davehtaylor

It's sad that things like this have to be explicitly spelled out

I had such a problem with this. At my college, the professor I had for my entire calc sequence once said, in response to a question about applications, "My degree is in pure math. I don't care how it's applied."

Thankfully(?) I was taking physics at the same time, so I did get to see how double and triple integrals and differential equations could be applied. But it frustrated me to no end that the person who was driving my math education cared so little about helping us understand it.

Yes, in fact. Whenever I've had these conversations with people, I always try to probe deeper to figure out why they are so angry about what should be common decency. And the answers are always the same. They think it's not about decency, and that their rights, and their way of life, are being attacked. In their minds that attack always comes from "liberals" or "niggers" or "faggots trying to rape our children in the bathroom" or some other hateful, bigoted nonsense. They think that their right to call these people out ("call a spade a spade" is an oft used phrase) is being eroded, and that means "PC culture" is preventing "dialog" and "telling it like it is" or "turning us into liberal pussies."

I cannot tell you how many times I've had this same unfortunate discussion. And every time it makes me sick to my stomach.

But the key is that they should be able to seamlessly interact with one another.

The biggest problem, IMO, with the contacts system is how limited it is. You get two email addresses and two phone numbers per contact, that are pre-labeled "work" and "home", and that's it. It absolutely must have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. I cannot comprehend how it can't do this. Every other address book on the planet allows this. I have some contacts with 8 email addresses, 4-5 phone numbers, multiple physical addresses, all with custom names for what each of them are. So the fact that thunderbird can't handle this makes it unusable for me.

5. Don’t show automatic pop-ups too early

How about don't show automatic pop-ups at all?

These things have become a plague on the modern web. I'm so fucking sick of every single website pestering me to sign up for their newsletter. No, I don't want your newsletter. I want to read your article and move on. I'm probably never coming back to your site anyway. And no, I'm not turning off adblock either. So blocking me from entering your site because I'm running an adblocker means I will most certainly never whitelist your site, I will leave and never come back, and no matter what your content is, you're never getting ad revenue from me.

TL;DR: Stop with the pop-ups. Period.

It really needs to have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact in the address book, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. Every other address book on the planet allows this. The fact that it can't makes it unusable for me.

It would also be nice to have a proper three vertical pane view. The way it currently works is horrendous.

As long as it isn't very windy, it's easy to make 14 comfortable.

No, no it is not.

And I say this as someone who enjoys the cold. No matter what, if it's 14 degrees outside, I'm only going out if I absolutely must. There's no hanging out in the parking lot during lunch in that kind of weather.

Schooling is definitely a major issue. My nephew has to be at school by 7:15 am. It’s absolutley asinine to believe that pre-teens and teens can be functional or able to actually learn anything at such an hour. Not to mention the fact that every school is different. His younger brother, for example doesn’t start school until nearl 9:00. And this is an elementary and a high school in the same district. It’s insane. So their mom has to figure out how to get them to school a vastly different times, then figure out how to make it to work at a reasonable time given her schedule.

I definitely agree that this is a major issue that we need to address.

Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that.

I think you really nailed it here. People who aren't "morning people" are viewed as lazy, strange, and unmotivated. And it's very frustrating to try to make people understand that I don't stay up until 3:00am every night and sleep until noon, or that I'm not lazy because I'm not flitting around the room like a humming bird the moment I get out of bed. It's like it's completely impossible to have this conversation because people are totally unwilling to see things in any other way.

Also, the early worm gets eaten.

I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.

I despise the fact that people think they need to have their phones in front of them the entire time, taking shitty pics and videos that they'll never look at again.

However, I would never support an artist/performer who tries to prevent me from using my own things. It's not their right to tell me that I can't pull out my phone if I choose to do so. It belongs to me. So while I would never actually have my phone out during a show like it, I would never actually go to a show that would prevent me from doing so.

I agree that the ideas aren't necessarily generalizable, but what if we shifted to an idea that people's individual schedules reflect when they specifically are most productive. Someone else who replied said they were most productive in the morning. Great! Let them have and earlier start time. For me, I'm completely useless in the morning. Sure, I can be in the office at 8:00am, but you're not getting any meaningful work out of me until late morning or noon-ish. So let me come in at noon and work until 6:00. And for someone else who is super productive in the evening hours, if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not?

I get that there are issues of collaboration or interaction that may be necessary. But in general, it seems like, as long as your job doesn't depend on customer interaction or some other constraint, why not let people work a schedule that suits their lifestyle, and lets them work when they are most productive?

a lack of tastemakers in public society

I would call this a good thing. I despise the idea of someone telling me what I should or shouldn't like, as though I have no mind of my own to decide what I do or don't like, and as though they are somehow superior and have some kind of enlightened outlook on things that I could never hope to achieve.

What if I'm currently in college, having returned after 15 years. Currently 35, a junior, CS major. How is it _getting into_ the industry at this age, not just staying in it?

