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teach

3,703 karma · joined August 15, 2007

I am Graham Mitchell, a software engineer in Austin, TX. I am also the author of the books "Learn Java the Hard Way" and "Learn Object-Oriented Java the Hard Way".

https://keybase.io/grahammitchell

Prior to becoming a developer, I spent twenty years (1997-2017) teaching Computer Science at Leander High School.

It is (or was, at least -- I haven't looked since I left) a pretty good school; consistently ranked near the top 5% of public schools nationally. I had a lot of students who were exceptional but most of my students were regular kids with no particular aptitude for programming. I taught over 2000 students.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/grahammitchell; my proof: https://keybase.io/grahammitchell/sigs/fFa_yO52UWi27swZ6hzR5gE-KWge1dNmSFxSgl5Jl10 ]

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teach··on A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals
Big if true.
teach··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for).

Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.

teach··on Predictive intelligence to anticipate anything.
Wow, spoiler alert thanks a lot
teach··on Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
Story aside, I'm most concerned with how closing a laptop "deleted" the lesson plan! It's hard to imagine how that could occur, and I've worked with a lot of people who aren't very technical.
teach··on Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
It is Signal, yes
teach··on Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
It's like an internship that people do when they are thinking about becoming teachers. Usually it is a university student who is just finishing up their coursework on teaching, and they spend ~8 weeks or so working under an existing, credentialed classroom teacher in a public school. It lets them practice working with real students under more experienced supervision.

They are not paid for it, and it's a required part of their training.

teach··on Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux
This is very different from Beeper or BlueBubbles.

Tether is "merely" talking to your iPhone over bluetooth and the local network. It does nothing if you don't already have an iPhone. Apple should have no more reason to come after this than it does a Garmin watch that can show your iMessages via bluetooth.

teach··on The risks of AI are real but manageable (2023)
This page fails to load for me (Firefox on MacOS with UBlock Origin AND DNS-level pi-hole adblock)

https://www.gatesnotes.com/search-reader?readerfocus=the-ris...

This link works, though

teach··on Trial is 40 days. Not until you're 40
I paid for WinZip and for Paint Shop Pro and used them a bunch in the late 90s. But I switched to Linux in the early aughts and by then the free software versions had caught up sufficiently that I didn't really need to pay for software for a while.

I do pay for Sublime Text these days.

teach··on Don't Wordle
The original version of Wordle was purchased by the NYT and then Josh took down his copy, so there's no canonical "non-NYT" version anymore.
teach··on I Just Want to Search
I have the same complaint but with Facebook Dating (yes, of course that's a thing). The app itself is less enshittified (so far) than many other dating apps (thanks, Match Group) but the filtering is just dumb.

"Hey FB I live in a major city and don't want to match with anyone further than 25 miles away" okay here are a bunch of matches from cities 200 miles away

"Hey FB I don't want to match 'as friends' because what even is that" okay cool we'll make sure to ignore that

Pretty sure this was written by an intern for their summer project. At least it's free.

And I guess I'm still on there, so maybe FB knows what they're doing

teach··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Actually I think this is more of a culture thing. Or maybe "is also" a culture thing.

One of the core tenets of early Go was the maxim "a little copying is better than a little dependency".

Probably because of this stance, they didn't even HAVE a dependency-management solution for years

I strongly agree the fewer dependencies the better, on average.

teach··on Spaghettifying DRAM
The explanation that appears in this repo seems largely LLM-generated. It's punchy, to be sure, but I wouldn't call it CLEAR

I had to look at the comments here to understand what was going on

So maybe he USED to explain things well, but that's not on display

teach··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
Quelle surprise!
teach··on Bulldozers Plow Through Big Bend National Park, Sparking Fury in Texas
"Texas isn't a red state; it's a gerrymandered one." - a pre-LLM aphorism
teach··on Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
Okay, that's an interesting complaint and I can understand it. For me, the title is QUITE clear.

