professoretc

I've done open-everything exams (just no collaboration) and my experience was that it didn't change the mean grade, but it did increase the standard deviation. Students who were already mostly on top of the material could look things up and double-check their work, so their scores improved. Meanwhile, students who didn't really know what they needed to spent the whole time trying to find "the answer" in the book or online (and that's not the way programming tests work!), so in the end they either left the answer blank or put something totally nonsensical, copy-pasted off the internet. In a closed-book test, they would have at least tried to figure it out on their own, and maybe gotten a few partial-credit points.

The housing bubble popped right after a tow truck driver told me he was getting his realtor's license.

Same here, because I wanted to feel like I was on Star Trek. Although it can get confused, given that I teach computer science and talk about it a lot.

Just because Alexa is not human doesn't mean I have to discard my humanity when I interact with it.

Technically, it's neither. Unless your programming language directly supports ECS, you're not going to be implementing the relationship between entities and components as either proper inheritance or a collection of data members, because neither of those can be changed dynamically.

> They iterate over one hash map in a linear way which is fast, but then they do a bunch of slow lookups like GP is saying.

Usually all but the most simple "systems" will need to access more than one component, which means you have a choice between a) store component data in regular arrays (and potentially waste huge amounts of space if relatively few entities have those components) or b) store component data in some kind of hash table (and then you use cache locality for all but the "primary" component of a system).

ECS is really just OOP with dynamic multiple inheritance: an object can inherit from multiple base "classes" (with "components" providing the data and "systems" providing the code) and this inheritance structure can be changed at runtime, by adding/removing components. Everything else (struct-of-arrays vs. array-of-structs) is just low-level implementation details.

When I implemented a variation on ECS for a game I'm building, I did exactly as you suggest, re, message passing: components receive and respond to messages but their implementation is hidden.

> What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago?

Perhaps we should be asking, what subjects are we failing to be introspective about now, that will fall into this category 10, 20, 30 years in the future?

I use the Nvidia card on my P50 with Linux (Mint) and the results are... OK. The biggest problem is that when it resumes from suspend, about 50% of the time it forgets that there are external monitors connected. Sometimes it forgets both (falling back to the laptop panel), sometimes it forgets one or the other. Sometimes it enables both, but forgets to apply the rotation, so the positioning is all weird. I have to re-enable and re-position both external monitors, and then move all my windows around to where they're supposed to be.

From the article:

> How is it so easy to “lose” your data in a system that’s supposed to never lose your data?

I think the author is mistaken; git isn't "a system that’s supposed to never lose your data". One of its features is the ability to "lose" data in a controlled way; i.e., to rewrite history. If you want a version control that is supposed to never lose data, use Fossil.

And the reason why we have prop 13 is because there was a period in which housing values in California increased dramatically, and we literally had seniors having to sell the homes they'd lived in for decades, because they couldn't afford the newly-assessed property taxes.

> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no

> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam

> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.

Banks don't like holding cash (because it doesn't belong to them, and could be withdrawn at any time). So it's actually the opposite: they pay for the privilege of not having to hold onto that cash.

I wrote a parser for a DSL using ANTLR about ten-ish years ago, and it was an incredibly painful experience. There's very little freely-available documentation for ANTLR, most of it is just "buy my book". ANTLR doesn't know anything about the language it's targeting (not even Java), so if you name a rule e.g., `while` the generated code will be filled with errors, because it names the parser functions after the rules. The graphical tools for building parsers are cool, except that many advanced things can only be done by adding actual code to the parser rules, which the graphical tool does not support (and how could it?) so you're back at square one.

I was at OPLSS[0] in 2018 and Enzo Alda gave a talk/demo on ZenSheets, his in-progress reactive spreadsheet thing where you could write lambdas in the cells, call them in formulas from other cells, etc. That talk wasn't recorded, but a similar demo can be found here.[1]

[0]: https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer18

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJa0_gKE6xo

I've made his Spanish tortilla once a month or so since that video came out... However, I once dropped the whole thing in the sink while doing the "flip". (Maneuvering a hot cast iron pan isn't easy.) I've never felt more disappointed in myself than I did at that moment; I was making it for breakfast and I basically just turned the stove off and went back to bed. So now I'm always a bit wary when I start on it, knowing that it has the power to destroy me psychologically.

I'm not familiar with the standard Go coding style. Does it correctly handle the case mentioned above, where you have a function call like

    connect(option1,
            option2,
            option3);

That is, will the spaces from the column `connect` starts in be preserved as spaces, or will they be converted to tabs?

Blind taste tests have found that organic tastes no different from non-organic.

char* is a allowed to alias to other pointer types.

I feel like a lot of the issues surrounding Git spring from its original insistence that the git repo exist in a subdirectory of your source directory, meaning that you can't have multiple checkouts in different directories. (I'm aware that you can do this now, with worktrees, but those are yet another distinct concept!) If the repo existed somewhere outside of your source directory, then a) the stash just becomes another directory (or directories), and b) so does the staging area. You could do anything with them (e.g., build, test) that you could do with any other directory of files.

> git wasn't created as a general solution to version control, but for the specific needs of Linux kernel development.

This is an instance of a more general problem in all software development: tools are created usually to serve a purpose, but when they become popular they end up being used, not because they're a good fit for the problem, but because they're popular -- everybody knows how to use them. The tradeoff (which may be worth making) is the time to learn a new tool vs. the continual cost of using a tool that's not quite right for what you're doing.

Same here when I was younger (i.e., less fat). With a full breath of air in me, I'd float, but exhale a bit and I could sink to the bottom of a 12 ft pool without any effort on my part.

> writing code would be trivial or even could be automatically generated (there are UML tools that can generate code)

Ironically, a lot of documentation systems now do the opposite: take your code and produce UML diagrams from it.

If the email mentioned particular students by name then that in and of itself is a violation (at least in California). We're absolutely not supposed to share any student performance information with anyone other than the student, without permission.

I give regular online exams without any protoring software, pure honor system. I have three students who live together who consistently turn in identical work. What I don't understand is why the keep doing it, when I keep giving them 0s for copying.

> actual work for the teaching staff

It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.

Our realtor was great... because he wasn't really a realtor. His fulltime job was as a DA, he just did the realty stuff on the side, so he didn't really need the commission. It seemed like he was showing us houses just because that's what realtors are supposed to do, but he was great when we found our house looking on our own.

> I used to love Sublime Text but it looks like it hasn't received much dev input recently

I think the devs are putting their effort into ST4 while unfortunately letting 3 somewhat languish. The same thing happened with the 2 -> 3 transition; 2 sat around without getting any updates for a long while, and then 3 was released.

> (professor suspended for saying a Chinese word mistaken for the epithet, in context that clearly identified what he was saying, on video)

It's even more ironic: he was teaching a class on international communication, and used it as an example of how you shouldn't jump to judgment of people from other cultures/languages. Cue his students doing just that.

> Why are people (students, faculty) playing along with that?

From the faculty perspective: lack of time to do anything else. Writing good test questions (questions that require synthesis of multiple topics and not just regurgitation) is hard, takes a lot of time, and may not even be possible in some introductory classes. Looking for cheaters after the fact is time consuming, too. I have to pay for a Chegg account out of my own pocket, and then keep it open whenever I do my grading, to look for solutions to my own questions.

That said, I steadfastly refuse to use Lockdown or Protorio or any of the other "solutions" my school offers; the downsides are simply too great. If I end up passing a few people who cheated their way to an A, that's a price I'm willing to pay.