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from the does-it-count-as-a-foreign-language dept.
Mark Guzdial at ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) writes:
I have three reasons for thinking that learning CS is different than learning other STEM disciplines.
- Our infrastructure for teaching CS is younger, smaller, and weaker;
- We don't realize how hard learning to program is;
- CS is so valuable that it changes the affective components of learning.
The author makes compelling arguments to support the claims, ending with:
We are increasingly finding that the emotional component of learning computing (e.g., motivation, feeling of belonging, self-efficacy) is among the most critical variables. When you put more and more students in a high-pressure, competitive setting, and some of whom feel "like" the teacher and some don't, you get emotional complexity that is unlike any other STEM discipline. Not mathematics, any of the sciences, or any of the engineering disciplines are facing growing numbers of majors and non-majors at the same time. That makes learning CS different and harder.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:43PM (31 children)
The feeling of newer team members "doing something" is probably why no major product can remain stable in the way it works.
Google for instance, has to change everything. A new mail web site? New messaging apps instead of Hangouts?
Or Ubuntu and Microsoft (and others) trying to change the decades old, well understood, familiar Desktop into something different? That might (but doesn't) work on a phone? I suspect this abandonment of the desktop is why people fled Ubuntu to Linux Mint. I suspect pushback is why Windows 10 has a proper Start menu once again. (How about fix Windows Server Data Center Edition, please.)
If it ain't broke, then don't fix it!
Why does a modern automobile have pretty similar basic controls to a car from the 1950's? Or office staplers which can shoot staples into adjacent offices / cubicles.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:56PM (29 children)
It's so right but the same thing (fix it till it's broke) happens in politics as well. Change for the sake of change. I was going to say Hollywood as well, but there it's just reboots of reboots of remakes although often the bits that did work in a movie franchise get changed in a clunky or shocking way just to try to generate some new interest.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:18AM (28 children)
Mostly, legislators don't even try to fix old law. Instead, already-made law hangs around, broken as hell, toxic as hell, while they make new broken laws, or just make the existing ones worse. So I'd say it's "break it further" is the goal of the legislator. Fixing things... no.
Non-elected regulators tend to remove a bit more from the rules corpus, but they engage in the same general process.
There's no motivation to fix old stuff; the tried-and-true (OMG terrorists... think of the children... superstitious pandering... yet more corporate and rich-person fluffing... etc.) occupies the vast majority of their time. That's why ridiculously, obviously and grievously broken processes like the "War on Drugs" don't get pushed aside because they don't, and never did, work; instead, they get progressively more Byzantine and destructive to society.
As I watch these things continually go radically and speedily downhill, I am often reminded of the remark Pris made in the movie Bladerunner: "Then we're stupid and we'll die."
Luckily, I'm old, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to die naturally on my own before voters manage to completely break things by continuing to elect the rich fools they consistently, and inexplicably, prefer.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:05AM (27 children)
You're making a huge mistake to think that "rich fools" are normally a thing. Yes, there are lottery winners, but generally the rich are damn smart. Many are geniuses.
That can change with age of course. McCain has his brain tumor, and he's old as fuck. He also married into money... but still, in his younger years at least, he was no fool.
In particular, if you think it is normal for a fool to increase his wealth by a factor of several thousand, you should do it yourself.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pav on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:56AM (20 children)
Perhaps what you say would have been true in the old high-tax anti-monopoly days, but these days wealth accumulates regardless of intelligence. The statistics show that a poor genius has worse prospects than an imbicile born into wealth. This is a no-brainer both in theory and practice. Game theory talks about "positive sum cooperation between entities of unequal economic power" - basically an economic disparity can be leveraged to gain an exponentially increasing share of collective production. Yup, Marx was right... raw capitalism is inherently unstable (which is why the social democracies came into being). Our ancestors knew this - the game of Monopoly started as a political tool to demonstrate how a low tax economy and no laws against monopoly will result in most of the economy becoming impoverished.... the "winner" is just the last guy to realise the economy has crashed. Monopoly originally had another set of rules with a high land/asset tax and laws against monopolies - it was "boring" ie. stable, as noone ever completely "won". Thomas Pikety also showed how this has worked in reality - as societies become more unequal and the common man is disempowered economies slow and falter.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:09AM (19 children)
No way. Sorry, wealth doesn't work that way.
No, that's not true. I'm sure there are such games, but economics of the market sort works differently. You can't have more than 100% so there's no "exponentially increasing share" possible. Second, perhaps you refer to people who invest their money and hence are likely to have exponentially growing wealth versus people who don't try. That's a bad comparison. A more valid one would be comparing investors against other investors.
