bpyne

Good point.

Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.

Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.

Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.

I tried black coffee for short durations and hated it. So, I'm willing to say my experience follows the conclusion of the study.

However, people have wide variations in what they taste (and smell) as pleasurable. Without reading the study, I have a hard time being as binary as "nobody likes the taste of coffee".

I quite several times over the years, one time as long as 6 months. I go back, ultimately, because I love the flavor.

That said, I would never work as early as 9am if I didn't have to. Caffeine allows me to jumpstart my brain for programming. I need coffee in particular: tea sustains but doesn't jumpstart.

Exercise first thing in the morning can act as a substitute for coffee in getting my brain jumpstarted. While I find it easy to exercise at 6:30-7am in the Summer and Fall, Winter and Spring in southern New England suck. At 6:30am, it's often dark, 10-20F, windy, and damp. It's an area made for depressions. I can't see ever giving up coffee while I live here.

It's important to point out that about every decade you're going to have to adapt your diet and exercise to meet changes in your body. I'm 53 now. When I don't exercise at least 5x/week I start to have sleeping issues. Alcohol affects me more, especially my sleep. Carb bombing happens with a portion of half the amount I could eat 10 years ago. Back to coffee, I have 2 espressos in the morning and, occasionally, one after lunch but never after 2pm. Breaking any of those coffee "rules" causes me hypertension, sleep loss, and/or a sour stomach.

Sorry for the tome. Hopefully some of it is useful.

The author seems burned out given his age. (I'm going to assume a male author given how few women were in the field 20 years ago.) I went through the same stage after working for a mid-sized financial institution. I had a plan to retrain as a physical therapist. I left the job and lived on savings and my wife's salary. Six months into it I started to write software again: I missed it. So I contracted for 1.5 years and wound up working in-house for a university as a developer. Here I stayed for 14 years now.

Early in my time at the university I started to feel again the way the author describes. When I started to attend local tech meetups and started to take university CS classes out of interest, I started to feel rejuvenated. About 3 years ago, I changed to a team of much younger developers. They used modern tools, had less bureaucracy, and developed distributed applications, which I had little experience with. That was the step I needed to get excited about development again. Now I'm working extra time on my own because I enjoy the work. I'm also taking up niche areas, like language design, in my personal time.

To anyone reading this who might feel the way the author does, I give the advice to focus on finding your cultural fit and figure out the priority of your values. When I worked for startup companies I loved the absence of bureaucracy and the rapid adoption of new technology. But I hated having to wear a lot of hats: I really despise desktop configuration and system administration. My current team has some bureaucracy but we have teams to handle the things I dislike. So it's a compromise that I feel works in my favor.

Yes! That was my experience exactly.

My university realized the need for a proof writing course a little too late to help me. Students who did well in the more abstract math classes, aside from the outlier "gifted" mathematicians, formed study groups. I wasn't mature enough at the time to realize how valuable those groups were so I went it alone and my grades reflected it.

I didn't notice if "participation" meant meals available or actually picked up by kids. Kids, particularly younger ones, who are in unstable households may not get to school in time to pick up what's available. Some districts have adapted by doing grab-and-go available anytime or serving meals in the classroom.

My biggest problems as a math major at the undergraduate level were proofs. I could muddle my way through abstract algebra proofs but real analysis just didn't click.

The oddity is that I could read proofs for both subjects: the reasoning made sense. But I couldn't develop a proof.

I have the same reaction. I suspect a lot of RAM is wasted by os's and applications.

Python is an excellent teaching language. It's simple to install. You follow a tutorial by typing something at the REPL and it gives you results. Learning stuff like importing modules, etc. happens as your coding ambitions increase.

Something else to consider is the Python shell at python.org/shell. Students often have Chromebooks. I'm about to mentor second year high school students who are interested in CS. Several of them have Chromebooks only. I can recommend Python and point them to the shell.

I would think Python got a good bump through Hour of Code and other programs to introduce people to coding.

