fburnaby

I do not think this extra justification is necessary, but it is valid.

This distinction is a more useful one that the article made. I love dockerfiles and immutability, but there are good cases for mutable containers, too.

it's like a very small part of a thesaurus.

Does anyone here know if and how the IHO's S-100 data formats relate to this?

I can't see from the docs what this gives me over a Makefile, Asciidoctor (or pandoc, Jekyll etc), and D3?

does that apply to installations from apt?

This also happens to me in Chrome on Pixel 4a.

asciidoc is my favourite too, thanks to Asciidoctor. I agree, asciidoc hits the sweet spots as a format. Been frustrated by the tooling lately though. I can see the huge effort put into Asciidoctor, and am thankful for it, but there are still big downsides i.e. no semantic html 5 output, difficult (or at least more difficult than necessary) integration with image generators, heavyweight (only ruby dependency on my entire machine). I imagine this just needs more time and resources put to it, as all these issues (except the ruby one) are open on GitHub.

I have no expertise, but this is my sleep. It turns out I have sleep apnea. I can "sleep" for 8 hours, but it does very little good. With apnea, you wake up as much as a few times an hour, getting very little REM. It took me years to consider apnea because I'm thin and somewhat fit. But all sorts can have it.

Philosophy of Science by Jeffrey Kasser

I have to disagree with other responses. I think you could make a career of this for the same reason management consultants can.

You could swoop in and "fix" some stuff and then leave the in-house team not understanding what you've done. That sounds profitable. You might even get called back to fix things a second time.

As with management consulting, I think it would at the system level tend to do more harm than good, even if you do good work and get paid well for it. I agree strongly with feoren that the code needs to reflect the in-house developers' mental models of the domain or everything will fall apart. If you fix things and then give them a bunch of processes and coding standards to follow, they will not do well and you will be thought of as some clueless architecture astronaut by them. But profitably.

I have been getting tired of node dependencies and not knowing what I'm running or when it will break. I make simple things for small number of users and started playing with just writing my own CGI in C++ or bash behind thttpd. This appears to be working very well so far and runs on a vanilla Linux install with deps just on system libs and gcc. With all the pain and unsafety of deps, this might actually make most sense. What new vulnerabilities am I inviting? Why aren't we still doing things this way? It seems... much easier, perhaps not to make it but to secure and sustain it.

I find this pervasive idea that "documenting" things is just a thoughtless dump of facts very troublesome.

Certainly, most "documentation" I read is just a thoughtless dunp of arbitrary facts about some system, design, code, or event or what have you. But it should be better.

There are infinitely many true statements to make about some thing in order to document it. The art is in determining which ideas and facts about it are relevant for an audience, and finding a way to express those ideas and/or facts clearly for.that audience, in a logical order, using good prose, diagrams, etc. I think that's as hard as any other writing task, and arguably more valuable than many. Documentation captures facts for record and makes them accessible to some audience who otherwise would not have known about that thing. What could be a more important kind of knowledge work than that?

I agree with all of this. Submodules aren't easy but they perform a useful job. It's hard to see how they could be made significantly easier. Where else in software is dependency management easy and convenient?

I believe this has less to do with software in particular and just generally reflects the typical dynamics of the line/staff distinction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line

I agree with your view on UML, but now I'm curious what you consider documents to be for.

I sometimes try to edit a file in neovim only to be warned that I have the same file open already (in some other tmux window or pane).

I imagine having tmux in vim instead of vim in tmux might resolve that issue for me. I'm curious to try this for that reason.

Hmm. I might be a "the internet is altering the course of human evolution" person. But it depends on what you mean by "the course of human evolution".

Do you mean "human evolution" in the typical biological sense, like talking about our genes and our physiology? Or something broader?

I'm pretty convinced that using the Internet has somewhat (not necessarily dramatically, but somewhat) already altered how I think about the world an dhow I see it. Certainly it has altered how I behave and spend much of my time. It also has clearly altered (I'd say dramatically) how we communicate, who we communicate with, and thus also who we consider to be part of our "in-group" (I'm thinking about Peter Singer's expanding circle). That has a huge impact on our moral attitudes, even. Very central changes to what we're like. Some people (I think rightly) consider this to be an evolution, in the broad systems sense of the word.