This is particularly relevant since investments are often of dubious value. Too much is of a form that doesn't have much, if anything in the way of a cash flow combined with illiquid markets that make bailing out difficult (this gets worse with greater wealth). Nominal value of such wealth is notoriously fickle and hard to realize. Now compare that with the ability to pull a fairly predictable paycheck.
Now for relatively low levels of wealth there is an obvious advantage to more wealth. For example, there seems to me to be a considerable improvement as one builds towards $100k from nothing and transaction fees are large enough that there are economies of scale to stock purchases in the tens of thousands of dollars. Among other things it allows one more control over their life and is an early filter between those who can figure out how to invest and those who can't. One sees further improvements into the low millions of dollars. But at some point, you go from investment being a thing that a single person can do to something that requires a group to do. While that gives the opportunity for hiring expertise which can improve yields of great wealth, it also creates the opportunity for great theft, fraud, incompetence, etc. People who have wealth for any period of time have to figure out how to keep from losing that wealth. And the more wealth they have, the more clever or powerful the people who are trying to take that wealth.
While "crash" evokes a proper sense of disaster, it's broken in the sense that the economy routinely fixes itself after a crash. Imagine a car that fixes itself after you wrap it around a tree and drives better than ever in six months. That's what an economic crash means.
Finally, once again, we see that Marx has nothing to say about modern economies. Once again, quoting Marx approvingly is a signaling that you are ignorant of such things.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:43AM (5 children)
No, what he means is, for example :
If you and I do equal work on this project, we can realise a total profit of $1000. If we are otherwise equal, we will agree to split it $500 each.
But if I am under no stress because I already have $1000 in my pocket, and you desperately need $300 worth of medicine for your daughter, I can 'negotiate' my share up to $700 before you will refuse to participate.
The simple fact of my having more wealth allows me to take more than my 'fair' share.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:52PM (4 children)
Except that it's supposedly iterative where next time you can take oh, $900, then $1500, then $2500, etc. That's what exponential means. But there's only $1000 to take and only so much that you can get me to give up before it just doesn't happen.
My lack of planning is not a lack of fairness nor am I an infinite resource. Even if you grew wealthy enough to exploit every kid on the planet with an expensive medical condition, you're only going to get so much. And at that point, you're out of luck, if you want to expand "exponentially" further.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:40PM (3 children)
Well, if you are going to be a pedantic about it, then 70%, 85%, 92.5%, 96.25%, 98.125%, 99.0625%, etc. would be an exponentially increasing share. (share ratios of 2.33, 5.66, 12.33, 25.66, 52.33, 105.66 to 1)
Good way to miss the point though.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 11 2018, @03:04PM (2 children)
Ratios are not shares. It's sloppy language in a sloppy argument.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday January 14 2018, @12:45AM (1 child)
So what does an exponentially increasing share of eg. the world economy mean to you then?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @05:00AM
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday January 11 2018, @08:34PM (5 children)
Hate to be condescending, but you mustn't know many wealthy people. I've known a few, both domestic (Australian) and from elsewhere (UAE, China, Singapore, Saudi etc...). The ones that have family businesses eg. grocery store chains, multi-ranch cattle companies, construction companies, cotton growers (didn't know there was that much money in cotton) etc... seem to be the most motivated, and either have some intelligence or have been made aware of their own lack of intelligence (often by the previous generation) to the extent that they know they need trustworthy competent people around them. These people need some attachment to reality because they aren't THAT wealthy in the scheme of things. I have also known literal "trust fund babies" who can't waste cash fast enough to stop accumulating. And they can waste a lot of money - there seems to be a culture of "keeping up appearances" with some. Anecdote : before 9/11 a Sri Lankan friend (who wanted "in" to the wealthy crowd) went on a shopping expedition around Australia with a Saudi (who I wasn't allowed to meet as a friend because I was too "western"). In the Sri Lankan guys haul he had bought the most expensive pair of nikes he could find, and the Saudi payed him double so he could burn them (apparently because he found them religiously offensive. A secondary reason was to signal to the Sri Lankan guy his "wealth" was insignificant, which, although he was wealthy enough not to have to work, was comparatively true). These trust fund babies are often of below average intelligence : I've even known one who was literally retarded, and another with schitzophrenic delusions - they're the definition of pointless waste, have many "friends" helping them to spend their money, and they were STILL accumulating because they couldn't spend their trust fund stipends fast enough. Those with some intelligence are often so unmotivated and depressed that it's strangely sad - wealth seems to be somewhat isolating, at least for some. I know a Chinese woman who is depressed, and buys realestate to pep herself up. She doesn't rent the property because that's too much hassle, and she has so much cash (her portfoliio is managed and she doesn't know or care where her cash comes from) that she can buy properties outright on a whim.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 12 2018, @07:25AM (4 children)
In other words, you don't know many rich people. Back at you.
