throwawayjava

I am one of those people who actually did the extra weeks/months to properly test/review/document/release my code and data sets (you can apt-get install my "research artifacts").

In retrospect, it was a poor use of my time and a poor use of my sponsoring institution's time. "apt-get install" is NOT what we mean by "reproducible" in science.

High-quality or easy to install code is not necessary for a result to be reproducible. True reproduction would mean coding the algorithm from scratch by following the written description, and that's what it literally means in most other fields of science.

You can't download & install a Large Hadron Collider in an afternoon. Does that mean the LHC experiments are "not reproducible"? Of course not.

But that's not even the important point. The really important point is that, in most cases, high-quality code is not even sufficient for a result to be reproducible! See: the article we're discussing.

IMO, the "blindly rerun the code" definition of reproduction is actually a HUGE barrier to creating a true culture of reproducability in computer science. It results in super lazy reviewing where "public source code that's easy to install and puts the correct-sounding shit into STDOUT" becomes a stand-in for "paper actually describes a novel idea in enough detail that it can be truly reproduced".

> So what is the optimal outcome here?

An optimal allocation of scientists' time and effort.

As a scientist who has actually done that leg work, I don't think packaging code so that it runs with a single click is the best use of public money in science in 99.9999% of cases. That time is much better spent on writing and other dissemination explaining the ideas that make the code work (in some cases well-documented source code is the best description but in other cases prose is much more effective and illuminating). Or on coming up with new ideas that are even better than the old ones.

Which I guess is just another way of saying that scientists should spend their time on science, not engineering.

P.S. When shitting on "scientists" for not being good enough software engineers, please remember who's going to be doing the actual work you're demanding. It's mostly phd students who make $30K/yr. And they have to do this work in their free time because their 60 hr/wk day job is fully allocated to doing the actual science. I.e., treat scientists who maintain their code as you would treat FOSS contributors who are making 5x-10x+ less than you while working longer hours. Because maintaining high-quality code is something they are almost certainly doing in their free time.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/promos/verizon-fios-installa...

> nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.

https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/health/individual-medica...

and bundling deals: https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/multiline

The SAT (and other standardized tests) make a lot of sense when you're comparing people who have spent more-or-less the same amount of time and money preparing. They also make sense as one component of a holistic picture, weighed appropriately.

The the true value of these tests for predicting potential is a lot less useful otherwise.

The huge problem, from a predict-success perspective, is that you can't tell the difference between:

1. a brilliant person;

2. a kind-of-smart person who's very driven; and

3. an average person with no work ethic who was forced to sit with a tutor for many hours each weekend.

> Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?

It should. That's what the SAT is for. As I've said twice now, the SAT is a well-designed test. I don't think the SAT should change. I'm just now sure how useful it is, especially as a holistic measure.

To be really concrete about this: colleges should shy away from the SAT because I won't be holding those students hands forcing them to study and custom-designing their course of study at their first job!

At some point soon after graduating college, the hand holding disappears and you sink or swim. Academic preparation helps, but work ethic and the ability to learn on your own is really important. Colleges are, or at least should be, attempting to select people who are more likely to "swim".

If I were a college admissions officer, I'd probably weigh "good enough scores to know you're not an idiot, plus a compelling demonstration of grit and work ethic" WAY over "great scores with no demonstration of independent drive".

(FWIW I think we're now completely disconnected from the actual topic of the article, since that's not what the hardship score is measuring)

School vouchers with dollars attached to kids is effectively "choice, as long as you can pay for it". It's the status quo of zip code based schooling access, on steroids. That's exactly the "systemic issue" I'm referring to in my original post.

The claim that school choice would improve access to quality education for students in poor-performing schools is a complete farce.

I'm not saying that our current system works well or that it's particularly just. I'm just pointing out that vouchers make the tie between wealth and educational access even more explicit and codified than it already is. A voucher system would deepen, not alleviate, the inequities in our educational system.

I worked with students throughout the school year with a focus on the underlying content, and only switched to "coaching" the last few weeks before the exam. For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!

NONE of the studies on the effect of coaching consider the effect of this sort of longer-term individualized instruction.

I'm willing to believe that short-term coaching only has small effects, but sustained individual instruction has a huge impact on mathematical ability. And as I explicitly said in my original post, SAT/ACT do a good job of measuring that ability.

But claiming that sustained access to individualized high-quality teaching doesn't effect performance on subject-specific tests that require nontrivial content knowledge and practice is, on face, absurd. At the very least, the studies you're citing say absolutely nothing about this sort of sustained intervention.

(Also, College Board loves amplifying those studies. I wonder why...)

Allowing any student to enroll at any public school regardless of their home zip code would be a much more meaningful form of choice than vouchers.

Why not just let anyone in a metro area attend high school at the richest/best high school in the area?