There's a very strong narrative in the zeitgeist that "no one" is hiring entry level jobs anymore because they're being replaced with AI. There's some pretty solid hiring data for CS grads, at least, that backs this up, even when controlling for the down economy as a whole.

So the first part "Not hiring junior engineers" is very clear. Whatever this blog post is, it's a message to companies that are making these hiring decisions.

Then, the rest follows: "<that thing you're doing> won't work". It won't solve the problem you think you have.

Now that I've got your perspective, it IS possible for me to force my brain to incorrectly parse the title in a way that produces word salad, so I guess I can get it.

I had all the context I needed to easily grok it at first glance. The intended audience of the article (people who are deciding to hire fewer junior engineers) ALSO probably have that context. But it's not hard for me to believe that there are lots of people even on HN that didn't!

Thanks for clarifying

teach··on Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
I agree with the sibling comment and also don't understand how the title is "offensive". I literally can't think of anything that could be offensive about any term in the title or the title as a whole.
teach··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
Grand Theft Auto VI looks complex, but underneath it's all just ones and zeros and NAND
teach··on Em dashes are amazing
May stick to certain types of skin
teach··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
It could! An MCP would actually be great but Slack would prefer to sell us their own AI integration product so (1) they make it difficult and more importantly (2) it's against their terms of service

We pay them a LOT of money every year and they would absolutely notice the indexing at the level we'd need to do to make this work ourselves, so the answer is "because Slack is preventing us".

teach··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
Slack's approach is NOT good enough, because the version of the Agent that lives in Slack cannot see the context of the Agent that lives inside Cursor on my developer laptop. They might be clones with identical brains, but they can't talk to each other or compare notes.
teach··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
Just my two-cents as a very much boots-on-the-ground infrastructure engineer. We use LLMs heavily on my team -- to write code and review PRs. Our harnesses and guardrails are very very good so we get extremely high-quality output out of most models.

But getting the humans and agents to talk together is really fragmented right now. It's annoying that the agent with the context in my locally-installed Cursor can't really participate in a Slack conversation about a PR that 'it' principally authored (and which I've signed off on).

This is a real communication problem that we face every day, and eventually someone will solve it well and I will ask our leadership to give them a lot of money.

teach··on As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
This is a good clarification but I think the core issue is that Spotify (and Apple Music and Amazon Music and probably others) have chosen a business model in which consumers can listen to basically everything and yet artists do not get paid. The rightsholders suffer too yet they are complicit.

This business model ALWAYS outcompetes any other, and can't be "fixed" imo, because no one will pay per-stream or pay $50 a month.

teach··on As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
I think this is a false dichotomy. There's no reason "all music is paid only" is the only option besides the all-you-can-stream for one monthly fee popularized by Spotify.

For example, the other day I discovered a local artist on Instagram. I went to her Bandcamp page and was able to listen to some tracks for free with zero friction. I ended up purchasing the deluxe vinyl, and it was one of my favorite albums that came out last year.

I've done similar with the radio. I went from hearing a track on the radio to purchasing the album on Bandcamp in like ten minutes.

Spotify and the like CAN help with discovery, sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with their business model.

teach··on As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
This article is from 2011. Noisetrade was a very cool site for several years, but I don't think it's still operational.
teach··on The lost joy of music piracy
I agree with you that you are never "forced" to pirate; you can simply not listen to the missing album.

But many many many many excellent albums are not available for sale anywhere at any price. They essentially do not exist, except in the hands of a few collectors.

The bands themselves, the creators of said music, want their music to be heard.

The fact that they aren't available for sale or streaming is often because a rich bureaucrat can't be bothered, not for any legal reason.

teach··on AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
Although I generally agree with you, it's really hard to make the case that it's not all-or-nothing for him when he literally says

> we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t

teach··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
You're entitled to call things as you wish, of course, but your definition of "vibe-coding" differs quite a bit from mine.
teach··on CarPlay Is Additive
Cars have had remote start with the ability to cool down (or warm up) the car before getting into them for decades before the Tesla was ever invented.
teach··on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense
(2012)
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