They're still wasting the trust fund. And probably heavily limited in how much access they have to said fund, meaning they're not that rich. Finally, we just have your uninformed hearsay as to what sort of damage they're doing to the trust fund.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Friday January 12 2018, @09:54AM (3 children)
*sigh* My mothers partner was a tax lawyer. He created trust funds, tax minimisation schemes, assisted in "succession planning" ie. passing business assets to the next generation etc... The intellectually disabled guy and the schitzophrenic I mentioned WERE limited in that their funds grew despite allocations to their drawings accounts, but that's standard practice for large trust funds. Perhaps you're referring to power of attourney issues or something ie. they don't have the power to liquidate their funds?
I did think of a name I could drop - someone a US person might know, but I forgot his name as I only met him once. He was an Australian rodeo rider who became #1 in the US, and wanted to repatriate funds to Australia in a tax efficient manner.
You're right in that it's dangerous to have that much money though. A brother and sister (Indians - friends of mine from university) were shot with a single crossbow bolt... the sister hid behind her brother in a confrontation with someone known to them who'd been sneaking their plastic and spending enough money for even them to notice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @03:36AM (2 children)
Thought so. Hearsay isn't a better foundation than knowing a few rich people is. FWIW, I have experienced directly the effect I speak of in an experimental market (Foresight Exchange [ideosphere.com], I'm currently first place on that list and have been at least third place on that list since a few months after its creation in 1996). That market had three features which exaggerated the effect of greater wealth resulting in lower yields. First, playing field was very level, it's nearly zero sum, and number of market participants was relatively low. I noticed that it grew steadily more difficult to find credible investments. For example, I had to shift from market making and short term opportunity buys to long term investments (time frame 5-15 years), because my wealth had increased greatly (almost a factor of ten increase in net wealth).
Sure, real world markets are different. They are larger with extremely rich people having some ability to manipulate the rules of the markets and society to their advantage, but you still have the problem that it's far easier to find good investments of a given high yield at $1 million than it is at $10 billion. And you don't have to involve large numbers of people or bribe a bunch of politicians in your schemes for the smaller amount.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday January 14 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)
So what you're saying the size of the world economy (or the part thereof one limits themselves to) is an upper constraint on wealth? That's both obvious, and isn't an argument against the fact that wealth disparities (when unconstrained) lead to an ever increasing share of the economy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @04:59AM
I'm saying a lot more than just that.
It is however an argument against the claim that such wealth disparities can be exponentially increasing.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 12 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)
That's a terrible comparison. You're just talking rich fucks vs slightly less rich fucks. How about investors against *people who don't have any money to invest*? Some people are born with millions in the bank, and no matter how dumb they are they can hire someone to manage their money and be fine for life. Others are essentially born into debt. They could literally have a magical gift for predicting the stock market and it still wouldn't help them any because they wouldn't have a dime to invest in the first place.
The average American salary will barely keep you housed and fed. There's not much left to invest after basic expenses. But those basic expenses don't increase at the same rate as salary. The more you earn, the greater percentage of those earnings you can invest, and the greater return you'll achieve. Hell, if you're rich enough you can hire someone else so you don't even need to have any particular skill at investing; while if you're poor you've gotta be smart yourself to do well. But below a certain limit, you can't invest at all.
Average *household* income in the US is $75k/yr. Average cost of living -- excluding housing -- for a small family is $50k/yr. Rent for even a one bedroom apartment could be $20k-$30k, putting you in debt already just trying to meet basic expenses. Where's the money to invest? You've gotta be above average from the start to have any of that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Median_inflation-adjusted_(%22real%22)_household_income [wikipedia.org]
https://transferwise.com/us/blog/cost-of-living-in-the-usa [transferwise.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 12 2018, @07:39AM (5 children)
Why would I do that? What's the point of comparing people who invest against people who do not or who are in net debt? Recall that someone with not a penny to their name still has more wealth than the collective 30% least wealthy of the world do (including debt).
