throwawayjava

Well, you can say the same for pretty much every curriculum ever: "we don't need a named degree, just have students figure out what courses they need to take".

Concretely, here's what happens in practice. A student does not know what to take and tells their counselor they are interested in transferring into a four-year CS degree. So student then ends up in:

- standard college prep courses (Algebra, Calc, and liberal artsy stuff), and

- some totally random stuff for the CS part. Might be programming. Might be VBA (won't transfer) or Java (might transfer). Might be a CISCO prep course. Who knows! And unless the student knows and fights, they end up wasting time.

Making a separate track that's explicitly "pre-college CS" avoids this confusion. And after all, part of the value add of a formal education is that someone who knows what you need to know organizes the curriculum for you.

So what you say is true, but there are still strong advantages for both the student and the institution to having a separate, explicit pre-college track.

I cannot find where the number originates, but there is at least one study @ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869151... which explicitly claims "vidence supported consumption of ≤400 mg/day in adults is not associated with overt, adverse effects."

So yeah, two freaking massive 20oz pours of highly caffeinated coffee will get you to around 1 gram.

But FWIW the daily recommended dose is 400mg. 1g is a ton of caffeine and way beyond what you would get to by sipping on coffee throughout the day (it's 10+ cups of drip).

TBF the proof is written for readability, not concision.

But also, this happens in programming as well:

"A search function looking for `x` in a sorted list that starts in the middle of the list, compares the element to `x`, and then recursively searches the front half or back half of the list"

"A valid HTML document with one button that, when clicked, downloads a text file containing the md5sum of the page"

"A facebook clone"

No, I'm curious and would use that citation! Even just a paper saying "this has been done" without any details? I have a hard time believing this has been done, and people are allowed to talk about it on online forums, but there isn't a single citation even acknowleding its existence.

> You're contradicting yourself again. There's a reason why weakness is a strength in formalisms.

I'm not sure what this means, but it sounds a lot like what I've been saying all along?

Long term problems need long term solutions and benefit from longer attention spans.

Your reminder to think about those problems is well taken. But, aside from heeding your reminder, I'm okay with this.

Your first point is 100% spot on.

Your second point deserves a caveat: CS does mean something at colleges/universities. they almost all follow the ACM model curriculum:

- CS I -> CS II -> Data Structures

- Discrete Math and Calculus I

- A smattering of available electives from a few fairly uniform buckets (SE,DB,OOP; OS,PL; ML/AI; theory,algorithms).

Contents of courses change (true in Math also! Biz Calc vs. Eng Calc vs. Honors/Advanced Calc). But overall shape stays the same. Can't guarantee outcomes, but can guarantee intent.

Unlike colleges/universities, at the national level, CCs have a serious cruft issue in CS/IT. It's totally impossible to tell what someone might know from the name of the degree program alone. Not even overall shape of curriculum is obvious.

IMO there's a simple solution: CCs nation-wide should pare down everything into a few specific named degrees:

1. Associates in CS Foundations: basically ACM without electives. Designed for transfer to a BA/BS.

2. Associates in Software Development: the non-math portion of ACM + some pragmatic courses (e.g., databases and web dev). Can have various version of this marketed as "AS in SD with Emphasis in ___" where ___ is chosen according to local/regional labor market. E.g., most bootcamps are somewhat like "AS in SD with an Emphasis in Web Development using <stack here>".

3. Associates in Information Technologies: catch-all for the stuff that doesn't even fulfill the non-math, non-elective portion of the ACM model. So "VBA scripting", "Networking aka CISCO certs", "Database Administrator aka Oracle&MS certs", "Applications aka MS Office+Web publishing", etc. degrees currently offered by CCs. Again, various versions can be marketed as "AS in Information Technologies with Emphasis in ___"

These issues might not be recognizable to folks in states like California with amazing CC systems, but in most of America, just figuring out which of the half dozen similar-sounding "IT/CS" associates degrees you want is a serious problem. And very often the answer is "none" because all gazillion of them fit into bucket #3 and you're really looking for bucket 1 or 2.

AFAIK there aren't really any examples of production systems that have meaningful, formally verified security properties without gaping holes.

Do you have a good paper about the full stack formalization/verification of a nuclear launch system?

> “Best practice” is a euphemism for whatever it is the majority does. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That’s not even reasoning.

1. Companies are sometimes sued, successfully, for not following "best practices". And on technical merits. Ex, Toyota lawsuits.

