bobochan

One of the benefits of this is Alon Zakai's wonderful compilation of the SQLite C code with Emscripten to generate sql.js, which I have found very useful for teaching SQL.

https://github.com/kripken/sql.js

It used to be three years, but five years is now becoming common unless there is a compelling need. Honestly, I am okay with it. My current laptop is a Early-2015 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and it has been flawless since they day that I bought it. The battery life might be slightly less, but it really does everything that I want it to.

I loved his series of "On To" books, e.g. "On To C", "On To C++", "On To Java". They were perfect when I was starting out and remained models of clarity when I started teaching.

Mid 50s. I still love programming but am very happy to have teaching, research, and writing too. Hoping to retire to Paris at 62 and everything seems to be on track.

I work in the US and since the Great Recession the swag that we used to get around the office (e.g. t-shirts, ice cream days) have really dried up. Spending on buildings, on the other hand, has increased rapidly.

Last year I went to a meeting in France that was held in a rather old building in Grenoble. It was a day long meeting so they brought in a boxed lunch for everyone. Shocking. There was some sushi, chicken in pasta, hot rolls, chocolate cake, and two small bottles of wine and water. It was fantastic.

I was slow on the uptake, but then it hit me, given a choice between spending money on people or things, they chose to spend it on people. Honestly, a total shock for me.

I paid close to $2,000 in 1984 to buy my Apple //e at the Harvard Coop with the disk drive, monitor, and extended 80-column card. To put it in perspective, my private college expenses were $8,000 the same year.

We do not have many adjuncts so I don’t think we actually lose less money on undergraduates. If it were not for the generosity of alumni and an endowment built over two centuries then I am not sure how we would stay afloat.

As a parent paying college tuition right now I want to agree, but as a professor I see the other side of it. I teach at the graduate level and despite the high tuition we lose money on every student that we accept. It costs a lot to have faculty spending two hours with each student alone in office hours, plus six hours of class time per week, and countless hours of support virtually 18/7 via email.

My time as faculty is just the tip of the iceberg: the cost of the buildings and grounds, IT costs, academic and administrative support, and the costs to support research, let alone student services and things like admissions, career services, etc.

My father was an engineer that spent his retirement volunteering to teach computer skills to anyone who was interested. I will be retiring in a few years and I plan to follow in his footsteps, however humble my contributions may be. I would love to contribute to a change that would make high quality education available to many more people at a much lower costs, but as a long time participant in MOOCs, I am just not sure they are the way.

There was a non-alcoholic drink made in Nigeria, Maltina, that was made at a brewery as a non-alcoholic stout. I have not tried it, but it was quite popular and it looks like it has some distribution in Canada and the US.

It sounds like a savvy business move. My kids have been coming home from university and are not interested in alcohol when offered, other parents report the same. They really have a negative association with any drinking, in part because of the binge drinking they see at school, but they also associate craft beers, wines, and fancy cocktails with older generations that seem obsessed with waiting in long lines to sample the next cool IPA.

On the other hand, they are growing up in an era where weed is either legal or de-criminalized, so perhaps they just have more options.

I would volunteer to teach programming, particularly at the high school or junior college level. I teach graduate students now but the real need is for people that really love the material to impart that excitement to students that are just starting to discover it.

I was living in N’djamena, Tchad and there was a restaurant called Le Central on the main boulevard that officers from the Legion used to frequent. I was sitting at a nearby table finishing my bottle of Gala beer when they started to sing. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was one of the saddest laments that I have ever heard, essentially refraining that “I will die and you will never know my name. I fight, not for France, but for my brothers in the Legion.”

They had no romantic illusions about their service.

People that are pancreatic insufficient take replacement enzymes in capsule form and the dose is based on their size and the amount of fat in the meal that they are eating. There is a learning curve when they start but they get pretty adept at guessing how many capsules to take.

Preach. I have been to Burkina Faso, it is a beautiful country.

I have come to terms with the fact that, at least at my age, I will probably never go back to Bangui, Central African Republic again. I always imagined I would walk by the Peace Corps office and the central market one last time.

Unrelated, I read some of your posts about your PhD research. Sounds fascinating! Best of luck.

It seems like the sign on that equation is wrong though, no? If social media was really a means of avoiding hardships then wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal? Instead they report being happier.

I keep seeing the word humblebrag come up in discussions on FB and I have to wonder if the real reason is that some people see social media as a form of competition. We now see both the good fortunes and misfortunes of people in a much wider global circle, which can provoke either jealousy or anxiety.

> I just don't care about the rest.

Everyone is different I guess. I could never say that I do not care about the welfare of friends and family.

