i.e. the crap I have to teach (or tell to self-teach) 95% of people who are taking on a programming role.
While I understand the value of distinguishing between CS and software engineering, not being comfortable with basic shell commands, installing programming language tools, compiling something using those tools, or source control means that there has been a huge gap between theory and practice in their education, which hurts understanding of both.
Particularly when interacting with senior CS students, they'll spend 6 months just getting comfortable doing very basic things like installing and running Python, using ssh with a VM, and using the command line. They try to do productive work, but their unfamiliarity with the basic tools of making software means they actually spend their time learning that.
Actually, this also applies to the basics of just writing a functioning library or piece of software, or being familiar with async vs. sync programming, etc etc. It would be better if they could dip their toes into these things while learning about, say, algorithms, because identifying the slow step in its execution context and designing a better algorithm requires knowing this stuff. Or even better, before doing any of that. I've met people with 6+ years of CS or CS-related educational background who don't know how to do basic problem solving / troubleshooting of their work because they've only done toy coding for coursework.
In some ways it's easier to teach a good language to someone that has been automating everything they touch with shell scripts/Excel formulas/weird python/VBA/javascript than to light a java programmer on fire with the belief and confidence that all tasks are automatable and all problems boil down to bits on a disk or bits in a packet.
To be honest, this comment section is full of blanket dismissals that speak to living in a bubble away from people with very real grievances. I would say it is not particularly philosophical or moral or factual - it is a reflection of personal material status.
I feel like most comments here reflect actual reality. Middle class of America is incredibly privileged. I feel like vocal minorities took over the media circles and got amplified disproportionately, especially after the pandemic hit and the only way to get information was through these narrow channels.
If possible, go out. Talk to people. It's quite refreshing how different the world is outside of the media machine.
It's tough to know where to begin with something so obviously false and trivializing.
What amount of violence would you need to experience before you would acknowledge victimization? There's plenty that goes around that you apparently don't know about.
Let's say you are poor, went to a protest, and got arrested. You can't make bail (you're poor) and are fired from your job because you are in in jail. You easily win your case and see no prison time, but your life has been massively impacted in the negative by others unjustly.
This person was a victim of policing and likely the system in general that creates these trade-offs and punishes a lack of material wealth. You cannot begin to even understand the situation without acknowledging the fault and the injustice.
This makes no sense at all. If you have been or are being victimized, recognizing it is the first step to taking an action to counter it.
If someone steals from your car, nobody plays philosophical games about whether you were victimized and understanding that you were is the very first step to even understanding the situation and then adopting habits of not leaving expensive stuff in your car, investing in locks, taking a focus to the causes of crime, etc...
The conflation tends to come from an angle that is either anti-semitic or Zionist and hyper-nationalist. Or was informed by one of those camps and picked it up by osmosis. I would guess this falls closer to the Zionist/hyper-nationalist camp.
No discussion whatsoever about people having actual grievances. Just the identification of a personality trait and then making it out to be a problem that actually hurts other people. Hoo boy.
Consider that summarizing it as a single quantity is already unwarranted and somewhat arbitrary. The question should be about the utility. What is the utility of having one major number that is supposedly quantitative and consistent rather than, say, five metrics related to material status? The latter will provide more opportunity to compare "like to like", after all, and there's no reason that the universe must conform to a single metric being in any way valid. This is made even worse by pinning it to a (controlled) dollar value rather than some aggregate quantity of material well-being.
For example, according to this metric, the vast majority of poverty reduction happened in China. What factors can we attribute to that development? Well even asking that question means we have to go back and look at other metrics and means by which to understand economic systems and the distribution of material goods. The moment we ask a pretty basic, but arguably more relevant and useful question, we have to throw this metric away and do something else.
And when I've encountered this information in this past, the utility seems to be more about propaganda and lazy inferences than anything else, and often among famous academics. While we all have our bubbles, it does make you question the point of trying to make poverty just one quantity.
HN is for any stories of intellectual interest. Interesting stories that aren't about tech are on-topic and welcome, so this alone is not a valid reason to flag a submission.