2. It most definitely is reasoning! Here's the cartoon derivation: "If I buy IBM I do not get fired. Therefore, I will buy IBM". This is reasoning about the social system, not the technical system. But then, security is both a technical problem and a social problem. $Billions on formal verification can't stop the simplest of phishing attacks.

> First all programs have operational semantics, the only question is how well understood they are.

Well... I guess technically. But that's not typically what people mean when they say something "has a(n operational) semantics".

Typically when people say "X has an operational semantics" they mean "someone has actually tex'd/coq'd/pencil'd the transition rules and maybe proved things about them".

Example: If I implement a programming language without doing any theory and you ask if I have an operational semantics, the only non-confusing answer is "no" or perhaps "the semantics is defined by the implementation of the compiler", which is just a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "no". This doesn't mean that no operational semantics exists, it just means I haven't written it down in the form of transition rules or a coq file or whatever.

If I give my language a denotational semantics and you ask if I have an operational semantics, I'll say "no". But again, that doesn't mean that the operational semantics don't exist. It just means I haven't written them down and proven a correspdonence.

> I’m surprised you’re taking issue with that since you give a great example thereof.

I think you missed the fundamental moral of the sandboxing example: perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Sandboxes allow for security guarantees without formalizing every aspect of the system. In fact, I conjecture that these sorts of "don't try to formalize everything" approaches toward formal security guarantees are really the only ones that scale.

If you try to formalize everything, you'll drown. If you strategically concede defeat and admit that some parts of the system aren't possible to formalize, you can get a lot of strong guarantees. As long as the concessions are strategic. Ex, sandboxing whenever the permissions interface is simple but the implementation is complex and the failure modes permit sandboxing.

Or, to put that observation in a pithy phrase: "perfect is the enemy of good enough."

Can you elaborate?

Well. This means no one can provide any security guarantee for any remotely realistic system because no modern stack has a completely understood&formalized operational semantics. But I definitely know that some systems are much more secure than others! So this seems like a situation where perfect is very much the enemy of "1000x better than it could've been".

Furthermore, formalization is "above and beyond" best practice, so you're unlikely to be accused of negligence if you do "better than best practice but still not formalized".

Finally, the original claim is not true. There are many systems with non-operational semantics that are useful for proving security properties. And sometimes no semantics is needed at all for large swaths of the system. Sandboxing is an excellent example of the latter. For some very reasonable attacker models, you need an operational semantics for the sandbox but don't need an operational semantics for whatever's running inside the sandbox in order to provide fairly strong security guarantees.

But you need to get your resume in front of the right people -- namely, folks in the central office (or maybe principals) who view your area as a strategic/difficult hiring area. Easy peasy in CS these days...

Also check out private schools.

It's possible to treat teaching faculty well. And even necessary in some in-demand fields where the private sector options remove the option of treating non-traditional faculty like crap.

In the US at least, there are thousands of (good) Bachelors, Masters, and sometimes even Ph.D.-granting colleges/universities that do not require an R1-level research agenda for the Full Professor rank.

And many students use "Professor" as a title for any instructor above the Highschool level, even for people who do not have the word "Professor" in their job title, such as ad juncts, full-time non-TT instructors, and sometimes even TAs.

This answer is US-specific

Unfortunately, http://fermatslibrary.com/ is down at the moment so I can't comment with an informed opinion.

But there are two killer features that most annotation software fail to supply:

1. print-ability. Physical copies are important.

2. Accurate rendering (related to 1). There's a pretty high barrier to overcome before someone else's inline notes are more valuable than knowing that I'm looking at exactly what the authors intended for me to look at.

That said, the scientific PDF annotation space is ripe for disruption. IDK how meaningful that market is (directly or indirectly), but someone could definitely step in and own it with something that's even an iota better than current options.

That's certainly a valid criticism.

https://www.amazon.com/Mister-Rogers-Neighborhood-Volume-1/d...

And there are a ton on PBS Kids for free:

http://pbskids.org/video/mister-rogers/

> "...totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code."

> Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.

No, I think this is fair.

The EFF has always been a huge advocate for watering down the CFAA. That's actually one of the main reasons I've donated to EFF in the past.

And FWIW I think this is a tactical error on the part of Yasha Levine. The constituency most likely to be swayed by her message is going to be turned off by this sort of tough-on-crime, throw-everyone-in-jail BS.

This piece would be 1000% more likely to resonate with its target audience if it started by acknowledging all of the good work that the EFF does, and then went on to ask why the EFF hasn't taken a stronger stance on some of the private sector abuses of some of its core values (such as digital privacy).

