Readit NewsThese aren't really that different. Consider the history of the earliest (non-assembly) programming languages, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding , as well as the ideas expressed by Lisp.
It's unclear whether the author wrote all of this themselves, or if they outsourced a bunch of it to Claude. My experience with Claude was that it was terrible at writing code to do the math, even when I explained what the calculation needed to be, what the input was, and what the expected result was. It ultimately took starting a whole new project just to do the rolling window calculation, and then have that fed back in.
My biggest question for the author, if they happen to see this, is: how much manual testing validation did you do of the outputs the app produces? IE: Did you do the inputs + transformations = output calculations yourself as well, counting days on calendars, etc, to validate that the app is actually accurate? (That was the only way I developed any faith in solution I made for myself, which is way less impressive than your app). Regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or not, a thorough test harness feels vitally important for an app like this.
And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...
[1] by well-regarded, I mean well-regarded by eg people at competently run well-paying firms who do hiring, rather than eg people who are really into politics and who have idiosyncratic opinions about particular universities
Part of my bias is that I was an exchange student at RIT and while I appreciated the experience, I was not impressed by the CS courses or the level of maths of the students going there.
In my country of origin, the prestigious universities were all public and (almost) free. The most sough after degrees are difficult to get in and difficult to finish.
There, the mentality is that the only reason why would you pay for a private university is if youre not smart enough to finish the degrees on your own. I always found it intriguing that the logic is reversed in the US - the good ones are the expensive ones and the only reason you wouldnt go there is if you cant afford it. But Im glad to see that the logic in my home country does have some merit, as evidenced by the quote from your professor.
Anecdotally - some of them(definitely not all, not even a majority) - clearly didn't care about actually learning anything, they just spent the entire day in the lab playing LoL or didn't actually turn up. In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important. And they still have to somehow produce an MSc thesis at the end to get their degree, so in the eyes of the university they are still passing correctly to get their degree.
Either way - UK universities are too dependent on that funding to risk angering China which can easily make it a pain to go to UK to study.
"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"
The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.
The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?
I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).
Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.
While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)
Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?
If so, like, why?
(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)
None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.
I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.
So far, I mostly sharpen my knives on the back of a plate. So definitely could be doing more :)
"And the cook?" "What?"
"The cook wants in on the no-tax-on-tips so we're asking how much you'd like to tip him. We're also going to ask for the cleaner and the guy who delivered the ingredients earlier this morning."