vbtemp

Sounds like this dude is insufferable and exhausting and probably presents himself as such on his dating profile.

Edit: Before you start writing a treatise on the socio-economics of contemporary market-based internet dating in the age of diverstity.. just try the following:

1. Put up a crisp, clear picture of yourself dressed nicely with a smile. Put up a second clear picture of you doing some kind of interesting activity (hiking in the wilderness, doing art, playing with a puppy, etc).

2. Write a self-description that gives off vibes of you being a generally positive person, and relatively charming and perhaps a bit funny. If you can't be charming, you can at least be polite. If you're not funny, you can at least be lighthearted.

I hear you, but I've also been around the block enough times in my career to see the awful consequences of designing some feature, breaking it into a few Agile "stories", coding it up, then unlocking an enormous reservoir of down stream complexity that only becomes apparent later... And no degree of making new stories or bugs can put a lid on it because there's no model underneath it -- its just an increasing amount of ad hoc code (however well-programmed: unit tested, peer reviewed, CI/CD-ed).

In almost all these cases, developing a simple model grounded in some kind of common CS formalism, playing with the idea, and then explicitly constructing the system around that model would have made the application much more understandable, with a lot fewer mysteries, and reliably used by the customer in much less time. Even small systems containing simple logic, with a few input and outputs, can yield extremely complex emergent behavior (Game of Life being first obvious example).

No, that isn't my assumption. I don't think anyone believes that there's some institution or degree program that spoon feeds everyone everything they should know and guarantees a high level of performance. Obviously, the scope of my consideration are people with a high degree of initiative, creativity, and experience. A CS degree in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient.

I positively agree with you. You are not going to walk out of a course or two in automata theory and group theory building critical complex systems. But that coursework does provide a lot of exposure toward the "primitives" in which these complex formal systems are defined. They are the first step of many steps.

I am reminded of PGs famous example of the "Blub"[0] programming language .Here's the relevant quote:

> As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

In the above, the "Weird Language" can also be a formal modeling of the problem domain and solution.

(Note: He should not be presuming the developer is "he")

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Hah. Nah, I meant someone who is extremely thorough and catches many thing proactively that would otherwise be bugs that are difficult to track down.

You're right. At the end of the day it's just that special mix of experience (professional and academic), natural talent, interest, and professionalism.

I work with a team of people who mostly have "Software Engineering" degrees. I am one of the few with CS.

In short: IN GENERAL - Those with SE degrees (or other non-CS degree, or no degree) can be excellent developers (good code style, good unit test coverage, aggressive PR reviewers, etc).

However, the art of computer programming - or computer system design -- is often in formally defining the problem at hand using computational structures (such as graphs), understanding the properties of that model, and creating a new algorithm over that model to solve it. Then developing a software system to mirror the properties of that formal system you designed.

Those people who did not spend dozens-to-hundreds of hours agonizing over their coursework in algorithms, abstract algebra, linear algebra, "foundations of computing" (i.e., computational complexity theory, computational theory, language hierarchies, etc) I found can lack this critical aspect of system design. Instead, they design systems that lack unity and are often simply a collection of routines to handle various inputs - rather than having the knowledge to think "Hm, maybe this whole thing I'm working on is a special case of a well-studied problem". What this means practically is that there is often a simpler, better-defined, and more testable solution lurking behind the veil of ignorance.

Sure, there are many many teams and projects for which the scale or complexity are not sufficient to warrant some kind of formal analysis and modeling -- but many do.

We're happy that you're alive too!

I'm so curious, what advice or insight would you have for parents or children whose conception was supported by a donor?

Eating up post-it notes ("issues") and crapping out code - i.e., doing agile - is just not gonna cut it.

When the end goal is a robust, resilient system that customers depend upon to suit their needs and your organization depends on for its business, by doing Agile you're going to end up with something that neither your customers nor business can fully rely upon (once your system or service is past a certain level of complexity).

Two major reasons:

1. A set of agile "Issues" (whether stories or bug reports) do not constitute a necessary or sufficient set of tasks necessary to produce, release, and operate a resilient or complex system.

2. You know the phrase that "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"? Agile gives you utterly meaningless metrics (e.g., story points) that can be counted, but don't count. What does count depends on the nature of your business or product: Small start up? Probably revenue or users. Large-scale infrastructure system? Maybe average latency or uptime. Unless you can directly correlate "story points" to your bottom line, just skip that clutter in the first place.

Call me old fashioned, but I found that when you bring engineering back into software development, specifically systems engineering (not "engineering" in the sense of "I'm a ruby-on-rails engineer"), products and teams are able to support a high level of confidence and reliability in their work products. This means (yup) requirements engineering and analysis, QA, Independent Validation and Verification, etc etc. It does not mean you have to have full departments for each of these, but at least having someone to "own" each of these areas (esp for small teams). Again, in the end, no amount of stuffing post-it notes down your developers throats will replace old fashioned engineering process and engineering management.