If you can answer that question, you can pretty well predict what systemic issues would be caused by a voucher system.

I'm generally skeptical of mixed public/private education systems with partial choice and subsidies for private options. We have exactly such a system for higher education and it's a fucking disaster.

I could consistently help even the poorest students move from below 50th percentile to 75th percentile. Moving from < 600 to mid 700s is totally doable with sufficient tutoring [1]. Even for pretty dumb students.

I think SAT/ACT are pretty good tests [1], but they're horrendously over-gamed at this point. I have very little faith in either as anything other than a demonstration of how badly the student wants to be admitted to a good school and has money for tutoring.

[1] edit: i.e., SAT/ACT are not easy to game wit short-term coaching, but sustained tutoring can substantially increase students' performance... see thread below for further elaboration and discussion of "coaching doesn't help" studies.

I.e., how many people are acting irrationally vs. how many people are misjudging their own place in the world?

In my career, I've taught myself how to make complex CLIs. Then CGI-based web apps. Then Java desktop apps. Then MVC frameworks. Then JS frameworks. Etc. Ditto for changes in development and deployment processes. Ditto for changes in DB technology. etc.

My employer rightfully expected that, for a six figure salary, I should be a professional who is able to keep up with best practices. That's why they pay me well. They let me attend conferences and I negotiate for some "experimentation" time whenever there's a big shift in the tech landscape, but it's not like I'm disappearing for months at a time every 5 years. That'd be insane.

I'm not very old.

Hell, I don't even work in web development.

It's just one of those skills I need to keep fresh because it comes in handy every once in a while.

The changes in my actual domain of expertise have been even larger and much more difficult to keep up with.

Coding bootcamps are expensive -- they often cost on the order of a single year of college. If you're going to need to go through a few of them in your career just to keep up with a single skill set -- building UIs -- that's more of a baseline competence than a real specialty, why not front-load and just get a good-quality degree that prepares you to teach yourself the easy stuff? Double major while you're at it.

We're commenting on an article about a coding camp founded by a professional TED talker who's now in law school.

The "they" pitching bootcamps and the "they" automating jobs away are two different "theys".

People who have been doing software for the last 20 years have always been saying "coding is hard" and "a few months in a coding bootcamp isn't sufficient preparation for a career in tech, especially when the winds of the market shift".

But no one wants to hear "high-paying jobs require spending years getting good at doing hard things".

This seems to be the huge differentiator.

I've had really good experiences with boot camp grads who had a previous technical career or came from a STEM phd. Camps are great for getting already well-educated people up to speed on how to hack together a website, which is an enormous value add to an existing skill set.

College is what you make of it. It's 4 years to spend at least half of your waking hours learning new things. You can waste a bunch of that time and still get a credential with vanishing return, or you can invest all of that time in building highly valuable skills (while also getting the credential).

N=1: I was offered a $70K coding job out of high school. I made over 4x that amount at my first software job after graduation. They definitely weren't paying 4x more because of my degree, and most of my graduating class was making less than 100K. But it would have taken me longer than 4 years to get those skills and knowledge if I were working full time. More importantly, I would have had very few options a few years later when I got bored/burned-out with programming and decided to move into research.

College is a space to develop your human capital. The official curriculum is there as a guide and baseline, but it's your responsibility to use your course project time and especially free time in an effective way to build on top of that curriculum. Unfortunately, very few students understand this.

The vast majority of people who are paid to use their knowledge of mathematics aren't doing math research. In fact, mathematics research is so uneconomical that most mathematics researchers spend 20%+ of their job on teaching.

The number of people who are paid a full 12 (or even 9) month salary to do mathematics research is vanishingly small.

> This problem is accessible to anyone who knows basic high school algebra, but it requires a lot of effort

That effort is really difficult to get out of students because few students have intrinsic motivation, and there's very little extrinsic motivation (unless 3 post-docs is your idea of a good way to spend your 30s...)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but showing more people what mathematics researchers in universities do with their non-teaching time seems like the wrong solution.

This is true for the majority of students, but not generally true for the top ~1-10% of students who often need all 4 years to compete for slots at top law schools, med schools, phd programs, and employers. And getting into the top 4-5 of any of those things (except maybe phd programs, outside of a few fields like CS) will pay itself back in spades.

I'd be curious to see a study that figures out who thinks they are in that 1%-10% vs. who actually is. I.e., are people just being idiots, or are they over-estimating the trajectory of their early career?

Also, even for the other 90%, the same is true for lots of stuff. Including housing and vehicles. People aren't rational.

It just requests reports from various agencies, which will then be used to help shape policy in 2020 when the Higher Education Act is reauthorized. Similar reports have been requested by previous administrations, to little effect.

The EO was largely about free speech at research universities, which is extremely narrow and ignores the really problematic institutions both in terms of free speech and in terms of student loan debt.

