No. They meant to stop him from his compulsive interest in electronics. They wanted him to play with other kids, play sports, run around. He seemed weird and they thought he would seem weird when he grew up. And running shop that fixes radios didn't look like success to them. (Until recently, "nerd" was a very offensive insult.)
> (Until recently, "nerd" was a very offensive insult.)
In that sense, perhaps society has made a little progress, in socially embracing those that seem eccentric, quirky or uncomfortable - maybe not always for the right reasons, but it allows more people to be themselves and be happy.
I think it's less of actual progress, and more of economy: what was considered nerdy two decades ago, now is the easiest path to both upper-class and 1%-levels of wealth. People don't hate nerds anymore, they want to be them - not because the topics are interesting, but because they're a good career.
There's certainly some of that, but the long tail of the Internet means there are all sorts of communities and real-life meet ups of the strangest obsessions where their interests are celebrated, not made fun of. This means it's safe to declare your weird obsessions. Even if you're family doesn't understand it, they don't have to - theres a community to connect with, whereas previously there was little/no such ability, and Nerd interests were shunned. Now they're the feature of Comic Con, SDCC, Pax, etc.
Rather, the connotations of the word "nerd" have lessened significantly. In the 60s and 70s, it was like what being called an "incel" is today. It was meant to mark you as unlikeable, unpleasant, unattractive, and pretty much outside of the realm of normal human consideration.
Very dubious that a electronics mini-wizard could not figure by himself that it's impossible to take down the electric city distribution system from your house.
I' vaguely remember confronting my father over a similar issue during my electrical experimental days as a kid, asking him why our house had no adequate protection (those days simple fuses where still normal).
Sort of, I guess. But it’s also the idea that most people receive a lot of information passively as a result of whatever ads are shown to them on tv, YouTube, Facebook, etc - so all that money goes to the volume of propaganda pushed out promoting one result or another. Important concepts often have nuance, and that means some good and some bad, and if you’re on one side or the other you can tell the part of the story you wish to become the narrative.
Yes I've done this both as an interviewer and interviewee, it's a pretty valuable exercise I've found. Not a silver bullet, not the only thing you can do, not appropriate for every situation, but generally good.
Regarding your other point I agree with you, but if the main point is to evaluate understanding then the difference doesn't really matter. If you're testing for ability to invent concepts etc, then this might be more important to you.
I secretly suspect this is everybody, and the people who claim to be coming up with real solutions in their sleep are back justifying what happened when they had enough time to sleep well and felt nice.
As I also experienced this, the trick is that you keep your mind focused around the problem, even when you go to sleep. I already mentioned you need to make trying to solve the problem your big thing of the day. Of course if you try to solve a problem and at the same day got almost robbed or were close to having an accident (or something really nice happened) your brain is most likely to process that instead at sleep or mix things up.
Claiming that all the engineers, scientists and researchers who claim to use a specific technique to solve problems are really just "back justifyting" seems a bit weird. For the record, I use this technique all the time AND, for the past 8 years, have been getting a solid 8 hours sleep most nights. Why would we do that?
Because that’s also what a brain is doing. The thoughts of a housefly may not be very apocalyptic, but there’s an evolutionary path from there to humans, which definitely could be.
Sorry, but that's not what a brain is doing. A brain is a self-sustaining organ, using a vast multitude of inputs, outputs, and interconnects to affect its surroundings.
"AI" is severely limited in both its inputs and outputs, has virtually no interconnects, but most importantly: it is not a self-sustaining organ. Wake me up when we have implemented RNNs on a dynamic, auto-sensing, auto-actuating FPGA grid.
I worry that tech workers may be under-informed about what a union may mean. A union can be in many ways similar to a corporation with its own power structure and demands.
Just 4 examples from my time in a union shop:
1) Pay raise and promotion via seniority only
2) Being warned by the shop steward that I was "working too fast"
3) Heavy coercion to contribute to specific political candidates
4) Going on strike for reasons I didn't agree with
Maybe a tech union would turn out better somehow. I for one would not want to go back to that situation.
A union is a beast unto itself, and much like companies, unions vary a great deal between themselves and your specific experiences don't generalize across all unions, anymore than my experience working for a CPG company generalizes across the industry.
To counter your anecdote, my mother spent years working under a telecom union when I was younger and never had any such issues. Employees sure were grateful however to have someone on their side when it came time to negotiating severance around lay-offs.
As a thought experiment though: Why do we allow corporations to exist then, if we actively oppose unions for behaving in the same way as corporations?
You draw a straight parallel between union behavior and corporate behavior. By that same argument then, I will argue that if unions are bad, corporations are bad for the same reason and corporations should be abolished.
Unions have their own goals that are more than just "the interests of Kickstarter employees". So in fact, there will be times when issues are important to Kickstarter employees but are not important to their union. Or important to the union but not very many employees. And then what?
I thought the whole point of unions was to represent interests of employees? If the Kickstarter employees' issues are not important to their union, why would they unionize?
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
The Kickstarter employees can create a “Union of Kickstarter Employees” and then try to build the negotiating and benefits infrastructure themselves, or they can join a much larger union and get the benefits of shared infrastructure. The benefit of the former is that it will be hyper-focussed on the needs of that group but it will cost more and probably be a lot less effective. A larger union costs each employee less and gives them a lot more “muscle” when it becomes necessary to negotiate but the downside is that they are one small group among many when it comes to setting overall policy or goals.
Think of a union as a business whose job is to protect employees and provide them with some benefits. Some unions will be giants with horrible customer service and corporate goals that seem to be more about self-perpetuation and some unions will be smaller and more focussed on the needs of a specific industry. Each type serves different needs.
I think that people need to think about the distinctions between a white-collar union and a blue-collar union.
