ht_th

> If I can get a 95+ on midterm and final I obviously understand the material.

That's assuming that these midterms/finals accurately and completely assess understanding of the material.

As a teacher, I need more assessment moments than one or two tests in a term to monitor, guide, and support students' learning processes, for all students in my class. This "busywork" gives me the extra input I need to adapt my teaching to my classes and students.

Of course, from my perspective, this isn't "busywork" because I try to create meaningful learning activities. However, from the perspective of some students, I can understand it feels like busywork. I try to differentiate, but that's not always possible, particularly if you're performing significantly above average.

The problem is that even if you are doing fine without the busywork, your classmates might not and need the training through busywork. Or they might need the structure and incentive to do something at all. Unfortunately, giving some students no work and other some work and other a lot of work will not go down well, particularly in larger heterogeneous groups. So we end up treating everyone the same, more or less. This can really suck for any student who's an outlier to the positive OR negative side.

Ideally, you'd get an education tailored to your needs, but in practice that's difficult to realize depending on where you live, your parents' background, etc. For example, if you're living in a smaller village with just a single high school, you don't have much choice. Similarly, if your parents don't understand what you need, they'll not go look for it. Or if your parents don't have the means to support your alternative schooling, bad luck. Etc.

I looked at your "apply here" website, but the job you're telling us about isn't listed among the two job openings on your workable site.

Don't care about everything. However, if you care about something, care a lot.

Over the years I've learned not to care too much about things I don't control, I don't know much about, or that I consider an individual choice. On the other hand, about the few things I consider myself an expert in, I care a lot. I have very strong opinions, and I don't hesitate to express them.

I think the author meant "just" as in: it is only another name. In Haskell, you can make an infix operator out of a function by putting it between backticks. Thus, `fmap` and <$> are synonyms. For example:

    (subtract 3) <$>    [1,2,3,4]  -- =[-2,-1,0,1]
    (subtract 3) `fmap` [1,2,3,4]  -- =[-2,-1,0,1]

I don't know about common city/village planning in the USA, but where I am from, farm machines can almost always go around the village using secondary and tertiary roads. They don't need to go through the center or use the ring road. In this situation using these primary roads during traffic and driving way under the speed limit isn't the best choice from a communal point of view. Besides, given the width of their machines, driving through heavy traffic is more unsafe than going by a back road.

Of course, using the back roads often also means taking the "long road", albeit just by a couple of kilometers. I understand the urge to take the shortest route, but I think people should think of others on the road too.

Yes, outside the cities and villages, where the number of pedestrians is low and that of cyclists often not large either. In those situations sharing infrastructure generally isn't an issue.

Inside cities and villages, I don't think I've seen roads with a bike path, but without a pedestrian path. Maybe I've seen one in an industrial park or so.

Learners need projects they care about, project they feel ownership about. Most students aren't motivated to do some standard project. In formal education, we make them care about these standard projects by giving credit. But that sort of extrinsic motivation isn't that helpful for deep learning, I've found. It'd be better if a student has a problem they truly care about, somehow. Unfortunately, turning their need into a workable project isn't as easy as you'd hope.

pandoc (https://pandoc.org) might help. It can read and write DOCX, convert it to a plain text format of your liking.

I recommend to be wary of changing someone else's workflow, however. Particularly if it is someone you live with. Unless the other wants to change their workflow, they won't accept it. And if something goes awry, you're the first person they call, and make responsible to resolve the issue NOW. For example, when stuff breaks a day before a deadline, you know what you'll be spending that day on :-)

Sure, but if you do have something meaningful on GitHub or where ever, and you share this in your CV, I would expect that the interviewers look at that. Or at least, I would not like to do some stupid coding exercises that are less complex, less authentic, and basically one-dimensional compared to my work on these open source projects.

