cycomachead

Very weird -- earlier this year the FedEx guy delivered some photo mattes to the apartment across the street. The vendor wouldn't refund me because it showed as delivered, but Amazon told me (and refunded the $40) specifically under their A-Z program. Eventually a few weeks later, the box turned up because I guess someone decided to actually check the address and re-deliver it.

Simpler than the iterative is hard to argue -- it's closer to a strict mathematical definition but the iterative version can also be setup very simply too.

To say one is more powerful is really false. I think recursion is great, and for some situations it should be the go to method, but anything you can write iteratively you can write recursively and vice-versa.

p5 has also been around for a while, but even then the tech isn't the cool part.

Processing was well thought out from a learnability standpoint, and p5 takes that and allows you to build some _very_ compelling lessons, modules and even whole CS courses that can be delivered and completed online. Because it's also JS, it means that if you can always augment an exercise with any of the rest of the JS ecosystem (for better or worse).

Berkeley undergrands have a special talent for building pretty websites that are terribly underperformant.

I say this with the utmost respect; I built a few of those as an undergrad too. :)

(And yes, it's obviously not just us Berkeley folks.)

Oh man, I 100% agree about color! I've worked on Snap! (which looks a lot like Scratch) and it has a feature called "zebra coloring" that's very similar. I've seen it be very effective with students.

Hacking up a friendly version of emacs does sound like an interesting project. I suspect it's an uphill battle to convince people to use it, but someone should try. :)

Syntax errors can be a large impediment to learning to program, so that's one big advantage. Frame-based editing has some other advantages, some of which you'd see in more complex IDEs like being context aware of what the user is truing to do.

Not that I recommend this, but if you want a (US) school to fix a grading security issue, you threaten to sue because exposing grades is a FERPA violation and schools could lose funding.

In addition to the aforementioned fraud, I think it's also about the fact that this was a lie, not necessarily that it's about the lack of credentials.

Most people do not like being lied to.

I ran into this a lot with propType validations, which don't seem to be changing. But I'm in the camp that are "warning" should be displayed as a warning, so this is a welcome change. :)

There's (pretty much) always a more egregious example though.

It also seems like, given the context of the remarks, the (probably little) harm this causes him, and the potential for a new board member who's hopefully more inclusive, that hopefully something good comes of this.

I've listened to all of them so far, but the jingles are pretty grating. They take away from the actual moment and become a distraction.

Engineers, and especially the hardware kind, are a limited resource. Not that Apple couldn't spend even more than they currently are on growth, but they're reaching some limits, and until later this year office space is/will be one of them.

This is combined with the fact that the Mac Pro sells in the "low single digit" percentage range of Mac sales means that it's hard to justify an outsized expense. When factoring in R&D costs, my guess is the Mac Pro has much lower margins than other Macs.

Publishers provide style, content/grammatical editing, domain experience and pedagogical review.

Most professors don't have strong backgrounds in pedagogy and even those that do benefit from having others edit their work.

The problem with these lifetime subscriptions is that you never know if you're going to actually use them. Textbook prices are definitely a problem, but it's usually much easier to rent or resell textbooks than the equivalent of software.

You also don't buy textbooks until you actually need them. I know many students who have felt pressured into "saving money" on "all 4 years!" plans only to find they don't need a product most terms or they stay and extra semester/term/year and need to spend even more than they were planning.

Maybe 5-6 a month? Sometimes a bit more. (Excluding one company who would spam me all the time but stopped.)

But my resume is public, my email is my screenname@gmail so it's not like anyone has a hard time guessing who I am.

I also recently graduated from Berkeley - so I have no doubt that with a simple search things could rank me as being possibly looking for a job. Then again, there's no way in hell I'm a "Senior Blah Blah", so I would guess a decent amount of the emails I get have been from scraping. (I always gave real recruiters a better email address.)

Apparently, there are quite a few of us who enjoy the idea of a coffee shop. I doubt I'll ever do it, but a year ago, I did a cost analysis spreadsheet of opening my own shop, but now a coffee cart seems like a fun side project. :)

On the whole, I think a lot of us really do enjoy coding and it's hard to overestimate how freeing financial security is. It's that security that enables other hobbies, too.

