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shinjitsu

103 karma · joined October 11, 2019

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shinjitsu··on Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness
I think also the ridiculous nature of the automobile market is a significant secondary problem in the US. When the median new vehicle is $49000 and the median annual salary (pretax) is ~$65,000 that isn't sustainable.
shinjitsu··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
I actually require the book the Jon Bodner was talking about in a class I teach every couple of years. The students who do well (the ones you would want to hire) will read it, the others will skim or try to summarize it
shinjitsu··on Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
Patrick Santore - he worked there sometime in the mid-late 1980s
shinjitsu··on Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)
How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...
shinjitsu··on Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
How big was the Franklin back then? My uncle worked there in the 1980s, but I was a kid and have no concept of if it was a scappy startup or a midsized company.
shinjitsu··on Are We Idiocracy Yet?
As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.
shinjitsu··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
>Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made famous by Zuck starting out.

and before that is was hippies with "Don't trust anyone over 30" which became deeply ingrained in at least American culture.

shinjitsu··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
Sometimes people who are able to talk a lot do quite well in interviews - and University students need to be exposed to a wide variety of topics, but rarely support large projects for a long time, so that wouldn't be something that would come up in an interview.
shinjitsu··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
So Thundarr the Barbarian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw

shinjitsu··on Are US EV sales a disaster or a booming segment? The answer may be both
Right you are - if cheap was all that matter the Yugo would have been everywhere https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a21082360/a-quick-hist...
shinjitsu··on Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?
My parents were public school teachers for decades. When our oldest son was getting to be school aged they recommended that we homeschool because as they said "It is nothing like when you went to school".

When I met an old high school classmate who is a public school teacher in the district we both live in (300 miles away from where we grew up), she also said something similar.

shinjitsu··on Gen Z is lonely. Going back to the office may be the cure for some
large cities seeing erosion of their tax base are also hiring PR firms I think
shinjitsu··on SCOTUS to decide if public officials can block critics online
Well The local governor of Hawaii used twitter to cancel a missile alert - so it isn't that wild an idea

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/23/16923080/hawaii-governor-...

shinjitsu··on 13 States join the IRS direct-file test after tax prep firms dropped the ball
Now if only they could do something like this for states. Some of the high pop high tax states are far worse to file for than the feds.
shinjitsu··on X.org Alternatives? MicroXWin, Wayland, Y, DFB, Xynth, Fresco, etc. (2009)
Wayland has struck me for years as being the new IPv6, the tech that the deep technical people tell me needs to come and replace the old thing that "doesn't work any more" and yet never quite takes over.

maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?

shinjitsu··on I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)
Was the one who got tenure the one who brought in bigger grants? Unfortunately in the R1 Universities these days that is probably the most important thing, even more than your academic family tree https://academictree.org/
shinjitsu··on Are the Americans Awake?
>then I'd argue Maine should be in -4.5 instead of -5. Maine knows it should be in Atlantic, it just doesn't want to be more isolated from the rest of the country than it already is https://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-a...
shinjitsu··on Brazil develops tropical wheat and predicts self-sufficiency in 5 years
An interesting take on this. Will it lead to a general increase for the Global South?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKvT7OS-lbU

shinjitsu··on CodeWeavers Now Controlled by an Employee Ownership Trust
I was a subscriber 10-15 years ago, but I used steam/proton now, I wonder how large the market for something like codeweavers is in 2023?
shinjitsu··on Ask HN: Which tech podcasts would you recommend to a friend?
Command line heroes was amazing, I was bummed they ended - but I guess they did cover a lot. (https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes)

I'm also a big fan of Coder Radio (https://coder.show/) Tagline: "taking a pragmatic look at the art and business of Software Development" They called the layoffs and salary adjustments happening now back in April 2021

If you want to look at software from a non-coastal US perspective (and don't mind occasional [or in early episodes not-so-occsional] profanity) I like Friday afternoon deploy (https://friday.hirelofty.com/)

I also was to second the Go Time recommendation from another post (https://changelog.com/gotime) - while it is Go focused more often than not, in recent months they've done show on intellectual property, tech horror stories and code maintenance

shinjitsu··on Ask HN: What was being a software developer like about 30 years ago?
emm386 Error #06

And a subscription to the Microsoft knowledge base which came on CD (in addition to the books others have talked about)

And I vaguely remember that the debugger inserted itself between DOS and windows, when meant that it could bring crash windows if something went wrong.

Fun, but slower than today.

shinjitsu··on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu
I've loved ubuntu for a while as well, but snaps are making me want something new - any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?
shinjitsu··on What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of employees since there is an assumption in most states that very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.
shinjitsu··on I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
This works fine for research universities, but in teaching universities (couldn't find the statistics, but there are a lot of them out there) someone has to subsidize the new STEM programs until the alumni start giving grants. In my experience, a lot more STEM alumni give large donations than humanities and social sciences. But that does mean a bigger initial outlay by someone.
shinjitsu··on Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth into own ear to cheat in final
In my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.
shinjitsu··on More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
Unfortunately a lot of this is because many faculty of 'liberal arts' colleges/universities believe "we are here to give an education and open student's minds and broaden their horizons" but even more often I have heard "liberal arts are not intended to be job training institutions"

so it is a much easier sell a creative writing major in a faculty senate or something similar than Aircraft Maintenance. And when you do get Aircraft Maintenance it usually gets tucked into the engineering or business schools in order to survive.

also: https://thedispatch.com/p/we-are-less-educated-than-we-think

shinjitsu··on Skimpflation: A reason inflation is worse than the government says it is
The issue here is that for most people (as opposed to highly paid tech workers) these items are all luxury items that are rarely replaced, as opposed to food and energy which are necessities of life. I know a number of university students who are using 4-6 year old laptops to do their work. The fact that they can get a better laptop for the same money is irrelevant because they are spending that money on things like gas to get to classes and work.
shinjitsu··on It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage
>If they have a small mom and pop company that cannot pay workers at least $50,000, then they need to go out of business.

wow, this site really does skew toward coastal cities in the US doesn't it? $50k a year is a high end white collar salary enough to buy a (often significantly) better than median home on a single salary and enough to be considered in the upper 25% income for most of the places I have lived.

I think one of the biggest problems in politics in the US is that we have such a diversity of experience and needs in this country and most politicians (and perhaps voters) think that the solutions that are best for their local area are actually good for the whole country - when in most cases the experience across millions of people and thousands of miles from rural to dense urban is so different that almost no nation wide solution is very good.

shinjitsu··on It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage
Especially families with children- now we are talking $8+ a meal at a time in life when people are very price sensitive.
shinjitsu··on What is ‘elite overproduction’?
>One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common >with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would >expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest

the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.

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