> So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike? Is this supposed to be news?

I think the point the author is trying to make is that there's a precedent for civil rights advocacy organizations being co-opted by corporate interests. Which is actually a reasonable thing to point out.

I think there is one important takeaway I can agree with, though. Advocacy organizations like the EFF or the ACLU should be focused on their (nominative) constituents, not their (nominative) enemies. So in the EFF's case, "digital privacy" not "stopping government overreach". When advocacy organizations focus too much on a particular vector instead of the underlying goal, they risk losing their mandate.

The EFF fights the good fight on the governmental side, and has done a ton of great work on the corporate side that the author isn't giving credit for -- Do Not Track, user education (on stuff like super cookies and browser fingerprinting), and so on. Long before "you are the product" became a thing you might hear in Congress or on cable television, the phrase was already trite among EFF's core demographic.

But they could still improve their private sector digital privacy advocacy. The Santa Clara Principles are a step in the right direction.

Mister Rogers Neighborhood was airing during the LA riots, during the Attica riots, during the height of Vietnam, during 9/11, during Watergate, etc.

Issues of racial resentment and hatred were dealt with, head on, by Mr. Rogers in Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

The television series continued until 2001, a year when the cultural and racial makeup of the USA was very similar to what it is today. The core message remained the same.

> I wonder if Douglass had... blamed others... instead of learning to read, educating himself, and becoming resolutely determined to gain freedom, [we would not] even be talking about him right now

has as its counter-example the very discussion in which you're taking part...

Douglass is a perfect example of two facts that cut agains the thesis of your comments in this thread. His work demonstrates that 1) critique is necessary; and 2) placing blame where it is due is NOT, as your question insinuates, mutually exclusive with action or self-improvement.

The point of the piece: Mr. Rogers provides a model of maleness and masculinity that works especially well for boys and men who feel scared, alienated, or attacked by society. This model, rooted in love, contrasts with other models for that subpopulation that ground out in anger or hate.

In other words, the very thesis of the piece is that there is a salient relationship between incels/mysogyny and Mr. Rogers: the latter provides an alternative to the former.

Quickly reading from beginning to end is useful, but only if you know why you're doing that and what you should be looking for. Examples:

- "this lemma gets used over and over in the proofs";

- "this theorem seems to be the main result of the text";

- "this function is where all the action is";

- "the application is organized around this framework"; etc.)

The only really effective technique I know is guided practice. From a teaching perspective, you can spend a lecture on "technical reading skills" like this:

1. assign a reading and make it very clear that this reading is non-optional, that the whole point of the next lecture is to talk about technical reading skills, and explain how huge an advantage students have in life if they know how to read technical content well.

2. hold a quiz that checks for comprehension (e.g., a proof that's a trivial result of a key theorem; a program that's a trivial modification of a key algorithm; etc. Basically, something that's trivial if you did the reading and understood the "main point" but hard enough that you're not going to be able to do it otherwise).

You can peer grade the quiz on the spot, or not, but at some point make sure you grade the quiz so that students who did poorly know that they need to work on reading.

3. Walk through the text on the projector, pointing out "oh look that idea from the algorithm got used here and here and here" or "and we're using that lemma again and again", etc.

You do this once or a couple of times and then invite struggling students to office hours for individual practice.

Reinforce this the rest of the semester. Force students to practice reading by holding (fiar and easy) quizzes on the assigned reading prior to covering the material in lecture. Respect students by going beyond the assigned reading in lecture. Help students improve by doing a good job at grading the quizzes, or by doing little exercises on the board that focus on trivial extensions of the "main idea" of the assigned reading.

Good examples of CS topics this works for are the pumping lemma and dynamic programming. Simple enough that there's a relatively short reading on the topic, but complicated enough that you can really test technical reading skills.

(Of course, I don't doubt that a lot of trips happen today which wouldn't have happened in the 60's, so you're probably still correct.)

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-clim...

Knowing how to modulate is an important skill in programming and mathematics as well.

I've seen the two extremes of "failure to modulate" with programs, especially with new programmers (students/interns). Some will speed read through the program, never slowing down to pay attention to critical pieces that may help them discover how to fix a bug or implement a missing feature. Others will slowly and methodically read every line, wasting away days on what should take hours or minutes by performing a depth-first search through each stack at each program point.