The free speech rules apply to places like UC Berkeley and UIUC (who are already obligated to follow 1A, and who the courts are adequately dealing with when the don't) but not places like Wheaton College and Cedarville University (both of whom will fire tenured faculty for not being Christian or Republican enough, and expel students for being unapologetically homosexual).

Because the oversight is targeted at research institutions, it also completely ignores for-profit institutions where 50% of students fall into default as well as non-research private institutions which are often far more expensive than their public counter-parts.

Both are by design -- requiring free speech and financial accountability from any recipient of federal student loan money would put lots of conservative christian colleges in very hot water...

I also think teaching some course in Java is somewhat reasonable, if only because Java is so pervasive and so important in the history of programming that it's good for properly trained software engineers to have seen it.

Remote != Offshore.

Some remote work companies don't even allow you to work remotely from a location outside their home country.

So "foreign national on foreign soil" is VERY different from "remote"!

Moving development offshore is often not what companies have in mind when they say "remote", and for good reasons. Taxes, travel expenses, timezones, risk profile, etc. are more complicated. Especially the risk profile. And that's before considering more nebulous stuff like communication skills and "culture fit". At the very least, it's a lot of unknowns.

So, make sure you aren't wasting energy applying for positions that were never open to international (or non EU in the case of Europe) applicants in the first place.

That is certainly true.

But the language can have a big impact on the difficulty of getting the implementation correct.

First, imperative programming is important to learn. Understanding the stack/heap and calling conventions is important. Yes, those things are hard to learn. But once you learn them, they are not that confusing. These are significant pedagogical concerns, but I'm not sure they are so important beyond the classroom.

Second, FP is also confusing to new programmers but for different reasons. E.g. anything that requires folds is typically easier in imperative settings.

- Do not tie the applicant to a particular employer, and

- in addition to min salary requirements, also require independent demonstration of in-demand skills. Otherwise this system is too easy to game for large employers/sectors, who could do the equivalent of dumping by temporarily paying high salaries and then ratcheting down once they anticipate the market will clear at their desired price.

So basically, turn the H1B into an O-1 style visa where you don't need to be as extraordinary as long as you're well-compensated.

Which was exactly the intent of the H1B in the first place!

> Citizenship granted after ... 3 years?

I like the intent, but that's pretty aggressive. Permanent residency after 3 years is maybe a better way of phrasing that.

Yes. Plenty of perfectly accessible public schools are good even though they're not nearly the best.

Again, access to the elite educational institutions in the country with most of the elite educational institutions in the world is... a luxury good.

Also, as someone who tutored those kids, IMO you're not doing them any favors in the long. If you have to work for a living, then at some point way before "the best public schools in NYC, $50K/yr private schools, or bust", grit >> prep. That sort of prep also has the effect of disabusing them of a clear-headed understanding of their own limitations; which, again, can be a really terrible thing for them in the long.

Also, you can recoup up to $3K of that $5K mortgage by cutting the other luxury goods in the budget.

I guess the point is: any one item on this list might be justifiable. At the very least, each on its own is a totally reasonable luxury to indulge in after decades of not just hard but also smart and stressful work. But the budget, taken as a whole, is hard to describe with any word other than "luxurious".

The United States. Not even the western or mountain states! One of the places I regularly go that doesn't have data coverage but does have voice coverage is in a national (or maybe state there?) forest in New York state.

> Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through

I don't have any experience with this, so I'll take your word for it.

If professors are responsible for ballooning higher ed costs then why have their numbers decreased (replaced by ad juncts) and their pay remained flat? How, exactly, are they siphoning off that money? Because it sure as hell isn't coming from their salaries or job prospects. Consider for example CS professors, who make only 1/3rd of what they would make in the private sector.

Blaming non-profit employees for breakdowns in for-profit employment is just confusing. How, exactly, is this mechanism supposed to work?

I suppose you blame nurses for ballooning healthcare costs?

And in your mind, who isn't rent seeking?

Are landlords and other real estate owners rent seekers?

What about owners of valuable real estate (real or virtual) who sell ad space?

What about owners of stocks and bonds who don't actually work in those companies or contribute to those communities?

Or only the teachers and pharma researchers and non-profit employees?

To be frank, it's hard for me to take a rant about rent seeking seriously when it complains by name about teachers and pharma scientists -- people who do actual labor -- but not about literal rent seekers such as people who own large amounts of stock or real estate.

Ironically, not even 10 years ago we were having exactly the opposite conversation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

I already use white lists -- I simply don't answer the phone if the person isn't in my contacts list and I'm not expecting a call from an unknown number. I assume this is pretty common practice.

> If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number?

I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city).

> Also, why can't cell phone providers use same spam filtering techniques used in email filters?

Because spam filters rely on contents in addition to meta-data. You can't pick up the phone and listen to the contents for a few minutes.