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Yes, crash landing into people, building, trees, and other traffic is a concern. But automation is not enough, we also need standardization and synchronization, because I am not looking forward to a future where the whole sky above a city is filled with random flying objects everywhere. That would be a mess, particularly around/over low-rise buildings, such as in villages, suburbs, and similar neighborhoods. Flying everywhere you want to go might make sense in either densely populated high-rise cities where you could fly and park your car at height, freeing the ground floors for pedestrians, cyclists, nature, recreation, and so on, or for sparse populated areas where there is no-one to be bothered anyway.

True, but usual you do not start with a large and successful software company. I think starting a small software company is much easier than getting a job at Google. However, growing a small company into a large and successful one will be significantly harder. If for nothing else, it will take much more time and effort.

If the state of public libraries is anything to go by, no. At least here in the Netherlands, most public libraries that are still open, have reduced their book shelf capacity in the past couple of years and added study spaces, conversation spaces, coffee corners, computer spaces, meeting spaces, and workshops to the menu.

The experience of going to the library now compared to 30 years ago when I was a kid is totally different. Then it was a quiet place with books, catalogues, a reading table, and maybe a computer or two. Now it is a social meeting place.

(What I do wonder is, what were the social meeting places of 30 years ago? Why is there a need for them now?)

Anyway, in my experience with university libraries, unless you know what you're doing research-wise, these libraries are not the most accessible for the outsider. There is a lot of information to wade through, and if you're unlucky, you have to order books you want from the archive/warehouse anyway, which can take from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Unless you can go to the library every day, you will have to plan your visit, search and request the books and materials you think you want beforehand, and hope for the best.

How I miss searching for hours or days in libraries and archives!

> Can you illustrate that in practice?

I have walked out of interviews as well. Sometimes the interviewer and I discover together that the recruiter we worked with didn't know their job, at all!

More often, though, it sort of was clear from the start of the interview that the company would not be a good fit for me. I would tell them so, and my reasons why I thought so, and leave after thanking them for their time.

If they ask me to do some simple programming task, I ask them if they have looked at my Github repository and what they think they will learn during the simple task they could not from my repository. If they do would have a good answer for that, for example they want to get to know my thought processes while coding, I am happy to oblige. But if they clearly have not looked at my Github repositories, nor have any inclination to customize the interview process, I tell that I do not believe in the validity of the process.

I have also walked away twice during the one-month trial period. Once the company was unable to find a project for me, even though they kept on promising there would be one for me soon. The other time I discovered I was unable to combine working full-time with finishing writing my PhD thesis.

Anyway, I also found that in half of the cases I walked out, the other party did understand and accepted why.

Of course, it is easy to walk away when you know you will find a job soon anyway and even if you would not you will get some support from the government anyway.

> The only pre-20thC buildings that remain are the ones that survive. The ones that survive are the ones we like and that are able to survive (not plywood and well built).

Unfortunately, the city I live in has been burned, bombed, or otherwise destroyed a couple of times since it became a city in the late middle ages. This destruction happened regardless of likeability or sturdiness of the buildings involved.

> But in a 1 day like the national championship I really do not think that such verbal agreements are valid at all.

That would be the case if each rider would have the same chance of winning and each rider would be there to win. However, for many riders, the national championship are not their main focus. They might be exhausted from a long program of races in the previous weeks and are not at their best. Or they might be preparing for other more important races in the coming weeks and are not yet on their best, for example when coming from a training camp at height, or are unwilling to take extra risks to prevent injury. And, of course, some races are better suited to certain riders than others.

All these factors mean that there are a lot of riders that know they aren't there to win, but would be willing to help another rider. For example, one who has helped him before, or a team mate, or one would could beat a rival, or one who is an underdog, and so on.

Awesome! I've had a lot of fun last year building my own "virtual botanical laboratory" in JavaScript (see https://heerdebeer.org/Software/virtual_botanical_laboratory...). It is based on the book "The algorithmic beauty of plants" by Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer (1990). Quite an interesting read. You can find that book on-line as a PDF here: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop )

It took me many a day at the local hacker space dedicated to building the software, but as it is so intriguing, I got a lot of comments and interest from other hackers as well. There's just something awesome about simulating life-like structures on a computer.