Interesting tidbit. I'm take an online course in Mexican cooking. The first unit is making tortillas. The chef covered the traditional way. You take dried corn, cut from the cob, and soak it in lime (pickling lime) water overnight. Then you grind it. I wondered how Mexicans use corn as a staple when it doesn't digest well. Question answered.

Interesting. Does the domain setup forward to your web mail account?

I think we need to be careful about the free speech debate in this case. Free speech applies to civic life, not your relationship with a business. Near me we have a bar that doesn't tolerate swearing. On your first offense, the bartender gives a warning. On the second offense, you have to leave. The bar owner has the right to make a rule that makes his business a more pleasant environment. As a result, the bar does quite well. Google has the right to do the same in order to make the experience of YT better.

It's amazingly difficult to get away from. For those of us who had Yahoo email accounts, trying to get people to stop emailing them is a slow drawn out process. My wife and I switched to Gmail accounts at least 5 years ago. We still get friends and relatives sending to our Yahoo accounts. This, despite multiple requests to stop.

People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/paste email addresses from old messages, like invitations for Christmas parties, when they contact us. Either way we can't get away from Yahoo.

The other issue is companies using email addresses as user names. Just a few days ago, I went through Yelp to order a food delivery fulfilled by Grubhub. The order confirmation listed an old Yahoo account as the contact email. This was courtesy of Yelp using the Yahoo account as my login. Yelp provides a way to add an email address and make it the primary. Not all businesses do.

If I could snap my fingers and be done with Yahoo, I'd do it. I started to move us from it when Marissa Meyer was still CEO.

Ironically, I ran into this talk by Guy Steele today. He presents the development of the Computer Science Metalanguage.

https://youtu.be/dCuZkaaou0Q

"The hypothesis that COVID is man-made is an inevitable result of already existing conspiracy theories about Chinese communist plots and "globalist/NWO" population control programs that go back decades. The only novel aspect of this is the degree to which it's been normalized and adopted as part of mainstream Republican identity politics."

And people are willing to believe conspiracies due to fear. The US elected a president who has a trail of failed businesses and marriages, as well as, a moral system that would make hardened criminals squirm. But, like any good con artist, he projects confidence and makes complex topics simple by ignoring details. Scared people cling to those cults of personality like a life preserver. The fear started long before the 2016 election. The US is changing demographically and with it comes change culturally. Some people fear their place in a society in which they're no longer the majority.

Scared people sometimes look for control over a situation to feel less scared. The hypothesis that COVID-19 is man-made makes it seem like we have some control over it, whereas, the thought that it developed outside of human control and might happen again terrifies them.

It's causing disenfranchised citizens to believe in a global conspiracy to subvert a man with a trail of failed businesses and marriages, as well as, dictatorial aspirations. It should be treated as a Hollywood recycled plot, but people are actually buying into it. Buildings burning will be the least of our problems if it continues to spread.

"Well, the client knows his business best, but sure as hell they do not know how to make software best."

My "clients" are all internal. As I work with more departments, I realize how little they know how they operate. They understand well what their mission is. But the processes and exceptions are largely in the minds of one or two people.

My team modernizes legacy integrations between core systems. The departments had a lot of retirements. The retirees took the knowledge with them and left sparse documentation. As I go, I'm trying to develop business requirements documents for them. But it slows down projects.

So, I'd say you're right that clients know what they do but not always how they're doing it. I have a feeling that it's not just my organization experiencing this issue.

There's no single culprit, but you hit part of the problem.

- Users prioritizing new features over rock solid performance hurt us badly. Basically, we as customers are our own worst enemy.

- Software done as distributed services when it doesn't need to be. Each tier added to a distributed architecture is a point of failure. And each tier needs to be supported in vendor upgrades and the like for server software, VM software, security patches, etc.

- Reduced emphasis on protocols. When my team started to develop services for the first time we decided to use JSON as the lingua franca for communicating between them. But we didn't think about developing protocols using JSON. Now it's a shit show of different messaging formats in JSON. So we don't have any standard components for parsing and forming messages.

