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Sometimes if a joke doesn't land, it's because the joke wasn't funny. (Also, yes, a lot of folks here are autistic, maybe cool it with the veiled insults.)

Sure sometimes... other times you get deadpan replies unironically demanding citations and proof of claims.

There's nothing veiled or an insult: what I mentioned is a real factor in why people would read that statement and jump to demanding proof.

-

If I told a room full of plumbers that Sharkbites are actually sponsored by big Water trying to encourage water wastage, it definitely might not land... but none of them are going to demand a citation!


Have you considered just not living with people you think so little of?

I have an analogue thermostat in my home, but vacations (in rental properties) with the in-laws turn into thermostat wars. I particularly don't appreciate the ones that use proximity sensors to light the thermostat display's backlight. Whoever came up with that idea was a genuine asshole.

Besides, would you really break off a relationship over something so petty as temperature preference? The people who find somebody who's literally perfect for them must be very rare, I think most people have to make small sacrifices and concessions.


I agree, everyone makes small sacrifices and concessions to the people they live with, and I would never break up with someone over such a small issue as temperature preference. But trying to trick your partner or housemate into thinking you haven’t changed the temperature? That’s the kind of strategy you use when you’re stuck with someone you can’t communicate with, or don’t respect enough to want to communicate with, or have given up on communicating with. At that point I’d be packing my things.

Illegal, yes.

This is a great tip. One of our QA engineers noticed recently that a particularly difficult-to-reproduce bug was affecting records saved at :21, which is when a particular cronjob hits. Without that extra info we’d probably still be scratching our heads over it.

Not to be that person, but spaces around em dashes is AP style. No spaces is Chicago style. They’re both valid.


And they wonder why print media is dying.


It literally did not. Celibacy was much more common (or at least commonly aspired to) and was considered virtuous.


Only in prescribed folds. The average unmarried person was a relative outcast. Lifelong singleness was exceedingly rare. It went as far as having legal ramifications like not being able to own property and being unable to hold certain offices.


If you’re an outlier, I’m out there with you: I’ve also been writing software professionally for 20 years, I have no CS degree, and I’m not fool enough to reimplement algorithms like quicksort that are sitting right there in stdlib. I similarly found this explanation a lot more useful than anything else I have read about quicksort, and I’m confident I could implement it now, but couldn’t have before I read this.


If you guys like visual-explanations that are a bit more intuitive -- I put actually made guides on both data-structures and algorithms not too long ago which you can find here:

Visual-Focused Algorithms Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-focused-algorithms...

Visual Data Structures Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-data-structures-ch...


The Fenwick tree in your cheat sheet seems a little broken


Can you go into a little more detail? What is broken exactly?


The visual is extremely hard to understand how it relates to the description, given that it looks to be 1-indexed, but the description only makes sense for 0-indexing (4th element stores the sum of the first 4 elements), not to mention none of the binary indexes seem to be storing the correct sums (or they're storing sums of a tree that isn't being presented).


The visual is directly from here (I recommend you give it a read if you want to grasp the full intuition on how a Fenwick tree works (page 97)): https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf

I should have included the full visuals which are included there and I can see your point on why people would get confused by that visual - so I'll make a note to include the full image when I have more time. Thank you for the feedback.


We don’t have time to hang our clothes out on the line and bring them in again and iron them. We’re too busy working. sobs


If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.


I’m not going to use force against him. Threatening to take away the computer or tablet is generally plenty. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a precondition to using these things is ‘go to school’.


I’m referring to governments, not parents. If I don’t send my child to school, the state of Washington will have a word to say about it. There are laws.


I don't see any part of my comment where I blamed the kids. I explicitly said that it's a flaw in the way our society approaches education.


Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was arguing with you. It was more vehement agreement.


My bad, I didn't realize :)


> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back?

Agreed.

> I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.

Disagree. The justification for why they should learn $FOO may never be understood by a mind that we are teaching $FOO to.

There's good justification for learning to read, but not one that would be understood by a 6 year old.

There's similarly good justification for teaching Maths, but you'd be hard pressed to convince a 16 year old of the value in practicing abstract reasoning, using Maths as the vehicle.

Sometimes, the only good answer to give a kid is "you'll see the value when you're older".


As parents do, I had numerous discussions with my kid about math and additional languages. Here's my usual explanation: it's existing knowledge that opens doors, not theoretical one, and you want to have as many doors open as possible.

Well, I use other words bit that's my message anyway :-)


And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.

I also disagree that there needs to be justification. I don't think students' minds work like that. What's needed is something different and probably many kinds of something different since there's many kinds of learners.

So far, a huge percentage of students are getting left behind when teachers and material fail to have a good answer.


> And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.

With an insufficiently developed brain, there is no answer that leads to engagement or interest.

Sometimes you'll find yourself telling kids "How do you know you won't like it unless you try it?"

If you, personally, claim to have never told a kid that specific sentence (regardless of context), I have serious doubts that you actually have kids.

Sometimes engagement and interest only come after the kid has been forced through a little bit of it.

They are children; you can't always reason with them because they have not yet developed sufficient reasoning skills. Making the claim that reasoning is all you need to get children to do the right thing is plain nonsense.

> I also disagree that there needs to be justification.

Sounds like we're in agreement, after all? I also don't think there needs to be a justification for "You need to learn Maths". This is why I said an answer along the lines of "you'll understand why later" is all you can do when asked for a justification.


If you ask adults about their school experiences, they very often say that it was a waste and they remember nothing and just remember hating math and that they never use any of that. And that we should teach about finance like loans, mortgages, bureaucracy, jobs, contracts, warranty rights, how to buy a house, how to buy a car, how elections work, etc. and other real life things that average adults do. It's super common outside the tech circles that you may be in.


I’d invite these adults to consider what their life might be like had they never learned maths, or other school subjects they considered a waste of time.

Maybe awesome, but I doubt it.


This is entirely understandable, and entirely the fault of whoever thought bash scripts belong in configuration files. If you’re trying to stuff a tiger into a desk drawer, the natural consequences are hardly the fault of the desk drawer.


But it's the situation we're in now. It's what you see in the docs and what my colleagues write as well. I entirely agree that scripting into a markup language doesn't make sense yet the inertia is there and I wish there was some way out.


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