As for actual biological evolution, I guess that's less obvious to me. But it sure doesn't seem impossible. Yes, the beginning of the Internet is in some sense a consequence of our nature, not a cause. But now that it's here, it can interact with us; it is part of our environment, and could affect our biology. This idea isn't strange to ecologists, who typically refer to it as "top-down" forcing.

So my attitude to this is that, no, the existence of the Internet doesn't only "make our true nature more apparent". Or rather, it makes our true nature apparent in the same way that the elongated shape of some flowers illustrates the nature of hummingbirds (http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html). From that article: "It's obvious that a hummingbird's long narrow beak is an adaptation for feeding on long narrow flowers, but the corollary is also true: There are species of tube-shaped flowers that are adapted for being pollinated by organisms with skinny, tapered mouthparts." I want to say something similar: "Yes, there is an ecological relationship between us and the Internet, and thus the Internet reflects our natures, but it's also its own thing, a part of our environments, alongside which we should expect to evolve."

One interesting advocate of this view is the science historian George Dyson, if you're interested in exploring the idea more.

If something is worth $10,000 to me and I can get it for $0.99, I will not pay $10,000 for it.

Someone has made and maintained the app over a few person-months of effort, and can sell millions of copies of it. In order to pay for their time spent making the app, I need to give them one millionth of the cost of their time developing it. When there's lots of competition in the app market, app makers will have to sell their time at competitive prices.

Compare that to coffee. There are three baristas on this street who can make me a coffee, so they're also in a stiffly competitive market. But they have to make me my coffee personally, one at a time. I have to buy a larger portion of their time, since they can only make a few dozen coffees per hour (and they have more physical supply-chain issues to manage, like sourcing beans and managing a property).

It's emotionally easier to pay for the coffee in part because no-one down the street is offering it for half the price, or for free. They can't. An app developer can. And they'll have to, because if they don't, someone else will. Because they can.

It's not that your app doesn't have value. It's that the marginal value compared to a free app is small.

Pardon me for being so naive, but why does Netflix have no competition in their market? There's no alternative to switch to, and once I've taken a step back and thought about it, this surprises me.

Study with others. Preferably others who are motivated, but don't know quite as much as you. You'll end up teaching them the material. This forces you to explain the same concept five different ways (until you find a way to say it that your friend actually understands it) and this forces you to make all sorts of new connections.

It also gives you near-term motivation to stay on task -- your friends are counting on you to focus.

Agreed. I'm aware of a few small businesses that seem to be doing well at undercutting the big players with SCADA.

I'm also an electrical engineer, planning to start working this summer. I took a little detour to study for a M.Sc in mathematical ecology after finishing my B.Eng. I did some fairly heavy programming, algorithms and data visualization in MATLAB to support my thesis on scallop population dynamics. I'd love to get into doing control and/or sensing for ocean applications.

Ideally, I'd like to start a business in this field eventually. But don't feel that I have the connections or expertise yet. This type of engineering is not hacking, so the "ramen profitable, learn as you go" paradigm seems to be less applicable. My plan is to learn some more in industry over the course of however many years. As it stands I can build things, but I don't understand enough about the market to make sure I build the right things.

PS: Is anyone looking for recently graduated EEs with a little more math and programming than typical? You don't have to be in the ocean, though that could be a bonus.

My last umbrella lasted 20 seconds (Halifax, NS). I just wear a full rain suit now.

This was made (at least in part) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I recognize the statue and the train tracks.

... so you care about other peoples' karma!

Woods Hole sounds like the coolest place ever. I've been considering seeing if I can get in.

> I crave the challenge ... Are there schools out there that will let undergrads touch research and tackle the problems that current computer scientists face today?

If you're actually as interested as it sounds you are, then go. Lots of people have found university to be a waste of time, but I can't help but think that it's mostly been the people who waste their time there.

I think it's a shame that so many uninterested people get 'duped' into going; they likely won't get much out of it, and it's horrible that their guidance counselors (or whomever) are misleading them into thinking it's a necessary step. But there's so much cool stuff that goes on there, and profs will let you participate in it if you actually show an interest.