It also seems to remove the people who may or may not actually understand the fundamentals of the language they claim to have experience in, rather only knowing how to cobble together frameworks and/or copypasta code.

Putting examples in the entry fields in the questionnaire seems like a leading question to me. When it says, "Tech you prefer not to work with: e.g., javascript, c#, php", one is immediately going to thing, "Well of course people hate javascript! So do I" as opposed to letting the respondent decide for themselves which they least prefer.

I think there's a massive problem in recent times of an over-zealous focus on procedures and the "how" of a particular process. I think process-driven management results in micro-managing tyrants, over-stressed, over-worked employees, poor efficiency, and poor results.

We need to focus on results. Who cares about the process, as long as it works, and the people doing it are happy?

Reminds me of a quote I heard a while back, not sure the source, went something to the effect of:

"Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But a person who never wins and never quits is a fool."

I've really been enjoying Black Powder

I think it's fascinating the change in how we view site navigation. Another commenter gave a link to an old Microsoft site that had links all over the place. But for the most part, it seemed like sites started to standardize on navigation vertically on the left side. Now, we generally see them horizontally on the top, or in hamburger menus. But it's interested how that paradigm shifted. It seems like vertical side navigation would be more prevalent now, given how much wider monitors are.

I absolutely adore that CNN 1996 site. Man, designs like that were great.

If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.

Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?

On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.

I evaluated it. I read the manifesto in its entirety.

He starts off by saying he's not against diversity, but then spends the rest of the paper demonstrating the exact opposite, and then justifies it by claiming that men and women are biologically different, and that a lack of diversity is ok because of that, or that any perceived discrimination is ok, because it's not really discrimination.

And he uses the issue of "dialog" as a smokescreen. It's the same kind of tactic used by creationists wanting to "teach the controversy." They don't really want to honestly debate the merits of each position.

This isn't dialog, nor does he want dialog. It's simply him trying to justify his prejudice, and railing at "PC culture" for not letting him do so.

The author took the "I'm not sexist, but..." approach to this. But sadly, because of that, people seem to think he's some kind of objective observer.

If you have to make that kind of declaration, then everything you say afterward contradicts it.

Perhaps it's hope that things will eventually get better. That's one thing that kept me hanging on for a long time. The problem is that so many project seem to be asymptotic. The developers get to a point where the software is almost ready for prime time, or is getting really good, and then trash it, start over, or decide to switch direction. Or the dev team falls apart, and you get 3 forks out of the project that never go anywhere. It seems like no one ever wants to actually finish anything. And it gets tiresome.

Also ideological reasons, which I totally understand. I prefer FLOSS options when possible, but I'm not dogmatic about it. I understand a lot of people want to make sure every bit of software they are using is open, and I totally get that.

I mean, I still love Linux a great deal, and if DEs were less shit, and applications were more integrated, I would still be running Linux, or would return to it. But I suppose it's simply a matter of what people are comfortable with.

This is extremely worrisome. What is their endgame? Who are the people behind PIA, and what is their motivation? Sure, freenode is an important network to keep alive, but PIA seems to be spreading it's influence in a lot of places.

I love macOS. It's a Unix system, with a fantastic GUI, well-integrated applications, an ecosystem that is rich and vibrant, and a command-line system the is extremely usable, also with a rich ecosystem (homebrew, macports, etc)

For me, after 10 years of trying to make desktop Linux work the way i wanted it to, macOS is everything I was looking for.

Gnome decided that they had no desire to make a usable DE. They took everything that made it good, threw it out the window, and went as far as they could to make it unusable.

KDE is just a clusterfuck. 2-3 system preferences panels, confusing options, and way too much gloss (glow, transparency, etc).

I spent a long time with tiling window managers, trying to roll a system that felt comfortable and usable to me. And for the most part I succeeded. But the lack of integration with applications is really what ruined it for me. I want a good email client, an address book that can have arbitrary amounts of phone numbers and email addresses per entry, and the ability to give those arbitrary names. I also want my email, address book, and calendar to be aware of each other and play well together. I want a nice way to sync all of that to my mobile devices. I want an experience that feels coherent, instead of something hacked together with bailing twine.

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. For servers, I would never choose anything else (well, maybe FreeBSD). But it seems like over the last decade, distro developers and desktop environment developers have gone out of their way to sabotage their own efforts and make their software as unappealing as possible.

Everything about this situation seems shady to me. It's really hard to take the story at face value. Especially given Gary's downward spiral afterward. There has to be _way_ more to this story than is widely known.

I'm a computer engineering major, but have a lot of overlap with the computer science track.

We start with Intro to C, then move on to CS1 and CS2 which both deal almost exclusively with C and dig pretty deep into it. We have an OOP class that is Java-based, and an operating system class that is C-based.

So yes, C is still taught.