ht_th

Maybe not forks for eating. But when I buy a pitchfork, I do care about the source of the handle's wood because I do not want to contribute to deforestation. I also look at the repairability. For example, would any standard handle fit? And can I attach one myself? And the "usability" of the handle, and the fork as a whole, is another factor that is important to me. Often, just from handling them, you do get a good feel if the pitchfork makers actually seem to care about their users and know what they are doing or not.

In my locale, the public library has shrunk in size to about 40% of its size 20 years ago. And it now includes a coffee bar and lunch café. The current selection is mostly popular books. For all topics I know something about, the non-fiction books seems to cater to children, lay-people, and beginners.

The library has pivoted to social work, helping low-literate people, offering a safe space for teenagers to study, and a place for the elderly and 30+ women to meet. Those are all good reasons to exists, particularly because many of the visitors cannot go anywhere else, but I miss the library of my youth. I loved spending hours moving through the stacks, discovering all kinds of oddities and new things. But that seems passé. Even in the university library the amount of books has shrunk a lot and the depot with a lot of older stuff is now off-limits.

> I have an instant negative reaction to the idea that "if it has defects, it may not be shipped ". Any moderately complex piece of software is guaranteed to have bugs.

Yes, but if there is a known defect in your software, do you release or not?

To me, there is a difference between knowingly releasing faulty software or only after release discovering faults in the software. Unless there is no reasonable quality check in the software development and release procedures, because then you are not doing much better than knowingly releasing faulty software.

> Then why are they not massively ramping up ICU capacity?

Because you cannot. Even if you have the space and the materials, you do not have the qualified and experienced personel to run it.

Taking home exams or assignments are great, but they need to be assessed as well. Here too, the number of students is a limiting factor. With too many students, the best a teacher can do is summative assessment and generate a reasonable grade for the student. Personally, I think formative assessment is far superior to summative assessment, but formative assessment takes a lot of effort from the teacher. Often more than is allotted to her for assessement (or the whole course!).

I was thinking more about a larger project or paper with quite a lot of freedom for the students that would take the teacher hours to get familiar with and give constructive formative feedback on. As part of that, an oral section to discuss the project and paper with the student would be great as well. In assessment, I would like the teacher and student to be partners rather than opponents.

If a student understands the material, together they should be able to have a conversation where the student can reflect on her understanding and learning to the extent where the teacher can determine that the student has passed the course. Of course, if there is an intense interaction between the student and teacher throughout the course, the whole idea of a final assessment becomes pretty meaningless.

I know, my ideas are a bit far-fetched and there are a lot of practicalities that are difficult to work out. But one can dream!

Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks.

As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations.

Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with.

Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.

> Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.

When I first moved in my house I didn't have a job, so I bought a lot of cheap appliances. Most of them still work, and I expect them to keep on working with almost no maintenance for years to come. However, they have some serious downsides: they are energy inefficient, they make a lot of noise, and they do not necessarily fit my future needs.

For example, now that I have a partner, my fridge is a bit small. And instead of running the washer once every two weeks, we're running it two or more times a week. Every time I run the washer, the floor the washer is on becomes basically unlivable for about half an hour or so due to loud noise of the centrifuge.

I do not want to buy new stuff, particularly because the old stuff "still works". And getting rid of my old stuff in a nice way is not easy either: Because they have wear and tear, goodwill and second-hand shops are not overly enthusiastic about taking them from me. Unless I can find someone to take something over (for free!), I am left with moving it to the recycling place because I do not have any storage space in my house.

There is an "Underline" type in pandoc's definition (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pandoc-types-1.22/docs/T...). In Pandoc's format, this works like:

    This word is [underlined]{.ul}.

Possibly, yes. If I am unfamiliar with the restaurant, or I have a question regarding their menu or my dietary restrictions, if they do not have a website with an email address or contact form AND they do not react in reasonable time, I will not eat at that restaurant.

It is? I haven't tipped in years, whereas I did in the 1990s. Maybe because I never pay with cash anymore. Then it was common to round up to the next multiple of 5. Even so, I never have had wait staff asking for a tip.

Except in a programming language designed for learning programming. Ideally, we would have a good educational language with a clear path mapping the notation from that language to more common notation used in programming languages designed for computer science, software engineering, or software development.

