat file to an FTP server that gets deleted after 7 days). Now someone finds out Y is missing a bunch of things. Who's fixing it and who should be fixing it?

The version of this that continually bites me is when someone is designing what is essentially a distributed system but doesn't know that's what they are designing. System W -> System X -> System Y -> System Z are connected with the assumption no guarantees or coherency checks are needed. Might as well just email spreadsheets...

I'll qualify my critique in that it depends on how the class leverages Coursera. I've taken five classes on Coursera two of which were through the UIUC program (procrastinating a type inferencer assignment as I write this).

There are a handful of things Coursera gets right: Videos.Playback works. I generally download them all immediately regardless.

Progress tracking. Easy confirmation of what I've done already.

There are several problems it fails to solve:

Course Communication. There's a discussion form. It's not used. These are supplemented with other means of communication depending on the course that all need to be checked (email, Piazza, Slack, dedicated forum, etc.)

Live Events. Typically these are links to a Zoom instance with all the attendant difficulties.

Integration. Instructors often want to use outside tools for automated graders and the like. Coursera has tools to integrate authentication to make this first class, but it often means learning the idiosyncrasies for a new tool for every class. Generally, the integration is slightly broken in some way requiring some irritating workaround.

Quiz/Testing platform. Difficult for instructors to get right. This results in things like never seeing the correct answers to a final because view rules aren't well understood by the instructor or free-form answers being too picky.

Proctoring. Coursera doesn't have a solve for this. Remote proctoring is generally garbage and easily the most frustrating experience for me. UIUC uses ProctorU which I despise, but that's another rabbit hole.

Content Navigation. It's based on a week-by-week view. This can give a false impression of progress. This can make navigating between thematically similar content in week 4 and week 5 difficult.

In most instances, I would prefer an index page that mimics the the syllabus with links to the content and discussion forum.

As for the MCS it's been a good investment thus far. I've taken two classes, Data Mining and Programming Languages & Compilers. Like most things, you get out of it what you put into it. It would be possible for me to learn most of this on my own but the long term motivation wouldn't be there. This is especially helpful for formalism I struggle to learn on my own. Most of the classes have a project component which allows a significant amount of depth.

I'm taking Computational Photography this coming term which I'm excited to lose my weekends to. https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs445/sp2020/

[Note: I'm enrolled in the MCS program at UIUC which makes extensive use of Coursera. Not a big fan of Coursera and most of the content for the courses is available through other avenues.]

They have two paths they can follow:

1) "Worthless" certificates

2) Platform to purvey certification for universities or other trusted credential organizations.

The certificates? They are what one makes of it. The problem of creating a usable, online education platform however is a hard problem and one worthy of investment. Academia is a tailspin trying to find an effective way to offer courses online.

I suspect most developers have been on both sides of it. I've most often seen it as a delaying tactic where access/system bureaucracy prevents easy recreation. So generally dysfunctional enterprises.

The Oracle eBusiness Suite. Specifically, iProcurement.

I've found that showing any degree of drive and gumption in the undeserved organizational tasks ends up eating more and more time as the expectations and scope increase, rapidly pushing out the technical work.

Finding the "just enough" part is challenging, especially if you're in an organization without a strong engineering culture where technical acumen is undervalued.

Is it an issue of editors or of language? The amount of errors that incorrect whitespace characters cause in whitespace sensitive languages could attributed to editors obfuscating what's written to file.

I think the pragmatic solution is an opinionated linter that can be broken.

I agree that a leaner core seems intuitively right. However, the discussion on emacs-devel has been in the other direction as of late https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg01....

This is true but generally only for grocery and a handful of the big box retailers.

The merchandising information is typically well known along with product taxonomy, but the mapping of this relative information to a physical layout isn't always cleanly implemented or available.

A typical scenario is sku 85111 is grouped in a product hierarchy (family > sub category > subdepartment > department or the retailer equivalent) and that sku is assigned to a planogram or set of planograms associated with a display fixture (which sometimes have a hierarchy of their own (e.g. peg > shelf > section > aisle) with mixed relative distancing. There's generally a departmental divide between who manages product and merchandising information.

Many of these robots to my knowledge use the products or special tags as unique identifiers as opposed to an indoor-positioning system that ties back to an exact product location. So it's frequently easy to say that a product is in aisle 20 section 2 shelf 1 it's not easy to say from your current location go down 8 aisle and up half an aisle, look on your left.

One story that comes to mind is the difficulty of change management. It’s possible to configure Aloha locally but beyond a certain number of locations a configuration tool called Configuration Center is used. It basically stores configuration information on a server (as a tree with the rough idea of inheritance) that stores connect to and pull down into the various configuration formats used.

In the tool there isn’t a concept of approvals. We had an admin disable receipt printers at all stores. There wasn’t a reliable global refresh so we had 10 people logging in remotely (through another horrible tool that was a front end for a reverse VNC connection) and calling stores to reset their configuration which brought their system down for 2 to 10 minutes during a Friday lunch rush.

We fixed this with process but NCR made it easy to shoot oneself in the foot.

Often the cloud sell is less a sale of “the cloud” and more modern development and configuration practices such as being able to do a reliable auto update. I’ve had a lot of vendors sell hosted solutions with the premise that since they will deploy an update regardless of the customers input it prevents the risk adverse business side from preventing updates.

It does provide resilience but it also increases the complexity which may not be the right trade off in some instances.

It’s fairly ingrained.

NCRs market share especially among chain QSRs and FSRs is fairly dominant if they were founded 15+ years ago. Easy to configure but hard to do complicated things (No well supported places to integrate, requires a partnership which NCR doesn’t give easily). They fell behind in implementation speed compared to other vendors and were slow to market with effective online ordering integrations and chip card acceptance.

In some ways they are a victim of their own success. Small business owners in a tight margin industry aren’t ones to upgrade hardware and software when what they have works. Further the state and configuration is complex and maintained in multiple locations making upgrades challenging for those not using systems. When I was using it they’d done a big overall switch from version 6.7 which was a release that wouldn’t die 7.0 but there were ongoing issues with the new version that held us back from upgrading for a long time (thinking promo rounding rules and inventory calculations downstream). The upgrade hesitancy makes it hard to get the needed integrations.

Now NBO (formerly MenuLink) is hot garbage. And don’t even get me started on Configuration Center (CFC) or Command Center...

Trying to get hundreds of franchises to agree in an interface change is a special circle of hell. The only thing wise is converting to a new POS system.

I administered and did integrations for a large chain (1000+ stores from 2013 to 2016).

Many states also offer an online filing option.

For example, California has CalFile[1] which covers most situations. There are also some options for free federal filing if your AGI exceeds $66,000 as the requirements set by Free File Alliance[2] members vary depending on the offerings (e.g. FreeTaxUSA[3] doesn't have AGI limits).

[1] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/CalFile/index.asp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_File_Alliance

[3] https://www.freetaxusa.com/

I recognize this is about 15 years too late but stolen is the wrong word. The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived which isn't necessarily the case.