throwawayjava

For starters, using patents as a proxy for innovation is dubious at best. Patents are a terrible proxy for innovation. My own experience has been the inverse: organizations/individuals that patenting shit lots of shit are consistently the least inventive. Not sure if this was true in the early 20th century, but it certainly is today.

At most private Universitues, only suckers pay full sticker price.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-report...

Except for a few ultra elite institutions, colleges mostly resemble high schools -- they rely on some combination of public funding and donations, take most applicants, and are happy to just keep the lights on.

There are 5,300 colleges in the USA. Most of those take nearly all comers, don't look anything like the ivies, and would have to shut down without somewhat regular infusions from donors. Most of those 5300 have 70+% acceptance rates, and a 70% acceptance rate basically means you're admitting everyone who could reasonably be expected to make it through the first semester of watered down 100 level courses.

The alternatives that are profitable aren't much better. E.g. the coding boot camps tech folks like to champion charge for 3-6 months of very narrow instruction what their public branch campus counterparts charge for several years of instruction. And, when it gets down to it, are mostly a way for VC firms to vertically integrate worker training programs for the rest of their portfolio.

Educating people is expensive and the people who need the education almost by definition do not have the means to pay for it.

Also, econ/fin/law makes more even at undergrad only institutions. It's a perception thing with admin. ESPECIALLY at those places, until institutions pay CS profs market wages, stay away unless you want to wake up when you're 60 and realize you can't afford to retire like all your grad school friends and so can't spend as much time as you'd like with your grandkids because you're teaching courses every semester.

But, yeah, the delta between econ/law and CS faculty salaries is why I turned down TT offers and went to industry.

They can pay. They're choosing not to.

It's the mid and low ranked schools who are facing competitive pressures from alternative options.

Quite ironic ;-p

s/clicks/listeners and the basic business model has been going strong for just a little over a century.

s/clicks/circulation and the basic business model has been going strong for at least a few centuries now.

So, never. Or, more accurately, in about 20 years when "clicking" becomes an anachronism and someone will make this comment except it'll be: "s/taps/clicks and this has been going on for half a century"

Whether it's banks or other taxpayers or recipients of other entitlement programs is, I guess, a bit of a red herring wrt the point I was trying to make.

The question is about the knock-on effects of squeezing an entire generation for some chunk of what they're worth before they even enter the job market.

Again, I think the K-12 analogy is the best way of communicating the point I'm trying to make. Why don't we also charge high school students $10K @ 4% instead of paying for high school through taxes? Well, because that would be a huge net negative for society.

> Also most stem phds work as researchers and teachers--they generally aren't paying tuition.

I have a stem phd :). I was referring to the huge opportunity cost re: delayed earnings. US students opting out of phds because they have huge student debt to service is a real thing. This is true even when the phd would undoubtedly increase lifetime earnings (e.g., students from no-name schools turning down CMU/MIT/Berkeley/Standford phd acceptance letters for mid five figure salaries).

Maybe the same reason we know have people poo-pooing the modern computer age -- moore's law for decades, the modern software stack, the internet, etc. -- as not amazing innovation. And down playing the role all of that has played in everything else humans now do from satellite systems to sequencing the genome. They think that because their interactions with computers are mostly mindless that modern computing must have been no great feat to build.

The full paragraph you quote starts with:

"In this article, I try to explain in detail where Frank Herbert got his names, concepts, and words from."

I'm not sure that "but you didn't read the whole book/series!" qualifies as a reasonable critique of someone who's just giving some (AFAICT straight-forward) etymological background on a few names and concepts...

Also, HN is not some high arbiter of taste. It's just a voting-based algorithm, and the population of voters isn't that large. A re-statement of your question might be: "so why did 60 random internet people click on this at around the same time?", and the answer might be "because there were 60 people who like dune, happened to be on hn around the time this was posted, and don't know much about islam/arabic" :)

1. Future reward should be discounted, usually by a fairly large constant, because of interest and risk. Also, in many fields, most of those extra hundreds will come toward the end of a career. So, highly discounted.

2. I wonder if it's really a good idea to set up a society where banks that provide educational loans are able to capture huge percentages of future productivity. Seems like this would have all sorts of really negative outcomes. Some of those negative outcomes are already happening -- e.g., we effectively import 90+% of our scientific human capital because US students aren't willing to do phds.