> A small village would typically have a train station

Having been born and raised in a typical small village in The Netherlands (population then ± 12000) with a lot of smaller and slightly larger villages around, there were no train station in sight for at least 30km. I had to travel to the big city to get to the nearest train station, which took about an hour by bus. And this is the norm rather than the exception.

The problem with trains is that the tracks are put in relatively straight between large cities. If your village is on that line between these cities, you're in luck and probably have a station close-by. Otherwise, you're out of luck and have to hope there is a reasonable frequent bus line going to your closest station.

Of course, because these bus lines tend to follow the more historical routes between cities, visiting each and every village in between, getting to the nearest big city by bus might take up to three times as long as just taking your own car.

Heck, if I'd not mind cycling fast (just over 20km/h) for an hour and a half I'd also be in the city. Just half an hour after the bus would get there. Actually, that was nice in summer as a poor high school student.

I use it as a local Java program and you can enable / disable all kinds of rules. You can also write your own.

I use https://languagetool.org/ for that. I have integrated this Java program in Vim as well. Every time I think I finished a piece of write, I run the ":LanguageToolCheck" command to learn that my writing still leaves a lot to be desired.

My first laptop was a Toshiba T3100e from the late 1980s. It still works!

I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.

You are taking it to the other extreme. Sure, in 8 hours I will not write something "unusually beautiful". But if I spend two hours solving a problem and hacking together a solution, I come to better understand both problem and solution. Hereafter, I then can rewrite my solution in another couple of hours and improve it significantly with respect to maintainability, readability, naming, messy choices, &c.

If I want this job, I would spend this extra time to submit this better solution because obviously that will improve my chances of getting the job. But that means that these take home assignments might not be such a good indicator of efficient proficiency. You might be overvaluing people spending more time on these tasks and undervaluing people spending the allotted time on these tasks. For example, a better developer who did write a solid solution in under 2 hours might get passed over because her solution seems not as good as mine where I did spend another hour to rewrite my initial messy solution.

As an engineer many political compromises make no sense to me to the extent I cannot support it. Compromising between, say, quality of a solution and the available resources to implement said solution makes sense to me and it is clear what the trade-offs are beforehand. A political compromise to keep all parties involved happy that mixes parts of totally different solutions and creates a system you know beforehand it is going to perform significantly worse than either solution, is difficult to accept let alone support for me.

The whole restaurant experience is not very enjoyable to me. There is a lot of noise, either because it is crowded and people talk loudly or because of music. Chairs, tables, and tableware are often not comfortable. Service is not that great: I have to wait to order, for my food, for my check, and so on. There are not many options that fit my dietary choices and food is surprisingly often fat, salty or sweet to the extent that I am not tasting the ingredients any more.

How am I to make this enjoyable in a restaurant? At home, at least, I can select ingredients and cook the meal to my taste. I have seats and tableware I am used to and are comfortable to me. I can talk and listen to the people I care about. And this better experience is significantly cheaper than in a restaurant, which means I can have this every day!

Sure. I have a place at https://heerdebeer.org. I use it to share my work in history, education, and software engineering. I do not update it often and there is not much traffic, but it has been a stable place for things I care about.

> A lot of those are nice additions, maybe in the third or fourth generation of the application when you got the data structure nailed down you can look at skinning and things

I have been here. Retro fitting a skinning / theming system afterwards invites all kinds of trouble as well. Ideally I would like to design for these customizations in a general sense from the start without spending unnecessary resources on implementing more than just a single style. At the very least, all configurable things should be injected into modules rather than be hard coded all over the place. Things like colors, fonts, language, and the like are obvious candidates, and if you have something for those properties, adding more later on might be easier anyway.

But I am not sure how to sell this type of investment, though. In my experience, the aim is to get the product to the customer as fast as possible for the first couple of versions because we need to have paying customers to afford any further development.

For me, the separation between hobby and work is more of a matter of responsibility than pay. If I feel responsible for some activity/task/project I would classify it as work. It does not matter if it is taking care of kids, growing a garden, being a board member of some charitable organization, or one of my free software projects: I do not get paid, and I like doing it, but I think of it as work rather than a hobby.

Building some software prototypes for ideas I have, that I count as a hobby. Reading all the books I do, however more time I spend on it than some work activities, I still think of as a hobby.