I personally enjoy having at least some interests (mainly coffee and photography) that I can pursue without having to worry about costs. If I ever leave programming, I'd probably take one of those up, but I'm afraid the financial support requirements would diminish my enjoyment some. (Sometimes, I want to work on side projects but after programming for 40 hours a week, enough is enough...)

I am though considering opening a coffee cart -- but not to make money. Opening a coffee cart sounds fun precisely because I wouldn't need to worry about profitability and I could just focus on providing something tasty and meeting people.

Caution warning is very necessary!

That thread is fascinating; thanks for sharing!

It's not clear to me whether the curriculum work as all his vision or whether that was a fight, or he simply felt that others didn't view it as something helpful to his tenure case. It's not even clear whether it was all his vision or whether he was mostly trying to volunteer to lead the effort.

Every department is different, but I've definitely seen cases where the expectation is that you wait until you have tenure to participate in some changes or take on service work.

You're absolutely right about respecting others, but from his perspective others in the department also should at least listen to him, so it's hard to say whether "speaking out" is fighting or just trying to voice what he believes - which he should do if he does believe it would be helpful. (Doesn't mean he has to "win", but stopping speaking out or questioning things leads to problems.)

> Everything listed under "speaking out" gives me the same vibe. > then encouraging a student petition and getting your name in a local paper about the incident? That's just asking for trouble.

On the whole, it sounds like there's a clear view he's "loud" about his work, and this sounds like the biggest probem.

I don't think this piece is that bad, and it doesn't sound like he is fighting his department.

I think you're right that viewing public pieces like this as "bad" is generally not helpful to anyone, but there seem to be lot of people in academia who are afraid of pieces like this and initially jump to the interpretation they're a fight or some way of circumventing the existing processes.

If this guy is as good as he says he is - then yeah he should be able to find a job, but posting this could make some of that searching harder, or at least cause resistance.

As sad as it is, there are lots of places where these things are met with skepticism and argument.

I know people who specifically waited years to redesign courses until they had tenure.

Wherein "serverless" basically means more computers in more places just doing different tasks.

There is a mix of stuff, but the two interesting components are OnlinePythonTutor[1], called "CodeLens" and Skulpt[2].

OPT actually sends data to a server and has a program inspecting a debugger which sends data back.

The other exercises rely on Skulpt, which is a JS-based reimplementation of Python.

1. https://github.com/pgbovine/OnlinePythonTutor/blob/master/v3... 2. http://www.skulpt.org

Yeah, they're mostly made by CS educators, but the content is generally well put together. :)

I saw "drug" and "ec..ma" and my mind first jumped to "ECMAScript Drug".

I have no idea what that says about me...

JavaScript, admittedly, has a few more quicks than the average language but I quite like it. I know a lot of people who also feel the same way. (And as many how, of course, hate JS.)

It still feels to me like we're in the early days of node and the dev infrastructure for "modern" sites. Hopefully, things stabilize soon(ish).

Slightly related, but if you're helping someone start out learning to code, it's worth reading this:

http://pgbovine.net/programmers-talking-to-beginners.htm

You don't _need_ react to build a cool site in 2016, but if you're dead set on that, then this piece is a good intro to the set of questions that arise!

I miss John Siracusa's reviews.

This is a fine review, but not a Siracusa Review.

I skipped over the first paragraph as was semi-confused to see "Resist Abstractions" as point #1 in a HN article.

I think there are plenty of startups working on valuable things, but since you mentioned education...

Typically, the largest group of students in open online courses like MOOCs are those from privileged backgrounds, like white males, and those who already have high or relatively high levels of education. Certainly, I still believe that these online courses are an amazing resource but they haven't been shown to increase access in ways that people hoped. There are dozens of reasons for this.

I think the real problem is that some startups are unable to recognize exactly what problems they are solving and for whom they are solving them. Extra disposable income from driveways is good, as are promoting healthy drinking habits. However, there's a very real chance that these potentially useful tools never reach the audiences where they would be most impactful.

For example, it seems like the people who could most benefit from extra income from rentable driveways are most likely to live in areas that are less desirable (high crime rates), are not even likely to have a driveway (apartments). Now, I have no idea what app this even is referring to, to be clear. This is just a potential situation.