- Here's a particular pain point with me. I'm sick of creating an account for every damned service I use. When I pull up an app to order takeout from a restaurant, I shouldn't need an account. All too often, I'm required to create one. I have accounts all over the web now and I'm sure I don't remember half of them. Of course, having lots of accounts requires lots of passwords to manage. So I have a password manager which works mostly until I'm in a hurry and then it doesn't.

I don't see a way out of our current predicament. But I do hear an undercurrent of "I want to simplify my life" growing. I believe that tech is taking too much cognitive effort from non-tech people.

Tech as it stands today requires a cognitive overhead that I think is wearing down people. It seems like we can make more complex software but we can't make it work smoothly. People are spending far too much time searching the web for tech workarounds and contacting support teams. Tech, when done right, should be unnoticed in the background of people's minds. It's anything but that right now.

Yes a hundred times!

Part of the fatiguing part is that you have to move frequently between big picture and highly detailed thinking. Trying to keep functional requirements, design, and implementation detail in mind constantly drains mental resources for some reason.

I'd love to see a study on the number of decisions made per work day for different fields. I have a suspicion that software development is near the top.

I looked up Trondheim, NO weather. It's only Rhode Island cold not Minnesota cold. Plenty of people in Providence, RI bike in the Winter. Trondheim also doesn't have the range found in either RI or MN so you don't get ridiculous heat and humidity to bike in.

Yes, startups are the wild, wild, west. I spent from 1994-97 in startups. I loved the lack of bureaucracy. But we spent too much time in firefighting mode. Through trial-and-error I found medium-small organizations in the non-profit world my best fit.

Early on I had a senior guy mentoring me on a project involving a tool called PowerBuilder. He chose a design that didn't fit the problem-space well but it fit the "PowerBuilder Best Practices" so he implemented it. The performance was abominable and he should have known it would be: he too was a smart guy. But he had a hard time seeing "big picture" design.

"I ran into this early in my career when a senior engineer at a startup reviewed my Python PR for operating on a CSV dataset and insisted I rewrite it in Pandas for performance."

Did a performance problem exist?

If not, then I would never promote that person to senior engineer. A working program should only be re-engineered for performance if it wasn't meeting the performance contract agreed upon when the program was written.

Other commentors gave good advice about how to negotiate.

In the US, there's an expression called "Keeping up with the Jones'". It means you're trying to match what you see other people getting in income, material goods, etc., often at the expense of your own happiness. Think about the following before you act.

Why is the situation bothering you?

Are you being influenced by another party who thinks you're being taken advantage of?

Are you happy with the work and is it allowing you to enjoy your life?

I notice that Ada 95 included inheritance. My experience in other languages with inheritance is that the feature creates a lot of complexity. Have you used inheritance in Ada and, if so, has it created any issues?

Ada came to mind when the parent mentioned separate interface and implementation files. Making methods in the implementation private unless they appear in the interface was an inspired design decision. I use only Oracle's PL/SQL dialect but I appreciate the design of Ada more the longer I code. Honestly, I'd consider using full-blown Ada in modern software development. It gives you the ability to write really clean code.

Some good ideas exist in this article. I could see this strategy implemented in my district as one of several starting in the Fall. But it's not going to be easy.

I'm in New England. The sheer number of students and the percentage of them who have inadequate Winter clothing and food would make the strategy impossible to implement as a one size fits all approach.

A quick search shows that my school district has 10,479 students. The number of students on free or reduced price lunch is a good indicator of access to adequate Winter clothing as well. We have 44% of the students on free or reduced price lunch. To implement a strategy of windows open or outdoor classrooms, we would have to account for 4,610 students' Winter clothing needs for temperatures ranging from 0F-55F.

Some communities have much higher percentages of students on free and reduced price lunch. A quick look at a neighbor city 15 minutes' drive to the north shows 95% on free or reduced price lunch.

Districts less affected by poverty could probably implement an outdoor or windows open strategy. But a mountain of logistics exist in trying to implement in communities like mine. Unfortunately, in our county, communities like mine are the norm.