If you can't afford to live in the absolutely most expensive places in the US (you can find a few places in the US that are routinely more expensive than $30k a year in rent, but you really have to look), then move some place you can afford to live. If you're going to have a family, then learning how to reduce your cost of living is an important skill to have. Spending every penny of $75k on your small family's living expenses shows you haven't learned that skill yet. No point to getting worked up over the rich when they're not the problem.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 12 2018, @11:32PM (4 children)
Yes, why indeed would you want to discuss the original topic of conversation without continuing to shift the goalposts?
We weren't talking about if people can survive; we were talking about accumulation of wealth by those who haven't necessarily earned it. About the prospects of a genius born to poverty vs a fool born to wealth. My point being that if you're born poor, you don't have many opportunities to invest, and you aren't going to become a millionaire putting away $10k/year or whatever you can manage on that $75k salary. If you're born a millionaire, you have plenty of spare cash to invest and hire fund managers and such to make sure you stay wealthy. It's much, much easier to keep wealth than to earn it.
That is your own statement; my assertion is that it's easier for a wealthy fool to do it than an impoverished genius. Of course some counter-examples exist...the population is such that even with billion-to-one odds, it would have happened a few times. But studies show it isn't common.
There have been studies into wealth vs IQ. There's no real correlation. Being smart doesn't make you rich:
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ [thesocietypages.org]
But you know what wealth *does* correlate with? Having rich parents:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-people-raise-kids-family-wealth/399809/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @03:59AM (2 children)
It's foolish to compare those who are trying to accumulate wealth against those who are not. Is it more unfair that an expert golfer improves their game even more or a scientist learns more about their research field than the layman who doesn't even bother to learn anything about these things in the first place?
Let us keep in mind that there's a huge number of people out there who have pretty much renounced the accumulation of wealth even to the point of declaring those who are interested in becoming more wealthy to be sociopaths and such. So why does it matter to us that they aren't wealthy, when it doesn't matter to them? What is supposed to be unfair about this?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday January 15 2018, @11:07PM (1 child)
I never said anything about people who aren't trying to invest; I was talking about people who *can't afford* to invest. There's a difference, which I highly suspect you're ignoring intentionally because you don't actually have any response to that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:28PM
While I agree that there are people who can't invest, I don't agree that they are sufficiently numerous to throw off wealth statistics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @04:00AM
Except of course, the impoverished genius experiences infinite increase in wealth, when they manage to save anything at all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:14AM
And you are a brown-nosing cocksucker desperately hoping you can impress the rich just enough for some crumbs to be dropped on you.
Keep begging for scraps under the table, you pathetic little fucking dog.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:29AM (3 children)
I'm not sociopathic enough to scam millions of people just I can become rich. That's what people like Zuckerberg are really good at: Since they don't care about others, they can freely use and abuse them until they make their fortune. Many rich people also had massive head starts via inheritance, which aids them immensely. This idea that all - or even most - of these rich people are geniuses is completely unsubstantiated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:40AM (1 child)
Bitcoin, bro! You can scam millions of people just by selling Bitcoin for huge profits! And the best part is, you don't even need to think about the nameless faceless losers who invested their savings in Bitcoin! Your hands are clean because Bitcoin is like totally anonymous!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:27PM
Some of us have increasing misgivings about the utility of the US dollar as a currency for all but the very rich. Some of us aren't interested in speculation but in having currency that isn't controlled and manipulated for the benefit of the very rich. If I want to buy from a merchant that Visa and Mastercard do not want me to buy from, well, I'm fucked if all I have is US dollars/Euros/Pounds/etc.
People used to be able to write checks to each other to transfer US dollars. While it's definitely time for something better than checks to come along, Visa and Mastercard are not democratized systems like people writing each other checks. Cash, of course, is only useful in person.
Some of us may be getting interested in cryptocurrencies because we're interested in secession from the new aristocracy. (Look at the train wreck the convergence before November 2018 between the Fear Encryption Narrative, the Misogynerd Narrative, and the Literally Hitler Narrative will prove to be. It won't go well for the D-team, but that fits the pattern of the past few emperors of the USA. Always in years 2-4 congress is controlled by the emperor's team. The reliability of this pattern should concern you.)
But yeah, if the only thing you can see looking at bitcoin is a capitalist investor shark feeding frenzy or if all you see is a get-rich-quick scheme, then yeah, I would highly suggest staying away from cryptocurrencies. It will be mutually beneficial that way.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:57PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday January 11 2018, @04:07PM
Hey Skippy, there's this thing called inheritance and paying other people to manage your money for you.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday January 15 2018, @04:08PM
Every OS sucks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI [youtube.com]