I am also fickle with my food, and a vegan to boot. I solved this problem of leftovers for my situation by making soup. With leftovers, like your tomato sauce, you can always make a soup. Making soup is easy. You can do that in parallel with making dinner, or quickly before breakfast or lunch. You can store and carry it in a thermos flask, or in a simple jar and heat it in a microwave at work. You can also use it as a starter for tomorrow's dinner. Or freeze it for later consumption. Soup, it's great!

Discoverability in libraries is better, and difficult to replicate in an online setting I've found. When I found a book through the online database, I would go to get it and almost always the other books on the shelf or nearby shelves were also relevant to my research. But most of these books didn't show up in the results of my initial queries, so I would not have found them without the physical library.

Unfortunately, the libraries I went to, have drastically shrunk their accessible physical collections in favor of keeping most books in storage.

Agreed. Whenever I look at one of those job sites, even when they're dedicated to software development, or even front-end development, almost all jobs listed are listed by an agency for the actual company. I'd rather deal with the companies directly, but too often the agencies hide away name and contact information. Of course, now and then I can figure out which company it is, anyway, but it is a hassle.

I suppose that smaller companies think they don't have the resources to maintain their job listings in various databases, but I think they should.

On the other hand, if this number also includes socks, underwear, rain wear, winter wear, sports clothing, swim clothing, etc., it might be less absurd. And don't get me started on clothing for young children, of course.

Still, when you say "68 items of clothing", most people think pants, blouses, dresses, costumes, and the like. But that's the fun with statistics :-(

True, but that is not the same as proving someone cheated. Besides, when you have too many students, you cannot talk to all of them one-by-one in any meaningful way. Or assess them in a meaningful way, to be honest.

By the way, where I work, management pushes for stuff like proctoring, and more students, and "measurable" results, and so on. As a teacher, I don't care much about the whole grading show.

I cannot help you, of course, but I have some observations:

- In some countries, like the Netherlands, you can get a reasonable salary doing a PhD. Although not $95k, certainly enough to live on and save a bit.

- Nothing is stopping you to do research on your own in computer science. For most of computer science all you need is a computer, an academic network, and a lot of time. If for nothing else, if you decide to postpone your PhD, being active in research might help you get a running start when you do start pursuing your PhD.

- Not all research happens at the big labs. And not all positions are for PhDs per se. For example, a job as a scientific programmer might also be of interest. Or join a start-up that is exploring and implementing some novel and innovative idea.

- Although doing research is great, at least in academia, you spend a lot of time on less exciting stuff like hunting for grants, publishing without much new to say, teaching, organization, and so on.

- Panning for the future is hard. Postponing pursuing your PhD now might mean you never get around to it. Or doing it now might mean that you burn out on it, while if you'd start working first you might get into a better state mentally/financially/family-wise/... in a couple of years to do your PhD. Or you might discover that you like your career a lot more than you expected and want to stay. Or you discover you do not like being a software developer at all. ...

Personally, when confronted with these sort of decisions, I have always put my own interest first. That might sound a bit egoistic or asocial, and it probably is, but if am unhappy I am not much help to anyone.

> Should they have to?

I suppose the assumption was that "they use computers all the time", which wrongly was equated to "they use computers in a meaningful way all the time". However, at best, despite their often use of computers, that computer use has been superficial. Otherwise, I would have expected they would have encountered things like CONTROL+F and discovered the convention that you can use that shortcut to search in almost every program. However, somehow, these conventions and underlying concepts of desktops, GUIs, computers, and what not, stayed hidden somehow for most computer users.

Given the huge amounts of time spend using computers, I too expected people to have developed a deeper insight in how to use them. But, as others in this discussion have suggested, I suppose most people use computers only as a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is just a tool, like an oven, a mop, a car, and so on. They spend huge amounts of time using those tools as well without "mastering" them or developing a deeper understanding of them either. For example, unless you're interested in cooking you might cook almost every day without coming to understand cooking at a deeper level too.

Yes, I wanted to build something that my students using Windows or Mac OS also could easily use. And I wanted to build a web extension for Firefox and Chrome using the same format. And maybe integrate it in some other tools we're using here as well. Of course, that was too ambitious and the only thing I ended up with was an integration in vim. And that could have been done easier, as your sibling posters have pointed out.