Although European cities do exists for way longer, for most cities, that's only true for the small city center. The larger newer parts have been built in about the same period as most USA cities: the 19th and 20th century. Since the 1940s the car has become the dominant mode of transportation in European cities as well, and particularly up till the early 1970s new city planning was quite car focused. You can still see that today by these large multi-lane roads through heavily populated areas in cities. But also a lot of industrial parks have been setup with only cars in mind. In the meanwhile these choices are in the process of being reverted by limiting through car traffic, adding bike lines, sidewalks, more green areas, and so on.

> Do people not have Black Widows where they live?

Nope. I think the most dangerous animal you'd encounter around here is the tick, which is related to the Lyme disease it might carry.

Nothing. It is quite common to do it like this here in the Netherlands. Of course, once we have a new employee and after a couple of months we think she is a great addition to the team, we will start negotiate for the permanent contract immediately.

Our team consists of experienced and above-average educated developers. We are not looking to attract that one 10x developer, nor do we desperately need a senior developer now. We sort of have too many senior level developers; our retention is high. Anyway, we are looking for similarly educated and experienced people that fit our team, and we offer a culture where such a person can thrive. We prefer to take a while longer to find and grow a great match rather than to gamble on potential talent that might leave again soon.

On the other hand, we do need new developers, particularly specialists, and we have gotten to the point that we are willing to take more risk. But the organization as a whole is still figuring out how to grow beyond a 10 person post-startup development team towards a 100+ person company (we merged with our biggest partner).

What's the difference? The intention of employing them is to offer them a permanent contract, but if things do not work out, firing people is hard. So, we almost always have three stages when we employ someone:

- one-month trial period - one-year contract - permanent contract

For senior people, the trial period is more of a formality as they are often quick to become productive in the organization. Of course, when after a couple of months it is discovered that the new senior and management do have a fundamental difference of opinion with regard to the future of the organization, professionally, or even personally, the end of the one-year contract is the moment to part ways. This can be initiated by employer, employee, or even both, but that depends on the situation.

True.

I've never been asked these kinds of "knowledge" questions in any interview. Nor have I asked them of any candidate. To me, interviewing is more about finding a fit to the company's and team's culture, than to ascertain if a candidate knows what she is supposed to know. Even if a candidate succeeds in bluffing her way through an interview, she will fall short in the one-month trial period.

I like the one-month trial period. I've walked away twice during the trial period from a company because they were a lot less organized than they did appear during the interviews. Similarly, we have let go of a couple of employees during their one-month trial because they were unable to learn fast enough or were too arrogant.

For these type of task, pandocomatic supports preprocessors, postprocessors, filters, setup scripts, and cleanup scripts in its templates.

For your specific issue, and this is a general pandoc solution, filters with side effects could work. For example, you can write a filter that would extract and inspect the metadata and writes it to to an RSS XML file.

In Paru¹, the Ruby wrapper and interface to pandoc, a very naive solution could look like:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    require "paru/filter"
    require "rss"

    RSS_FILE = "my-rss-file.rss"

    title = "No title"
    date = Time.now.to_s

    # Collect metadata information while filtering a document with pandoc
    Paru::Filter.run do 
        title = metadata["title"] if metadata.has_key? "title"
        date = metadata["date"] if metadata.has_key? "date"
    end

    # Create new Atom item
    new = RSS::Maker.make("atom") do |maker|
        maker.channel.author = maker.channel.about = maker.channel.title = ""
        maker.channel.updated = Time.now.to_s

        maker.items.new_item do |item|
            item.title = title
            item.updated = date
            item.link = "Some link"
        end
    end

    # Add new item to existing Atom RSS feed
    rss = RSS::Parser.parse(File.read(RSS_FILE), false)
    rss.items.concat new.items
    File.write(RSS_FILE, rss)

(My apologies for the bad code, this is my first attempt at working with RSS/Atom)

¹ https://heerdebeer.org/Software/markdown/paru/#writing-and-u...