I've also seen this failure to modulate in mathematics. Students who get to chapter 5 of a dense text before realizing they have no intuitive or even formal understanding of the definitions on page 1. And students who spend their entire week interrogating unimportant definitions or lemmas because they do not get a sense for the overall structure of the chapter before diving into details.

Reading is such an important skill, and we as a society do a fairly good job at teaching how to read non-technical material. But reading skills are probably the most important thing that's (not) taught in math and CS.

There was a recent CATO study on exactly this question [1].

Nearly 2/3rds of Republican-identifying respondents believe NFL players should be fired if they don't stand for the pledge.

Over half of the Republican-identifying respondents believe that burning flags should be illegal, that an executive should be fired for flag burning, and also that flag burner's citizenship should be revoked.

None of this is particularly surprising! You expect to find that many Republicans oppose flag burning.

However, you don't expect to hear that Democrats support rolling back free speech protections. The data support this shift toward illiberalism on the left. And you even point out that this shift happened in your original post!

The rise of illiberalism on the left is concerning, but again, nowhere have I claimed that the American left is a bastion of free speech warriors.

My claim is that we do commonly see conservatives going after people for expressing themselves.

And the empirical data demonstrate it's not just "a small minority" of conservatives who feel that's justified. It's a majority. Sometimes a very large one.

So. If you want to complain about illiberal leftists, I'll nod along all day. And you'll notice that this claim was not the portion of your post I took issue with, because I don't disagree. I took issue with your claim that:

> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people

because they do, and the data very clearly indicates that the majority of Republicans believe it's justified.

And, once again, to be very clear, there is no implied assertion anywhere that leftists do not do the same thing.

> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble.

Either I'm not the one in a bubble or else someone should tell CATO their methodology is flawed ;-)

[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey-reports/...

There is a liberty-leaning wing of the Republican party, but it's not currently the dominant force in the party.

There's also a liberty-leaning wing of the Democratic party.

> However, this is the model which liberals subscribe to.

Well, that's just definitionally false... I think you meant "democrats" or "leftists" or something.

But just like the Republican party, the Democratic party has both liberal and illiberal contingents (and the illiberal democrats tend to be further to the left than the liberal democrats). It's hard to say which wing is ascendant because the party is in flux.

US party lines aren't really good predictors of whether someone will support free speech; a slim majority of Republicans support banning flag burning, while a slim majority of Democrats support banning hate speech. Even "small government" Republicans are far more unified around tax policy and welfare while relatively split on questions of free expression.

In the 1990s, in the midst of the Culture War I, the thing Rs and Ds could really unite around was the illiberal policy of regulating speech in the music industry [1].

> Govt should only act against things which are objectively morally wrong

Ah yes, objective morality! Definitely a thing that exists and is never a source of contention! Now, if only everyone were as objective as me ;-)

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center

>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people

I think this is false.

That said:

> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things to happen, but they only do in your imagination.

Each of the things that I listed has actually happened in the past few years.

Consider reading, with an open mind, the link from my parent post. It's written by a former Cedarville student, which is about as far from a liberal bubble as you can possibly get.

There exist a contingent of conservatives who are extremely hostile to free speech, to the point where they create entire institutions dedicated to suppressing and blocking out any non-christian, non-conservative influence.

They are right there in plain sight. They do things like publicly threaten to have campus speakers arrested and fire faculty for opposing Republican presidential nominees [3].

Do you disagree these people exist?

> Most Christian colleges are actually pretty accepting of LGBT.

I agree! [1]

In my post, I referred specifically to conservative Christian colleges, not all Christian colleges. And I even named particular colleges that fit the mold.

And, btw, those very institutions agree with the facts I asserted (if not the way I phrased them). Cedarville, Wheaton, Liberty -- the presidents of these colleges will be the very first ones to tell you that you should not expect freedom of expression as a student or employee at their college!

FIRE, a free expression advocacy organization focused college campuses, even creates a separate category for these institutions (and their illiberal [2] peers on the left): "Warning Schools". The meaning is literally what I say: you should expect to be censored and this fact is very explicitly written in their codes of conduct and staff manuals.

> Schedule a conservative speaker to talk at a College, at you won’t be at all surprised when a gang of violent, intolerant liberals start a riot.

Wait, have you actually scheduled a conservative speaker on a college campus?

I have.

No mob.

Actually, of all the speeches I organized, only one speaker was heckled. (And the speech/speaker wasn't even remotely political. And the heckler was a conservative, not a student, and I think the heckling that was entirely unrelated to either of those facts. He was just a rude nutjob.)