A blue-collar union, like the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), can essentially treat each person as known amount of performance and bargain as such. There is relatively little difference between trained employees on a production line. So the UAW can bargain for things like promotion by seniority only, which provides a reasonable balance to keep managers from playing favorites. There's not a whole lot you can do to set yourself apart when you are stamping out door panels and robots do the welding for you, so promotion on merit isn't as important. Take a look at the tone of this UAW web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to avoid bad things: https://uaw.org/organize/no-union-no-rights/
For white-collar unions, such as the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), there often is a demonstrable difference in the quality of work that trained employees do, so they don't want to get rid of merit based consideration, but they do want to ensure that their employees are treated fairly. Take a look at the tone of this SPEEA web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to achieve more good things: http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/Benefits_of_SPEEA.html
The Kickstarter union shouldn't model themselves after the UAW, but more like SPEEA. I don't know what the employees are proposing, but I fear that a lot of people assume that the Kickstarter employees are trying to start a mafia within the organization that controls what all the employees can do. That's probably not the case, they should make sure that two people with the same merit are given the same fair shakes. They shouldn't be telling people to code fewer lines per day because they don't want to give the company free labor.
Things like requiring workers to support certain political candidates is what makes some people dislike unions. It's one thing for a union to endorse a candidate because they support policies favorable to union workers, it's another thing to coerce your employees to vote a certain way.
Things like striking even if you don't agree with them however, is a good part of the union and is how it gains its bargaining power. If people were free to just pick and choose the issues that they supported, then there wouldn't be a point of a union. Assuming the union is not corrupt, you should strike in solidarity with your other union members. If you show support for them today even if you don't necessarily agree, they might show support for you tomorrow even if they don't necessarily agree.
What about unions that are more like a trade guild, which sets standards for its members which make dealing with a union member more of a known quantity than hiring a random person off the street? I'm thinking of things like a union electrician or plumber.
This could serve to minimize the need for interview gimmicks, since the union itself would enforce standards through its own certification process.
Yep. And that's exactly where it should be. It's insane that we have to prove the same things at every interview when certification already proves these things.
If all you want is a plumber with a certain skill set, then hire a union plumber with certification.
because languages are specification, "books".
they are not interpreted nor compiled.
The most common implementations of the C language are compilers, yes, but "compiled" it's not a language property
As another denizen of this chain, I still don't see the confusion at all.
> because languages are specification, "books". they are not interpreted nor compiled
Languages are a specification, and an implementation working together in perfect harmony, with absolutely no undefined behaviour at all, yes, keep walking now.
At least... the good ones try to be, cough ignoring small half baked interpreters and compilers I've had the pleasure of working with cough and never touching again.
> The most common implementations of the C language are compilers, yes, but "compiled" it's not a language property
It absolutely is a large part of the C language and worth teaching, and I'd only split hairs in a programming language theory class, this is a book that presumably leaves the reader with a better grasp of C than before. And arguing against it is an exercise in personal experience I assume (you have C interpreter experience I wager?).
Most people are still taught C in terms of a compiler like gcc, or clang. Source code in, object code (for a specific language specification, target architecture, etc) out. Think operating systems, kernel modules, executables, dll's, and, etc.
I never touched a C interpreter (but I am curious at such a beast), but I know that C is fine to be referenced as "compiled".
so, is javascript an interpreted language?
what about jits?
...or babel, for what is worth.
if languages are "compiled" why does both C and C++ (and also java etc...) need a "memory model"? bare physical address and real threads should be enough, no?
> Languages are a specification, and an implementation working together in perfect harmony, with absolutely no undefined behaviour at all, yes, keep walking now.
never talked about "quality" or "comprehensiveness" of the specs.
Just that languages are specs, not implementations.
Yes, in the real world you will use gcc, and you will learn that you write some text stuff and it will transform to an executable for you.
Still, why don't you use the right terminology?
The problem is that, if a book slip on this -- so basic -- definition, how good can it be on the complex parts?
The root thing here is the author said "C is a compiled programming language". According to the objection, C is also, an, interpreted programming language so its not the correct classification. That's the complaint I read...
I just don't see this complaint as valid. From the discussion garnered here, C be both a compiled and interpreted language. This is a book about C in the context of the compiled variant, and has references to gcc and clang. The level of detail and nuance when using terminology here is used to match the context the terminology appears in. Excess verbiage for terminology isn't a panacea to confusion, in fact it can increase it. Can't "C is a compiled language" and "C is a interpreted language" both be true independently?
Don't get me wrong, I like reading perspectives like yours, because I just discovered a bunch about C interpreters.
But I feel like you are asking for a "spec" level document on modern C, when you are reading a more practical work on it.
It just so happens that the specification in this case makes very specific demands on the translation environment, closely describing compilation step by step from source files into a program image.
Your "interpreted C" is only C in the loose sense that one may describe other non-compliant but roughly similar implementations.
>>> If you made a viable investment in a property and are currently renting it out, wouldn't rent increases just need to equal inflation in order for you to maintain the same level of profitability?
Not necessarily - taxes on property owners don't follow inflation. They may go up greatly compared with inflation.
>>> I hardly see why maximizing profits should be seen as a necessity---especially when it comes at the cost of pushing people out onto the streets.
Because if don't allow it to be profitable people won't do it. Particularly in California it can be quite risky the rent out a property. It's an extremely tenant friendly location, so much so that evictions for major infractions can take several months, or in some cases years.
In Chicago, a lot of multi-units (2+ flats) are converted to single large SFH, so the net effect could be worse especially if prices were to go down that it would be attainable to do that.
Interesting! I wonder about the economics of that?
Do they just knock down a wall in the middle? Or is there any new construction involved? (Usually the developer wants to go for higher intensity to sell more units per land.)