We realize that allowing financiers to capture a big chunk of the rewards for K-12 ed is a bad idea. Why don't we realize that the same is true for college?

There are lots of very large Coq code bases that work just fine with code extraction. Scalability of extraction isn't the problem.

Is it really true that TLA scales to large programs? Why isn't there a Compcert in TLA? Why isn't there a Flyspec in TLA? And how about stuff like CertiGrad, where just the spec is pretty involved?

My impression has always been that Coq/HOL scale and TLA-style systems break down once your spec gets big enough (let alone the impl).

Go out and interview folks running non-profits, research labs, churches, health clinics, legal clinics, schools, anyone else who fits into your colleges definition of "community around us".

From those interviews, build a large list of project-sized problem/solution statments for future groups of students. Include skills needed, points of contact, possible adoption challenges, etc. Validate those project descriptions with the people you interview.

Identifying and describing problems that need to be solved and what it means to solve them is something lots of people build careers around

Find one with a restaurant on the bottom floor and you're done.

It'll cost close to 5K/mo all in for decent square footage. That's before food, which will probably run around 50/day at least. Still very achievable on a dev salary in a major market, as long as you don't make any other expensive life decisions (i.e., children). Not what I would spend my money on, but certainly an option if it's what you want

2. Tech workers help pay a lot of that tab by working in productive sectors that generate the profits needed to keep the war industry going.

3. A very tiny percentage of the service members are ever deployed. Of those, only a tiny percentage ever see combat. Those that don't see combat are paid very well for their time. Why does this matter? Because $686 BILLION pays for a lot of software engineers.

IMO: if the military needs more technical expertise, then:

1. Get good management! Open up leadership positions to non-officers or, god forbid, civilians. No more officers who majored in Theology at bible colleges or History at an academy running "Cyber" teams. The business world stopped hiring blank slate MBAs to manage software projects a LONG time ago. Time for the military to catch up.

2. Especially in the Army, stop running pointless rural jobs programs and reallocate that headcount to salaries for skilled professionals in more productive locales.

We're spending 680 BILLION employing enormous numbers of people to run around in circles (sometimes literally). There's more than enough money to pay people for their work and more than enough patriotic talent willing to take the jobs. What's needed is competent management and headcount.

Mathematics is a very general tool. As with any very general tool, a lot of the devil is in the details of how to use it in any particular domain.

For this reason, in-sourcing mathematics service courses is best for everyone. The very best math-adjacent departments in every field tend to do this either directly or indirectly. E.g., in the direct model, many CS departments internalize the Discrete Mathematics course and some combinatorics. And an example of the indirect model is Mathematics departments that hire Math Finance professors to cover the service load for econ/fin/bus depts.

I think this in-sourcing (either directly or indirectly) is best for everyone -- mathematics depts don't do a good job at teaching those service courses and often don't do a great job of it in any case. Unfortunately, most departments don't have the headcount (in students or faculty) for a specialized mathematics curriculum, so they have to share the math faculty with N other majors to predictable effect.

It's only recently that people can talk about their non-heterosexual relationships at work. In 1995, mentioning your lesbian partner would've been overtly political and, in certain workplaces, is STILL called "political" and can get you fired [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/us/gay-teachers-wife-texa...

The author is talking about large defense systems like satellite arrays and airplanes. The status quo that the author is responding to is that engineers of the physical systems (missiles, satellites, etc.) make all the decisions with software bolted on after the fact. This is definitely true at places like Boeing.

You could replace architect with "senior software engineer" or whatever.

Point is, software should have some seat at the table during the design process.

The fundamental thesis of the piece is: "If, instead, system acquirers ensure that systems engineers address software concerns at the same time as the physical solution is conceptualized, acquirers can opt for a slightly different physical system, whose software architecture is tuned to optimize the provided capabilities."

Which, to me, sounds entirely reasonable. If some system needs an MLOC or so and the software will be doing a complex thing like piloting the aircraft, you better be thinking about the software from the beginning of the project...

Edit: generally, I wonder if you have a huge perception problem even if you've designed a responsible insurance product due to the fact that people are (reasonably) suspicious of taking on enormous amounts of counter-party risk from a pre-seed start-up.