I am using pandocomatic¹ to generate my website. It uses pandoc² to convert all kinds of input files to HTML output and pandocomatic is controlling that conversion. Applying it to a directory it converts, copies, or skip everything recursively given a flexible templating system. In the end, it gives me total control over the output and I have started using it for all my websites.

¹ Manual: https://heerdebeer.org/Software/markdown/pandocomatic/ ² https://pandoc.org/

Sure. But I was more thinking about people who directly work indirectly for the government, such as cleaners who work for a company that has them clean (the same) government offices (all the time). There are a lot of similar supporting services that have been privatized and "out-sourced" to external companies but which employees are practically working for the government.

> Why do we have to only get to calculus or pre-calculus concepts so late and why is it so extreme like it is all or nothing?

I agree. I did some research on teaching the concept of instantaneous speed to 5th graders. Building on their intuitive understanding—from a young age on we are continuously confronted with dynamic systems such as (loco)motion, weather, computer games, cooking, and so on—and connecting to their understanding of a constant speed, I devised a learning trajectory to explore and deepen their understanding of instantaneous speed more mathematically, including quantifying it.

If anyone is interested, you can read more about it here: https://heerdebeer.org/DR/thesis/ch5.html

Our hacker space has been meeting for years now. We are guests at the office of a foundation that is doing work related to art, design, society, and technology outside of their office hours. This makes the space very affordable.

Twice a week we open the space for visitors and regular participants. We try to be as open as possible; everyone is welcome to join up whenever they feel like it. There are no restrictions regarding participation or contribution. If people want to, they can make a small donation but it isn't required. At our meetings there is free coffee, tea, and beer, but everyone is welcome to bring other stuff as well. Donations in the form of drinks or food or tools are also welcome.

We have about 15 participants that show up regularly, and about 50 or so that show up now and then. I think we have had a couple of 100 visitors that did not return or only once or so, particularly when we organise special events.

Basically, people just show up and start working on their own projects. Somehow we have trouble starting communal projects, probably because it is up to the hackers themselves to keep it going or not. We try to create some sort of free-style atmosphere where everything can be supported, but there is no pressure to perform or finish. Most often, when a couple of hackers show up, it becomes more of a social gathering than a work place. That is always a nice end of the evening.

Furthermore, we also support other like-minded clubs to have their meetings at our space for free--we also have a large canteen, and a couple of meeting rooms. We have collected about four separate clubs that meet up about once a month or so. This is great as it results in some sort of cross-pollination.

After a couple of years we created an official foundation to make renting and paying things easier. It has a board, which has one board meeting a year of about an hour or two. So, bureaucratically, it does not take much time.

I am hosting a hacker space twice a week, on Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon. Although these are certainly social events, I do make sure to spend at least half my time there working on one of my free software projects. As an added bonus I can tell our guests all about it while working on it.

It does not matter if I am unable to finish a task, because I'll be working on it during the next hacker space meetup. Yes, oftentimes it is slow going, particularly when we're having fun, but it gives me two clear structured time slots a week to work on my projects.

> Anyone can fire-up a word processor and produce interesting looking documents and flyers.

Actually, even this is harder than it seems. Having worked as a teacher, I saw many teacher create their own materials. They created handouts, pamphlets, worksheets, exams, short instructional materials, and some even whole text books. Compared to profession stuff from publishers, these self-made artifacts were often awful. The artifacts worked, of course, but typesetting, layout, illustrations, printing, and editing were almost always sub-par.

The most common example of this was trying to fit a worksheet or exam on one sheet A4, printed on both sides. As a result, my colleagues and I chose to use smaller fonts, smaller margins, decreased image size, less whitespace, and so on. Over-all, we ignored the intended readers (also known as our students), and focused on secondary matters such as ease of distribution.

On the other hand, where these instructional artifacts did shine was with respect to their practical applicability and usefulness because they were custom made (by the teacher) to fit a very specific situation (their classroom). Which is why readily available computers, software, and printers are such a powerful and awesome tool for a teacher.

I've also a web interface at https://heerdebeer.org/Software/symbol2unicode/converter.htm...