Two things: Either move your departure slightly, or, if that is not an option, use a rainsuit. These rainsuits are very good and easy enough to take with you. I always have one in my bicycle bags which are fastened on the rear rack of my bike.

All text-based input fields. Like this text-area element I am typing in now. But also for elements with the contentEditable attribute set to true.

This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.

Unfortunately, with the advent of electronic learning management systems and corporate content management systems in universities that are as much as required to be used, this seems to be declining fast. Currently I work as a lecturer at the same university I studied at twenty years ago.

Then, almost every teacher and researcher did have their own website behind "~username" on the open web. For most it was just a list of publications and courses they taught. For these courses they often made an overview page with links to all kinds of interesting material, from lecture notes, old exams, literature, to tools, thoughts, and curiosities. Some went all out and made a personalized personal web page with all kinds of interesting content. I spend a lot of time browsing and reading and exploring these pages when I was a student. Now I wished I had downloaded them all.

Now, no-one but some old-timers do have a "~username" web page. Courses and their materials are hidden away behind the walls of the learning management system we use. Their publications are visible via the library's repository and bibliographical system. For the rest, everything that is on the open web on the university's servers is published via the corporate content management system with rules and regulation what and how to post and most employees do not have access to edit anyway. Many researchers are part of some academic social networks like researchgate, but that's outside the scope of the university's servers.

What is left is for those who are interested to share to setup their own websites elsewhere. Not many do, unfortunately.

Just like you might learn to play the guitar in 4 months.

Depending on your goal, in 4 months you can become a novice programmer who could be hired by a company to grow into a junior position.*

You could spend the same amount of time to solve a problem that is meaningful to you and in doing so try to learn all the programming you need to know. It would be helpful to have a mentor of sorts, though. This approach is often taken by domain experts who have a problem, but are unable to get a solution due to bureaucracy, lack of funds, or there just is no suitable solution yet. The resulting programs might not be the best, from a programming point of view, but the value added is often very high.

* It is actually not quite clear what a junior programmer is or should be able to do. This depends on the expectations of the organization as well as their willingness to train good people. Usually organizations are looking for people who know enough to be productive fast without too much supervision, whereas novice programmers often need more one-on-one attention than organizations are willing to invest. As a result, novices are thrown in the deep end of the pool and those who can swim to the other end of the pool during their probation period are kept, the others are left to drown.

I have had a (paper) subscription to this and other quality news papers, but in my experience most of the content is news, opinion, sport / entertainment / culture, or advertisements / infotainment, and only a very small part I would consider to have journalistic depth. I would not mind paying for those articles, and I would even prefer they would extend these articles to a substantial read (say 1/3 the size of an average novel). However, somehow, newspapers keep holding on to the news paper model that exists since the late 19th century.

It might be interesting to include "pine" and "mutt" as well, as a baseline of mail clients that do not support HTML out of the box. (At least with mutt you can set it up to automatically render HTML emails via "w3m")

More importantly, though, I convinced all mail clients I use to just show plain text when viewing and writing my emails. Often there are HTML emails in which I do not see all the content, or content at all. For me this is nice because most HTML emails I get are spam, marketing related, or organizational nonsense.

I like the GDPR. Since its introduction, removing my account and data has gotten easy. More importantly, in my experience people and organizations have started to ask for (irrelevant) personal information less and less. Furthermore, I now can ask them why and for what they want that information and I get a reasonable answer or it appears they do not need it anyway. Before I often got answers like "That is required", "Everyone needs to do this", "This is a government regulation" (almost never true), or "Because the system needs it", and it was difficult to get out of under it.

Personally I also like the GDPR and cookie walls on websites. When I get one I cannot get rid off by clicking "Decline" or something, most often I decide to not use that website after all. I do not feel I am missing anything and I see a lot less crap during my internet searches.

Furthermore, if organizations are explicitly accepting penalties to keep on violating the law, that law will be adjusted accordingly. It might take a while, but it will happen. Laws with the intention to change behavior / culture cannot "work" from day one. This is a continuous process steered by politics, courts, governments, and public opinion.

> Anyone else have good luck with non-leather steel/composite toe lace up workboots?

As an alternative: I like to wear wooden clogs whenever I am working outside or doing some heavy lifting or other stuff around the house that might hurt my feet.