throwawayboise (u/throwawayboise)

throwawayboise commented on PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Thebroser

BeetleB · 4 years ago

> Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt.

For people in many European countries, this is an absurd amount of debt to get a university degree.

Edit: For context: About 20 years ago, my university's annual fees was $15000/year for out of state students, and $4600 for in state - in today's dollars. Now that university charges $28K for out of state and $8.3K for in state - almost doubled after accounting for inflation. In other nearby universities I see people paying $15K/year for in state. This is a huge increase in two decades.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.

throwawayboise commented on PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Thebroser

LewisVerstappen · 4 years ago

Where is all this tuition even going to? Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia and yet these colleges are also systematically underpaying PhD students, Teaching Assistants, etc.

College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either.

Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt.

These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant tax benefits), so where is the money even going?

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

> Where is all this tuition even going to?

Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.

Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually choose a school based on the living accomodations over the education.

Programs to assist students who should really not be there, and other programs that don't seem to recognize that college students are adults and should be expected to manage their lives by themselves. Do they really need the university to arrange coloring book time to help with the stress of mid-terms?

throwawayboise commented on PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Thebroser

twistedpair · 4 years ago

Ever seen Football coach, and college president salaries?

For state colleges, they're often some of the highest paid employees in the state. [1]

1. https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/28261213/dabo-s...

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Athletics is normally (always?) a separate self-funding enterprise attached to th e university. Tutition dollars don't pay the coaches; alumni donations/gifts, sponsors, and ticket sales do.

throwawayboise commented on Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries? science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/elorant

jmclnx · 4 years ago

Based upon what went on with Auto Tires in the US 30+ years ago, they will build up in many people's yards (especially in low populated areas) for decades until it becomes a kind of minor super-fund site.

Unless disposing of batteries can seem "free" and very easy, I expect that to happen. Somewhat similar to used auto oil. I suspect in various places used oil is either burned for heat or dumped in an undeveloped area.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Used oil is very much burned for heat. Common for shops in areas that need heat in the winter to have a "waste oil heater" instead of using utility gas or electricity for heat.

https://www.energylogic.com/waste-oil-heaters/

throwawayboise commented on Useless Use of "dd" (2015) vidarholen.net/contents/b... · Posted by u/RaoulP

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

I used to used dd to convert EBCDIC to ASCII reading tapes from a 1/2" reel-to-reel tape drive. The "convert" capability of dd is what differentiates it from utilities such as cat.

throwawayboise commented on Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries? science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/elorant

endisneigh · 4 years ago

I'm going off the warranty - if it was really that good they'd offer better warranty, no? Speaking of the Nissan Leaf, upon searching I came across a forum post (https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=32426) claiming they're down to 60% in 6 years. Pretty bad, no? Obviously anecdotal but my original post was conservative to begin with.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Warranties are for sales. They don't really say much one way or the other about the reliability of the car.

throwawayboise commented on Blinkenlights: PC Binary Emulating Visualizer justine.lol/blinkenlights... · Posted by u/yakshaving_jgt

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Sometime in the first half of the 1980s I had a TI99/4a, my first computer.

I started programming in BASIC and it was interesting but I felt I was missing a lot in my understanding of what was really going on.

At some point I found a program called "picoprocessor" that was along these lines, but vastly simpler of course. It created on the display an operator panel for a 4-bit computer, it had maybe 2 registers and only a few operations but it was enough to get the light bulb glowing in my head about how computers worked at the assembly language/machine code level.

Seeing the state changes visually on the "panel" as the program ran was so helpful to my understanding that I still remember the experience quite clearly some 40 years later.

My dad also commented about the computers in the lab where he worked, that had operator panels with toggle switches and LEDs. He could tell what loop the program was running by the pattern of lights on the panel.

throwawayboise commented on Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read youtube.com/watch?v=z7w2l... · Posted by u/zdw

bjourne · 4 years ago

Very interesting video. I'm convinced that this is a very under-explored area of software engineering and that proper naming is at least 50% of developer productivity. Often it doesn't matter how well-structured a code base is, if the function and variable names are nonsensical the code will still be very hard to read.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

This is actually not a new idea at all.

I once worked in a place in the 1990s that took it to such an extreme that every table name, column name, and variable name had to be approved by a naming standards committee before it could go into production. IIRC the committee met once a month, maybe twice? Which was not ideal for the developers but changes only went to production once a month during a "change window" anyway.

Naming conventions can help with code readability, but don't let the process become more important than the goals.

throwawayboise commented on “What if it changes?” chriskiehl.com/article/th... · Posted by u/goostavos

weatherlight · 4 years ago

What if it needs to change is better than, "What if it changes?"

In a business environment, Write code that is meant to be extended upon by people other than you.

It's not mindless tyranny, its good design.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

That's fine, as long as you are still solving the original problem in the required time. The IRS won't excuse that you missed filing your withholding data on time because you were making the reporting tool easier to extend upon later.

throwawayboise commented on Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing? · Posted by u/miguelrochefort

alkonaut · 4 years ago

1. Accept that you are a hoarder. 2. Stop hoarding. For example, stop bookmarking. Just accept that either you read somethig or you let it slip into the void of everything you'll never read.

throwawayboise · 4 years ago

Came here to say this sounds like hoarding behavior. To OP: do you also have problems accumulating physical things, organizing them, being unable to discard anything?

For your online stuff, I'd do a mass delete of anything over 90 days old (or pick some other cutoff). You just have accept what's already obvious: you're never going to go through all of it, so why keep it?