Anyway, it was fun to build and very useful the past year.

Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse or even a tablet. I wanted to be able to "live" calculate with symbols while I talked over it with my students.

I called this tool √𝚎𝚍, the rich Unicode text editing suite (RUTED, pronounced ˈruːtɪd) and I use it in vim: https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim.

I first defined so called modes of ASCII sequences representing Unicode symbols, like "forall" for "∀", and "NN" for "ℕ", and ";o" for "∘". Then I created a very small vim plugin to enable modes and change modes. When in a mode, you can enter the ASCII sequences, and they are replaced by their Unicode equivalent.

It is a bit of a simple hack, but it worked great over the past year. Entering symbols has become very easy for me now.

I did learn to read, write, listen, and speak three foreign languages in high school. Beyond learning vocabulary, there was not much memorizing going on. I still use two of these foreign languages regularly!

I would rather we fix foreign language education rather than just cut it. Besides, why not teach parts of these "life lessons" during foreign language class? Might be interesting to compare home economics in different cultures.

They might. It would not surprise me if a lot of people just type their calculations into the browser address bar or in their Internet search engine's input box. Or search for a calculator web application, and use that as their calculator.

My mother, who is in her 70s, loves to build these new sets! She also loved to build all the old Lego sets from her children again for her grand children. Just to see if all the pieces were still there, she said :-)

I like living in a society where playtime isn't just for kids!

Yes. You can build the command-line application Java Jar from that repo. I also combine it with vim (https://github.com/dpelle/vim-LanguageTool).

I am using LanguageTool. Not the website, but a command-line tool. You can configure it with all sorts of rules to check all sorts of spelling, grammar, style, and language issues. However, as far as I have noticed, LanguageTool is not a very advanced language-help tool. Still, it did improve my writing a lot. If nothing else, my writing has gotten more consistent.

Yes, sort of. Use WSL2 and a Xserver like https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/ that runs on Windows.

I always loose in a couple of minutes in 0 A.D. :-(

Then again, I am more interested in exploration and building than fighting to the dead. I loved playing Age of Empires on the easy setting and then go overboard with the civilization building.

I miss my 20 minute bike ride between work and home. That bike-ride truly separated work-life from home-life. It cleared my head, and I got some exercise in. I really miss that.

And no, just going cycling or walking for an hour or so during the day isn't the same. I don't know why.

> my teams are just as productive today (100% remote) as they were pre-COVID (100% in-office).

How much of this is the result of working with an established team that existed before you moved to work-from-home? Do you think the same will be true for teams that are created in a work-from-home setting from the start?

I ask, because I am worried about training and retaining new people. A lot of work is not satisfying in itself. Part of my motivation comes from working together with a group of people I've come to known well. Often I care more about the people I work with than the problems I am working on. I consider this people aspect part of my intrinsic motivation to work.

I fear that once we're all working from home, our motivations become more and more extrinsically. After that, why bother working for THIS company or problem? Can I trust myself and my colleagues to be involved enough to finish anything in the long run? Or should I start to expect anyone to jump ship anytime?

> What drives me crazy is people who say "can I ask you a question?" I really try hard not to say "you just did".

Yes! And the same things happens in real life as well. As a teacher, I get quite often this same question: "Can I ask something?" To which I always reply: "Apparently!"

In the classroom I am trying to establish a local "classroom culture" wherein students feel safe to ask anything. I suppose we should also try to establish a local "chatroom culture" with norms, expectations, responsibilities, and so on.

> Not everyone builds a site to immortalize content.

True, and that is fine. However, by using JS + APIs, we risk that others who want to immortalize content for purposes of historical or cultural research fail to capture quite a bit of our current culture and content. I would be sad if my grandchildren are unable to get a feel for the world I live in like I could get a feel for the world my grandparents lived in by means of archives, magazines, newspapers from their day.