I've created the program symbol2unicode¹ for that. You can enter ascii representations of a symbol, say ->, and you get the unicode symbol (→). It has a CLI interface and a web interface. I keep it always around in a terminal tab and made some Vim binding as well.

¹https://github.com/htdebeer/symbol2unicode

No (and yes). I think that if foreigners are motivated to integrate in the local society and culture, they will find a way to do fine. If that motivation isn't there, I doubt any of these cultural courses and workshops will help much. On the other hand, I do think many if not all people do know that integrating is hard, so a course/workshop/self-help book/whatever will be attractive. Therefore, yes, here lies a business opportunity.

Well, if taken out of context supplied by the author of the article, "This is not your word" could be interpreted as an observation that there is a phrase that does not fit the style of writing of the piece as a whole. That would make it constructive criticism.

Agreed. And I would even go a step further. Most often ed (tech) companies focus on education as opposed to learning. It is all about efficiency, organization, administration, and improving conventional education or schooling processes rather than improving the learning processes of the student.

> I'd be curious about scenarios like: > > - Practice identifying the semantic bug in a 20 line snippet of code. How effectively would practicing this help a person identify real bugs in actual code?

For a couple of years I've been a high school computer science teacher. Having 50 students making the same errors over and over, made me very good at spotting syntactical errors in other people's code. Furthermore, I was also able to easily identify "beginners' bad patterns", which are basically the inverse of the usual best practices. The downside of this was that some students tried to use me as a human compiler/linter because I was seemingly able to spot the problematic areas in their code in almost no time at all. Of course, at such moments I had been monitoring their progress for some time. Nevertheless, it helped me enormously to support my students in learning to debug their own code because I could have them reflect on their own practices and design choices.

Just an anecdote.

I do not disagree with you on humanities' progression in SG1, but I'd think that all these mayor shifts in technological advancement would have been better explored in separate series rather than in one big swooping race to the max.

For example how Star Trek explored early space exploration in Enterprise (sans time traveling shenanigans), another era in the original series, and another one in The new generation and DS9 and Voyager.

I do like the stargate universe, the Atlantis spin-off in particular, and I would like to see more of it. Maybe they can set a new series in, say, 100 years from the ending of SG1. Or maybe it is time to move on to fresh ideas. I liked the universe of The Expanse, for example, and am looking forward how they can move it forward.

(I was less happy about the Dark Matter universe, or rather the story told in it, for example: one small ship with a small crew holding the balance and future of the entire (known) universe in their hands is a bit too much for me.)

That is the thing about (good) teachers: they have a lot of pedagogical content knowledge (Fachdidaktik). They know what questions to ask to what student at what time in her learning process. They know what examples, metaphors, strategies, and so on, might work for certain students or situations. They understand the individual nature of a student's learning process and are able to fit their teaching to best guide a student towards deepening their understanding and reaching a learning goal. That is also what makes teaching hard and it is not easily learned or taught either. A teacher not only needs a good understanding of the topic herself, but she also needs expertise teaching the topic, and manage the students and the classroom pedagogically sound to boot.

Agreed. Just tell a good story, take the time it needs, and be done. In my opinion, long-lived series tend to become repetitive and formulaic, escalate beyond measure because somehow there always has to be a new bigger bad (I am looking at you Stargate SG1) or more trumped up storyline. I understand the appeal to keep on going as long as it makes (a lot of) money. But as an appreciator of a good story I just move on to a fresh idea.

Dijkstra worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum (mathematics center) in the 1950s. He was responsible for most of the systems programming of three subsequent machines that were build and used there. His PhD dissertation (1959) was on the operating system he wrote for the Electrologica X1 computer that was being built by the first Dutch computer industry Electrologica.

They're bikes. Good to get from a to b like any other bike.

During my daily commute from and to work I think about one in ten I pass / pass me is an electric motor supported bike. It seems that mostly elderly people are riding them, but more and more people under 50 are using them as well.

Note that e-bikes here are normal bikes with an electric motor to assist the cyclist to keep a (slightly faster than) normal pace. Personally, I dislike the e-bikes who behave like mopeds/scooters and go 30km/h or more because they're dangerous. Especially on bike path given the difference in speed between regular cyclists and these electric monsters.