throwawayjava

> is more efficient with a keyboard

...?

I agree; in fact, that was my whole point :)

> Developing on-device will come, in time.

We'll see what Moore and his progenitors think. Until software is the only bottleneck, there will definitely always be lower-tier, cheaper options for the N>50% of the population that doesn't need the compute/batter life/etc. that's necessary for a mobile dev machine. My WAG is that we're still a few generations (as in people generations, not tech generations) from getting there. If we ever get there at all.

I'm confused. While I definitely believe that you are correct in that assessment, the example you gave doesn't seem relevant.

Mary Tai was an EDD (doctorate of education), not a physicist. and the reply was from the mathematical community, not the medical community.

2. Feedback. E.g., there are some good fractions apps that help students understand what it means to "divide" a set of things into a set of groups of things. you can do that on pencil/paper or with other props, but there's no tight feedback loop.

It's unclear whether (2) is strictly a good thing; learning how to validate your own results is also an important skill...

FWIW iPads and android tablets tend to not work for most software development tasks.The "iPads aren't for producers" mentality might be more of a "iPads aren't for Software producers (and some types of engineers)"

I have quite a few lawyer and doctor friends who use tablets first (usually with a BT keyboard) and only break out the computer when they need it for some very particular reason.

If you don't need root on a beefy machine and/or Windows-specific software, then a modern tablet with a bluetooth keyboard gives you more than enough compute and all the applications you need to be productive. Often with a better UX.

Not impossible and not necessarily excusable. Just... difficult.

Is selling an exploit to a foreign government even 100% legal? (Serious question; that seems like the sort of thing that could get one in trouble.)

Not ostensibly, but actually.

The article goes on to identify some concrete charges that independent auditors felt were ridiculous, including charging $19k for stents that the hospital most likely purchased for about $2K.

> It's just a contractual reason he owes this money?

The hospital just straight up dropped all but $800 of the charges when they got PR heat.

Actionable advice: check if your employer-provided healthcare is a self-funded insurance plan or a fully insured plan. And then look up the relevant consumer protections in your state for that type of plan.

Also, in case you're wondering what the hell all those hospital administrators are dong, the answer is "shaking down your employer and screwing you over":

> In a statement, St. David’s HealthCare defended its handling of Calver’s bill and sought to blame the school district and Aetna for offering such a narrow network.

>“While we did everything right in this particular situation, the structure of the patient’s insurance plan as a narrow network product placed a large portion of the financial responsibility directly on the patient because our hospital was not in-network,” the hospital said.

> WellRithms reviewed Calver’s bill in detail at the request of Kaiser Health News and determined that a reasonable reimbursement would have been $26,985. That’s less than half what Aetna paid.

This is not at all the case in Computer Science. Especially permanent positions at CCs and lecturing at universities, there are more roles than people at the moment. Mostly because the worst-case alternative is taking one of the plentifully available 100k-200k industry jobs. Especially in ML.

Generally, "don't get a Ph.D. planning that you'll be a professor" is good advice. CS at the moment is the exception that proves the rule. Especially outside of R1.

I also had this problem, but fortunately, I could always buy my way out of the problem better hardware and maybe one afternoon of optimization.

I finally shut down the last of my PHP side projects because of pervasive security issues and a dwindling/dead community. I recently reinstalled one of those sites on a DO droplet. Getting the right versions of everything took an entire weekend, but I eventually succeeded. The droplet had way more RAM and a faster CPU than I had access to back in the day.

But holy hell those pages still loaded so slowly. I probably didn't notice at the time because internet connections were so much slower and waiting for an HTTP page with a few images to load was normal. But those load times would be absolutely unacceptable today.

Also, IME even good PHP programmers suffer from the "MySQL-table-as-global-runtime-state" syndrome. And it's at least as bug-prone as storing global state in an ADT.

In addition to $_SESSION hell, lots of custom PHP applications end up with extremely complex and convoluted MySQL tables dedicated to storing what would typically be global application state.

Both of these can lead to difficult-to-debug performance issues, race conditions, and especially security vulnerabilities.