I am prepared for this to be a minority opinion, but I liked FB when I joined and I still really like it. There may be many alternatives, but as someone who grew up with an acoustic coupler modem and an Apple //+, I do not take for granted the fact that I can video chat with friends around the world for free with Messenger. In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane: a kid doing better than expected on a spelling test, or scoring a goal in soccer; an unexpected meetup with an old classmate; or a selfie of someone going on a hike. I get great recipes on FB.

Many friends have quit FB and reported that they feel better, and almost everyone on this thread is reporting the same thing, so there must be something to it. Honestly though, I have a hard time understanding why looking at a FB feed would bother someone. If it is anxiety over privacy, then absolutely, leaving FB absolutely makes sense. I get the feeling that it agitates people for other reasons though, but I am not sure what those are.

VBA actually lets you decide at the top of each module whether to use 0 or 1 based indexing. The default value is 0, but you can specify "Option Base 1" to change that.

There is an interesting note in the Wikipedia page for "Dartmouth BASIC" which says the second edition "also allowed arrays to begin as subscript 0 instead of 1. This was especially useful for representing polynomials."

Thank you. He was quite entertaining and clear.

There is also no such institution as “Dartmouth University,” so I would guess that editors are in short supply over the holidays.

All are welcome, particularly if they want to start families. We could use many more young families with school age children.

We are an old state with a dropping population, hence why the government is trying to attract new residents. Seriously, grab your skis, get in the car and come on up; the more the merrier.

This. Vermont and NH residents are much more concerned by property taxes and education funding. I do not love having to fill out yet another tax form for the state in VT, but the income tax is a rounding error compared to other expenses. Meanwhile, I live somewhere that other people come to vacation. It is paradise year round (with an exception for mud season).

Vermonter here. The average Vermonter voted for a Socialist Senator, a Democratic Representative, and a Republican governor in the last election. The person tends to be much more important than the party.

Vermont was reliably Republican until there was the perception that the GOP had an evangelical social agenda. Vermonters are not against private expressions of faith, but they believe it is deeply personal and have no interest in being lectured on it by politicians.

She was two years behind me in college and we played together in a group. She played keyboards and never mentioned that she could sing, or anything about this album.

She was incredibly nice and very quiet. I think she transferred the next year.

The elementary school was only a five minute walk away, but even still, the kids always wanted to be at school early to play soccer, ice skate, etc. It has always been more of an issue telling the kids that they cannot get to school too early, rather than the opposite.

> having free time after you put your children to bed, or watching one of the 17 Netflix shows everyone is talking about

These are two things that are not a big sacrifice for me. But honestly, I am continually baffled by posts that insinuate that waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 is some bizarre ritual. Since the quote mentions children, I will just throw out that a school start time of 8:00 generally means having to leave for school before 7:30, which makes a 6:00 alarm pretty necessary if you want to start off with a good breakfast.

We have lights out by 10PM (with the occasional homework mandated exemption) and everyone is up by 6AM after eight hours of sleep. This has never once seemed like an unusual schedule to keep.

I got a call a few years ago from a member of a humanitarian organization that had accidentally lost a significant percentage of their web site detailing projects that they had completed over many years with no backups. The people that had completed the work had moved on and they were frantic that the work was gone forever, but the Wayback Machine had almost perfect records to restore everything.

Not once. I have been doing it for just over 30 years now and I run up the steps to fire up emacs every morning. I have lived through an amazing time, from an Apple ][+ with 16k plugged into a black and white TV to mobile and communication technology today that feels like science fiction.

I am very excited to see what the next ten years or so will bring.

Awesome! I lived in Bangui, Central African Republic, for a few years and used to listen to "Radio Rural" every day (mostly for the music, but also to improve my Sango). One of the highlights of daily programming were the lists of messages that people were trying to get to relatives in distant villages. It was a pretty steady stream about the health of family members and requests for different things.

Asking someone to find the "tall, white guy" would not have been out of place!

First of all, well done NH. As a Vermont resident I am happy when any Northern New England state does well.

The table you link to shows Vermont coming in #12 in SAT scores, and I'll accept that for it is. Other sites (e.g. US News and World Report) typically ranks us in the top ten for our educational system. It is not unheard of for us to be ranked #1:

https://www.alec.org/press-release/state-education-ranking-s...

My point is, I do not understand how you can be so fixated on NH finishing six places ahead of VT and not actually asking the bigger question of "How do two small rural states even begin to compete?" Let alone trying to decipher why New England consistently does so well overall with Massachusetts and Connecticut ranked #1 and #2.

Vermont is a high tax state, fine. I more than get my money's worth. As someone that goes to Town Meeting Day and looks through the budget every year I know that I head home secure that my dollars are being well spent. Meeting my kid's teachers at school I know they are getting a very solid education and heading off to university next year.