marksutherland

I've studied as a computer scientist and as an engineer (electronics) and it's been my constant impression that those trained in the former completely misunderstand the latter. The engineering mindset is one of creative problem solving, using heuristics, tools and systems that have worked well in the past to guide you to your eventual goal, and ignoring them if they don't make sense or will misguide you. Instead many programmers seem to want to find the general algorithm for development. It doesn't exist and in a way its our philosophers stone, it's pursuit wastes time, effort and money. Instead we should be happy with the ever expanding toolkit of techniques the modern developer has at their beck and call whenever they're necessary. That's the real essence of Software Engineering, even if some parts of the industry have gotten lost over the past few decades.

Frankly, this article's title is blatant troll-bait and I really should know better.

So, my advice is to give the guy a hand if you have time, you'll probably find he has skills that compliment your own which could come in useful someday. Also, try to stop caring so much about how your peers are performing, and focus on exploiting the access to people and resources available to you so you can get what you want out of the course. Ultimately there's very little you can do to change the behaviour of people your only mildly acquianted with.

The thing is, the industry is a lot bigger than it seems when you're at university. Developers/programmers are actually a pretty small part of it. For example, software testing/validation is a job in itself which can involve very little coding. Professional documenters are paid to write about software and do very little coding, but an understanding of the field is still useful to them. And lets not forget the good old ranks of management, forever considered to be a complete waste of time that gets in the way of "just hacking shit out". Except it turns out people don't want shit.

So basically, just because somebody is on your course and doesn't want to spend all night fiddling with their ubuntu installation, reading HN and learning the stuff you know that you'll need for the job you want, doesn't mean they wont be able to hack it in industry. If anything the industry could do with more normal people. Preferably ones with boobs.

goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting

More to the point though, twitter's issues tend not to be the kind of thing you're looking for in beta testing. You can't test scale with a limited number of users by defintion. A service which still loses data in corner cases, exposes private information unintentionally and so on is better off in an acknowledged private beta than suffering the incredibly bad press and resentment of users which will arise in these scenarios.

Also, not all software is built equal. Twitter is strongly affected by network effects, the more people using it, the more valuable it becomes, so getting people signed up is more important than ironing out every bug. However the likes of gmail is weakly affected as you can still email all of your mates whether they use gmail or not. Spotify's value doesn't particularly increase when new users join it, but it does when it's catalogue is expanded.

The highest rated posts in the last N days (not sure what N is). Not very well documented, but interesting to know about.

Also, primary school is equivalent to elementary school is in the states, so this doesn't mean that pupils will never be taught about some of things that have been made non-compulsory. In particular, as the article points out, the second world war is covered extensively during secondary school (i.e. high school). And it's also worth mentioning that this probably only applies to the english curriculum.

Now, lets quote Zed:

"Read it, and take it as a chance to discuss pseudo-macho speech online, and whether you really are only listening to perceived strength rather than reason."

I did some searching, and the highest ranked similar post I could find is this one which currently has 31 points:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404309

Want to bet this article gets more points? :)

Meh, I suspect one of the reasons I'm most riled up about this is that I'd have also defended him a few months back. I doesn't seem like he needs it now though.

WTF are we still paying attention to him, and why is he still getting to the top of the HN front page when he's done nothing of any real worth for the past year, apart from the opinionated rants he himself has decried?

Any particular reason this was linked to other than general interest? I'm not seeing anything revolutionary...

Perhaps also worth mentioning Hofstadter's Law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

Similarly, adverts on TV are usually much louder than the shows they're interrupting to try and grab your attention and they all compete with each other for that attention. Very annoying.

http://www.prorec.com/Articles/tabid/109/EntryId/247/Over-th...

I suspect this is the same process that resulted in making Death Magnetic almost unlistenable with good headphones.