I wonder if she (or her staffers) actually think with a straight face that this is actually a thing that many people care about? It seems marketed for coastal elites who are being patronizing towards rural americans. They knew what they're doing and what they're voting for - (anti)immigration, culture war, agricultural subsidies carry far more weight than elitist plans like this.

Not the OP, but often times people coming out of PhDs don't have applicable engineering skills that are used to deliver actual products to actual people. Getting results to put into a publication and delivering a product that people rely on are two skillsets that have very little to do with one another.

Amen! When your product requires true engineering, agile just causes you to keep chasing your tail. Engineering systems requires an engineering process and discipline, and agile is just not up to the rigor.

Fascinating. The worst thing about agile I feel is the stand-up meeting. It encourages people just to say stuff and posture as being busy. I feel it encourages the worst part about agile -- that input (work) is more important than results (a working product).

This absolutely has nothing to do with Tel Aviv having a high concentration of vegans.

It's just cause people using tabs are not using properly configured IDEs or text editors, which reflects a lack of experience or adaptability, which reflects the lower salary.

Edit: It's also kind of funny how people in this thread are making it seem like there's some kind of controversy. There isn't: the question was settled a long time ago.

So long as there is contention for a finite resource the market always exists. If you don't pay with cash, you pay with something else that has value - your time.

Lost among here is Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language

The only language where not a single word is known to the outside world!

I normally wouldn't belabor the point, but you peddle at best dubious information and cloak your argument in pseudo-logical sophistry.

You, without any clear credentials in the field, make a bold claim that flies in the face of the standard medical understanding of cardiovascular health. And - when challenged - you twist the argument around and ask your interloper to defend the scientifically standard model.

Elevated LDL is associated with CVD, and is - in itself - an independent risk factor for developing CVD.

The _extent_ to which this is true seems to be an open and unresolved question. The scientific understanding of this interplay between LDL and CVD may shift over time, and there may well be breakthroughs in the years to come, but that is the medical consensus and one should need significantly clear evidence that to the contrary.

Not that you are on this level right now, per se, but this is how anti-vaxxers operate too. This is pick-your-facts pseudo science. This is spreading misinformation that less-informed people might make decisions on.

[Citation Needed]

And if you are just an armchair cardiologist and you cherry pick one or two publications that suit this conclusion, well...

I cannot upvote your comment enough.

Keto is all well and good... until you get your lipid panel checked.

We all understand that lab values are not everything, but I don't think _anyone_ who is informed about cardiovascular health would say that over the long term such elevated LDL values are anywhere near healthy...

I say this as someone who felt great on a very low carb diet and preached the keto diet for a while.

Wow, this comment is prime material for https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says !

> Baltimore has only had 4 Republican mayors in the last 100 years. Maybe something isn't working ideologically.

I'll be downvoted to hell for saying this, but what you point out is an inconvenient truth. Nearly fifty years of blight and desolation, at what point does the other party get a shot? In places like this the Democrats are just a crooked patronage network.. both the source of and solution to their resident's problems...

Look at Maryland in general, they elected possibly the most moderate and centrist republican in the nation, and is generally respected across the spectrum. I wonder what would happen if one of these types had a term in the mayor's office.

I grew up near Baltimore and go through frequently. It's such a shame that what should be such a historic and interesting is so blighted. There are so many beautiful 19th-20th architectural gems that could provide it with so much character and liveliness, not to mention and proud community

Exactly, that's why Chinese culture in places like US, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan,HK, etc etc is generally associated with upper middle class professionalism and honorable success. It was decades communism and the associated violence and very intentional destruction of interpersonal trust that breeds a lot of what we see in mainland China today.

Massive famines, "cultural revolution", decades of civil war, genocides.. in general the demented social programs of Mao and his henchment. This was China from the 1910s to 1970s. Not to mention a century of colonization and forced concession. Chinese culture overseas was not ruptured in such a way, and preserves a lot of aspects of it from before that bloody century.

This soft bigotry against Chinese culture is really tiring already. Chinese culture and people are all over the world: America, southeast Asia, singapore, and so many other places... To think that cheating and IP theft and scams is somehow part of Chinese culture or that these are virtues unqiue to these exotic orientals and we should drop our Western preconceptions is so unbelievably condescending... And how offensive to Chinese people, both in China and overseas, who earn their achievements though their honest and diligent labor, the kind of work we value here too.

> Another interesting spin is how we frame ourselves as being the anti-imperial liberators of the world and praising ourselves for workers' rights, anti-child labor and pro-living wage. It was actually the soviets who were anti-imperial and pro workers rights.

Isn't there like a subreddit or website called like r/ShitHNSays?

I genuinely want to thank you for that full throated chuckle I had from this comment

Everyone except you responded with something well-reasoned and interesting. Does that change your mind about your ill-considered and rude response to me here?

Thanks

Of all the nutty, anxiety-inducing and self-destructive things administration is doing right now, this trade war with China leaves me least concerned. In fact I'm curious to see where it leads. Change my mind?