Global state is going to happen, so languages/libraries should provide mechanisms that make it easy to state and enforce strict invariants on reads and writes to global state.

[1] http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.session.php

What I assume is that not all humans are perfectly rational individuals whose only goal is profit maximization. And thatwe cannot see peoples souls, so we need laws that err in the side of caution.

I also assume that homo economicus is explicitly disincentivized from reasoning about feedback effects and historical context, which are two things many actual homo sapiens care about (for obvious reasons).

E.g., disregarding feedback loops and the long arc of history, ie in a vaccuum, supporting racialized slavery is perfectly rational for non-enslaved people interested in profit maximization. Cinsider also a completely not raciat loan lender with vested interest in high property values who knows dark skinned people lower property values. Even if the data scientist is perfectly unbiased, bias and hatred in the underlying population can result in data driven, profit motivated decisions that harm marginal groups. The fact that this really actually happened en masse is WHY we have these laws...

Regarding the latter point, you are effectively dismissing all non-consequtialist ethics and associated legal traditions as "gut feelings". I submit that these gut feelings play an important role in human societies made up of irrational people. In fact, they are even important in societies with perfectly rational people who are not super reasoners with perfect forsight.

If you're genuinely curious for an answer, in the United States it's absolutely the case that you are legally

> obligated to throw out the conclusion

when it comes to many of the things you mentioned (e.g., you can't consider race, or often gender and sexual orientation depending on the state, when you evaluate a loan/employment application).

The reason for those laws is that, historically, overtly and openly racist people used the loan application process to discriminate in housing.

Asking to be able to use any accurate statistical model for any application is an inherently political request, because bad actors in the past have attempted to exclude people based upon skin color. We can't make that discrimination legal whenever someone can dream up a plausible mathematical model justifying an ultimately racial intent.

The real point of my post is that a discussion on this topic devolves into a flame war unless everyone agrees that we can't turn p-hacking into a legally justifiable way of allowing racial discrimination in important social processes like housing loan or employment applications.

> But there’s an extremely important caveat: Students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects. If the whole story were a market response to student debt and the Great Recession, students would have read the 2011 census report numbering psychology and communications among the fields with the lowest median earnings and fled from them.

IME Psychology and Communications attract students who are looking for an easy degree. Humanities majors are typically more rigorous than the Psych or Comm majors.

Psych/Comm attracts a lot of students who hate reading/writing and math equally.

> Or they would have noticed that biology majors make less than the average college graduate, and favored the physical sciences.

Again, IME, most of those bio majors are planning on med school, nursing, grad school, or teaching.

Two thoughts: (1) such courses are often opt-in and don't necessarily have tons of free time for off-topic discussions; and (2) many schools with such courses do in fact have robust CC-tracked options that all-honors students are not exposed to.

1. A class like this was offered by my high school (years and years ago...) I didn't take it. However, from what I remember talking with friends, our school's course was explicitly for people who were planning on going to college. So it'd be kind of weird to discuss alternatives. That would be like mentioning in a Biology course that Physics or English are also legitimate fields of study.

You'd think such a course would be wishy-washy and have plenty of time for discussing alternatives, but actually it was quite a serious thing.. Most of the students who took the course thought they were on-track for ivy league applications and then got a dose of reality in the form of a below-average standardized test score. They had a couple months to learn how to pattern-match and flash-card their way into the 90th percentile starting from the 50th percentile. I distinctly remember more than one person dropping AP Calc so they could focus on the college prep course...

(In other news, grade inflation and subjective grading are harmful because they are sparse & deceptive reward signals!)

2. Community college was very much not looked down upon; in fact, we had a robust partnership with the regional CC system and many students would spend junior and senior years splitting their week between HS and CC.

However, if you were honors/AP/college-tracked, then you wouldn't really know that those students even existed unless you socialized with those students. I only knew about these programs because of my friend group.

At a recent reunion, I talked with some guys who I recognized from my AP courses. They were complaining that our high school didn't offer non-college-tracked options. I mentioned the various programs my friends had made use of and they were shocked and swore up and down that those programs didn't exist when we were in school.

