>So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
This is a fair concern, but I'd say that if you're building something right now, I think is better to worry more about getting your startup in a position to take over the world first and then deal with those concerns. Worrying about these big problems when you're small I would say is a bit of premature optimization.
If we had known in 94 that customer reviews would eventually get gamed in this way, should we ever have added the feature? Was 15 or 20 (?) years of a "working" review system enough to make it worthwhile, and now it needs revisiting, or should we just have said "no" right at the start?
No review system would be even worse as you cannot even tell if people are getting crap. There is already ceasesless whining about false positives being an abuse of power and in the same breath complaining about not doing enough.
The "do nothing ever without the foresight of a precog or else you are EVIL!" school of ethics never made any sense. It is just an excuse to be outraged and pin all of the world's problems on the tall poppy.
Same here, I was running around like a headless chicken and wondering what I was doing wrong when elasticbeanstalk just wouldn't deploy anything. The fact that we doubt ourselves rather than thinking aws is down is a good damn indicator how reliable they are, luckily it happened during daytime (EST anyways)
The issue started happening much sooner, around morning time in EST, but it got worse as the day progressed. It looks like the Amazon engineers woke up and realized something was wrong and they updated their status page 5-6 hours late. But I agree, AWS is super reliable, it's unfortunate that this problem occurred and I hope it's resolved soon.
Simply not true. Actually Jetbrains IDEs have IMO one of the best if not the best VIM emulations in all IDEs, IdeaVIM is awesome.
For example, you can have your own custom "vimrc", they call it ".ideavimrc" which can also read your normal .vimrc but I prefer to keep it separate.
Once in the .ideavimrc, ideavim has emulation for probably the most popular vim plugin (vim-surround) and also vim-multiple-cursor and commentary.vim plugins, you just have to enable them... set surround, etc... see more at: https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim
But to me the best part of it is doing my own keymappings to execute IDE actions which sometimes don't even have a shortcut or menu and are just accessible by "mouse"
supports imap, vmap as well in case u just want to trigger in those modes.
etc... this will let you use the ANY IDE action with just the keyboard and most dialogs in jetbrains IDE support CTRL+N/P for next/prev navigation in panes... not to mention you can filter most of them just by typing whatever
The fact IdeaVIM exists is probably the biggest reason I use and pay for Jetbrains IDEs, all the VIM goodness + IDE convenience.
> It's absolutely, crushingly, depressing seeing how far you've come up, vs how others are staying down and the incredibly thin line of circumstance that seperates you both.
I hear you! this hits home hard with me. It is truly sad to see your family "stuck" in the same circumstances but at the same time I also think is very motivating to know that you "broke" the cycle from your family's "unlucky" past circumstances.
> And it gives employers confidence that you have the skillset to handle whatever they throw at you.
Blindly having confidence in someone with a degree vs. someone with no degree is a bad mistake in this industry, IMO, sadly it happens.
It really comes down to the person, self taught or not, if you don’t pursue continuing education (which is a must in this industry) whatever CS knowledge you learnt with your degree will only take you so far.
Also said “broad exposure” can be well… self taught as well, algorithms, data structures, OS, etc… all things you can learn and "master" with no CS degree.
With all that said, I do agree CS education is essential to become a better developer. As a self thought myself, learning CS has made me a way better developer for sure, and I would advise all self taught devs to do the same, it will pay off immensely and best of all no student loan to repay.
I think you’re missing the point your parent was making...
In a good CS program you will be presented a series of challenges below your “depth”....
“wait, you want me to WRITE a data structure? I usually just use a good one from a library”
“wait, you want me to fix a compiler? I have only ever run a compiler”
“wait, you want me to write code that CREATES processes out of nothing? I am used to letting the OS create processes”
... etc. These provide you a series of epiphanies, “wow, I can build a compiler from scratch, that means I could fux with LLVM if I had to”.
Ideally, these programs are designed to take you all the way down to the bottom of the machine. For some students, the end result is confidence in their ability to “dive in” to a problem anywhere in the system.
If your point is that you can teach yourself that outside of school—absolutely. But... well, in my case I doubt I ever would have. It wasn’t fun, I was pushed to do things I would never have followed through on if I was just casually teaching myself about programming languages or operating systems.
And if your point is that students can get away without learning the material—well, also yes. Of course.
But you are wrong to dismiss the idea that a CS degree is just another few things to learn. This business of “get all the way down to the bottom and challenge yourself at every step” is kind of the whole point of a CS degree, and the world outside is not going to encourage you to do it the way your profs will.
I have seen plenty of CS grads that can barely code or put together a real solution to a problem. There is no guarantee just because someone was able to muddle through a CS degree that they can do these things. In almost all cases, you really need to evaluate whether an individual shows the aptitude to solve your problems you need solved and crank out good well thought out practical solutions that fit the scale of the business problem. The degree paper is not all that important. I would give bonus points to a candidate if they came from an accomplished but different background than CS that shows they are capable of success/mastery in multiple areas, they are adept at learning and researching new material, and they have the matching technical prowess to spearhead a real project. For instance I have known many engineering (of the physical paradigm) types that are self-taught with no CS degree that I would trust to tackle a project over any random CS degree candidate.
for the reader, not the writer. he/she obviously knows the word but a potential reader might not and he's just saving them the google search, my guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nextdoor comes to mind, but not necessarily a local online town square which I agree with your comment that a source like that is invaluable to keep up with local issues.
I've seen too many stories of people discovering their neighbors are racist/classist assholes on Nextdoor to want to participate. Leave me a few illusions about the inherent goodness of people.
(SF Bay Area here) I personally enjoy watching almost every ND convo degrade into which person is the biggest victim (race, class, and so on). Bothered me at first, but now it is sheer entertainment
Must be a geographical issue. I’m very active on next door and I’ve never seen such behavior. Sure there are a few spats like recently about fireworks but I’ve never witnessed anything “racist” or “classist”. I understand this is anecdotal, my experience might not match others.
Probably. I live in Seattle and people seem to frequently complain about having to see homeless and other "undesirables" in their neighborhood. I love it when their posts also include stealthy photos of the offenders in question. /s I've seen neighbors who live in my same building posting this sort of crap. Obviously there are a lot of issues to address in the city, and people should certainly find ways to do that, but I find it really maddening when people pile on and and take out all of their frustrations on a single person.