Just as most Christian colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints, most other colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints.

You don't hear about the countless of uneventful Young Republican/Libertarian speeches. Or the countless weekly bible study groups that happen without incident.

You hear about the tiny handful that go awry. And then a narrative is crafted.

But the point of my post was not that liberal institutions are a bastion of free speech. Just like the point of my post was not to assert that all conservatives are illiberal re: free expression.

The central thesis of my post was just a refutation of assertion that:

>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people

by pointing out the very real existence of places like Cedarville/Wheaton/et al. that very much do "no platform" any not-sufficiently-conservative-in-just-the-right-way speech.

And additionally to point out that illiberal conservatives (again, to be clear, a subset of all conservatives) are not new in this country. We are not surprised when a conservative expresses illiberal views (which, again, is not meant to imply that all conservatives are illiberal). Whereas the (also real, also subset) illiberal leftists are a newer phenomenon. Maybe that's why we "see" illiberalism on the left but not on the right?

Because we are used to, we expect, a form of conservative illiberalism re: free expression.

> If your unfortunate enough to voice a conservative opinion in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’ll get a Twitter brigade harassing your employer until they fire you.

It's unfortunate that some conservatives are harassed in this fashion, but this is an anomaly, not a norm. This country has millions of conservatives who are open about their political beliefs (on Twitter, FB, etc.) and do not suffer retribution for expressing those beliefs. E.g., the majority of my friends and family.

And, this sort of harassment also happens to (an also small number of) leftists and even not-quite-conservative-enough conservatives. The one person I personally know who was fired for political speech was targeted by conservatives.

Again, consider reading with an open mind the link in my parent post.

People with illiberal views on free expression and with a vendetta and no decency exist on both the left and the right. Which is why, again, I disagree with the initial assertion that:

>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people

It's just not true. Those people exist, in plain sight, and are very open about their beliefs. Falwell openly threatens to have people (not-conservative-enough conservatives, no less!) arrested for expressing views he disagrees with at the wrong place and time.

I do agree that we don't always see them clearly enough. I hypothesize it's because they are so overt about their repression of speech.

But you very much do "see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people".

--

[1] For anyone following along, item #3 in this interview does a good job at distinguishing between the sort of conservative Christian colleges I'm referring to and the hundreds of less dogmatic Christian institutions that have much stronger free expression protections for faculty and students: https://www.thefire.org/is-speech-suppression-at-religious-c...

[2] To avoid confusion: I'm using "illiberal" to mean "illiberal specifically on the question of free expression", i.e., opposes free expression. I use "left" and "right" to refer to more general political affiliation. Hopefully that doesn't cause too much confusion...

[3] https://relevantmagazine.com/current/shane-claiborne-says-li...

This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech...

Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform' people" in the same way that fish don't see water.

We expect conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night.

We expect Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative enough.

We expect those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights.

We expect obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives strongly support obscenity laws and strongly oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither. But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not. If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their reasoning.)

We expect attempts to ban flag burning.

We expect the Red Scare.

And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended.

It's normal for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that, like fish in water, we don't even see it!

So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's fair to say (as https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... puts it):

There are many who argue, in the pages of this country’s most respected periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech.

Now, revisiting your quote once more:

> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism)

Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism that you don't even see it even though it's pervasive. That's practically the definition of insidious.

> I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship.

There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a lecture hall but not at a large rally.

Many people argue that it's the best mechanism we have for achieving whatever our actual goals should be, but few if any will claim that running businesses is itself the higher purpose of human civilization.

In order for this conversation to be productive, we'd all have to agree on some underlying moral framework prescribing what society ought to achieve. And then we'd have to evaluate whether ultra-wealth people allocate their capital in a way that achieves that outcome.

No small tasks! But I expect that in the course of such a conversation, we might discover that there are a wide variety of rich people who spend their wealth in a wide variety of ways. Some of those people will typify your caricature of the rich, and some of those people will typify Harvey-Specter's caricature.

Finally, as an aside, you put the ultra-rich on quite a pedastal. They're just people who decided they wanted to accumulate wealth and then did a good job at achieving that.

It's admirable to do so well in a competitive environment, but no more or less admirable than the top 1% in anything else (a sport, medicine, religious/military leadership, teaching, etc.). Being great in a competitive atmosphere is a good signal, but wealth accumulation is not the only place where great humans compete and wealth is not the only metric which great humans use to measure their life's work...