I wonder if either of these two things is true for OP. IME it's fairly rare for an entire high school -- let alone an entire school district -- to not have robust options for CC-tracked students. Maybe in super-affluent areas?

> Sounds like my sex-ed class in Georgia which never even discussed birth control.

Yeah... state law. Same for me. I had a teacher who risked her job to give us good info. If that was the case for anyone else reading this, consider looking up that teacher and sending a gift card or something their way. Doing so is a huge personal and professional risk.

Those are both pretty high numbers, and those are just the defaults; i.e., the worst-case scenario. It's not counting the tens of thousands of people who defer housing, defer saving for retirement, defer saving for their own children's education, or end up on a perpetual treadmill of loan payments that will destroy their ability to retire.

We are heading is the worst possible direction wrt regulation of private for-profit institutions; the available data incontrovertibly demonstrates they should be subject to more scrutiny, not less. But that's definitely not the whole story.

This is not the case in other fields such as Engineering, Medicine, Education, or Law. More experienced engineers, doctors, lawyers, and educators tend to be better at their craft. Failing to keep up with new methodology/technology is also a problem.

It's almost like the quality of the person is more important than their age or seniority.

Now, I don't have any first-hand experience with legislatures. However, based on analogies in fields I'm more familiar with, I am a bit suspicious of the claim that there aren't any advantages to seniority and experience.

Also, consider this concrete question: would term limits fix the student debt problem? I don't see any arguments in this thread that it would.

Inflation-adjusted, that's like $10 million.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/02/26/gover...

Also, the motion requests:

Plaintiff Rejhane Lazoja respectfully asks this Court to order Defendants to return her Data, to expunge any copies made of the Data, to disclose all third parties who received and/or retain copies, partial or complete, of the Data, and to provide information about the basis for the seizure and retention of the property.

If the judge grants all of these requests, it will be interesting to watch what happens with the request:

...return her Data...

If it comes to this, I hope the plaintiff asks the court to know whether the data was decrypted. I.e., if you decrypted my data, you need to return that to me. The original image doesn't suffice.

Maybe "correspondence with council" is the groundwork for this later request? I.e., something along the lines of "I have a right to know what the government now knows about my private correspondence with my council."

The "partial or complete" portion of the request is also relevant for answering this question: the information is legally relevant (and the request reasonable) because some of the correspondence was between the plaintiff and her council, and also because if they shared partial information that almost certainly means they were able to decrypt the data.

The govt's response to the timeframe arguments will also certainly leak some information about the government's capabilities; e.g., I imagine the gov't will argue that 130 days was necessary in order to execute the search, and/or that they need to retain the data so that they might one day be able to execute the search.

without individualized criminal suspicion, the off-site search of an electronic device taken at a border is unconstitutional. No such suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity existed in the case of Ms. Lazoja giving rise to reasonable suspicion to search and seize her property. Consequently, neither was there probable cause, nor a warrant. Therefore, the search and seizure of Ms. Lazoja’s property violated her rights under the Fourth Amendment.

To make this argument, the motion mentions some precedent. Most notably was United States v. Kim (page 12):

In Kim, where DHS agents seized a laptop computer at Los Angeles International Airport and later sent it to a laboratory to be copied and searched, the district court found that the lengthy post-seizure retention of a laptop at a second site, outside the airport, “did not possess the characteristics of a border search or other regular inspection procedures,” and that it “more resembled the common nonborder search based on individualized suspicion, which must be prefaced by the usual warrant and probable cause standards.” Id. at 58 (citing United States v. Brennan, 538 F.2d 711, 716 (5th Cir. 1976)). The court in Kim questioned whether the seizure and imaging of a laptop at the border “can accurately be characterized as a border search at all.”

And furthermore that doing so for a cell-phone is particularly egregious; recent supreme court cases strengthen the argument that if we're going to protect laptops then we certainly need to protect cellphones (page 13):

The Supreme Court recently expanded the categorically heightened privacy interests in data located on cell phones, specifically addressing cell phones’ location data.

The motion also makes auxiliary arguments about retention and duration: even if the border search was constitutional, shipping the device off to a lab was not constitutional without a warrant. And even if shipping the device to a lab was constitutional, retaining it for so long was not constitutional. And even if retaining the device for so long was constitutional, retaining the data indefinitely is not constitutional. At least, not without warrants.

They took her phone and retained it for 130 days. Presumably, during that time they copied all of the data off of the phone (and perhaps also decypted that data). Regardless, the plaintiff argues that keeping the phone for that period of time without a warrant was unconstitutional in the first place.

A few interesting aspects:

* Lazoja is suing over the data, not (just) the physical device (Her phone was already returned to her.) Also, she is making additional arguments that the duration of retention for both the device and the data on it are unreasonable. I hope at least one of these claims succeeds; even if warrantless border searches are permissible, retaining hdd/sdd dumps should not be allowed.

* The motion mentions several times that the device contained persona, private information including "pictures of her in a state of undress, as well as privileged communications with her counsel". She requested all data (and especially this data) be deleted and the response was radio silence.

I also am not entirely sold on funfunfun's characterization, but if you think of this in terms of cultural hangups that cause excesses rather than concrete technical contributions then it makes some sense.

The excesses of OOP culture are distinctly different from the excesses of Functional culture.

OOP in excess looks like software architecture books with quotes from Alexander and FLW, programming as artform, etc.

Functional in excess looks like really bad descriptions of category theory promulgated by writers who couldn't tell you what group theory is good for.

So if we want to characterize these ways of programming in terms of what harmful excess looks like, then they are on sort of opposite sides of a spectrum. Where one side considers programming pure art and the other pure logic.

I'm still not sold that this is a good model of reality. But if you focus on excesses rather than useful insights, I can see what funfunfun is saying. I think.

I would lump in KS/eastern CO with OK and with Missouri minus KC/STL/JC.

So three or four regions:

* The bible belt - the black belt

* Mormons

* The lower midwest and "eastern west" (e.g., eastern CO but also maybe even to some extent parts of NV, the Dakotas, and the rural eastern partns of the PNW). Maybe this is two groups that sort of blend at their boundaries?

No two places are exactly the same but that last grouping makes at least as much sense as the bible belt. IMO, at least.

I'm not a demographer or anything, but I bet that you could explain some of the cultural differences between the bible belt and the lower midwest+eastern west in terms of historically dominant congregations/denominations of Christianity. (And also some other things, most notably slavery.)

I think viewing this as a fallacy is a bit of a straw man. There are very few people who believe in a "Right Way (TM)" to write programs (although those people are probably over-represented in the comments section of online news posts about functional programming).

> Maybe a trap for contemplative people?

FP is hardly unique in this regard. Were you around in the 1990s? Recall that the OOP crowd got pretty philosophical there for a while, with elaborate treatises on software organized around some obscure book about architecture. ;-)

> The ultimate goal of software is to build something useful.

It's worth noting that the ultimate goal of functional programming (as a research field) goes beyond building software; (typed) lambda calculi are an entire alternative model for studying computation. The science of computation has many applications beyond software development.

You said nurses don't make good money. I think 100k is good money. Better money than most people in the banking and legal industries make, that's for sure.

> The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.

Cargill has higher revenues than the largest bank in America.

Cargill has larger assets than most US banks.

Cargill had higher profits last year/quarter than most US banks, even big household names.

You "guessed" that wasn't the case. You were wrong.

>> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.

> You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

The word management wasn't even mentioned once in my original post. I mentioned banking and law.

What I was pointing out was that low-paying jobs exist in every industry, and there are plenty of people in nominally low-paying industries who do very well (e.g., nurses RN and up) as well as many people in nominally high-paying industries who do not (e.g., bank tellers, low-level financial advisors, accountants).

(BTW, you should consider re-reading the end of the article that we're discussing. The conclusion to that article is quite literally that the exemplar discussed by the article -- NYC garbagemen -- are doing fine. So fine that people who get the job feel like they won the lottery.)

Concretely, average SE salaries in flyover states are pretty comparable to average RN salaries in flyover states.