"'The self-described genderqueer geek and “web slave” quietly hacks on everything within reach'posted by Blasdelb at 9:48 AM on December 2, 2012 [28 favorites]
I just hacked my ham sandwich by adding brown mustard! A jawdropping feat of breadcraft!
This mechanical pencil? Also a zit-popper. Hackery!
Yesterday on the bus I was a little sleepy so I wadded up my coat and used it as a pillow! Hackariffic!
That ham sandwich I mentioned before the jump? Gave me heartburn! So I hacked my wetware with a Pepcid AC! Jawdropping!"
College degrees are not required for a stable developer career in Silicon ValleyThe common thread among the people profiled in the article isn't that they're all millionaires (or soon-to-be), but that they all got through college admissions. They all had the educational attainment, and the financial wherewithal to attend, and decided to allocate themselves elsewhere. And it's not clear to me that this thesis is wrong. If you screen all essay applications for spelling and grammar, you haven't taught anybody anything about them, and yet your graduating class may well be immaculate in that regard. This attitude is even subtly enforced by the argument that this is the responsibility of K-12 education.
<meta> tag in the markup, as some sources suggest, is less correct, and may not always be honored by browsers. To do so, you'll need to edit your server configuration file (the Apache syntax is of the form AddCharset UTF-8 .htm), or use a scripting language (the PHP syntax is of the form header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');). The latter solution may be required if your web application is hosted in a shared environment.Easy for all the programming kids to say when their field lends itself so well to self-education.Sadly this is not the case. Programming only appears to lend itself well to self-education because programming appears, on the surface, to be no different from being a sort of software mechanic. Fix a bug here, tighten a bolt there, good as new. You don't have to really understand much to start writing software, making it ideal for so-called "self-starters." Just read some docs, copy someone else's code, and start building your app. Only much later – when, for instance, the code has become the backbone of some breakaway startup, and needs to be rapidly scaled up and maintained by a large group of engineers – does a programmer's incompetence manifest. But by the time this happens, the culprit has long since moved on to something else – management, for instance, or selling real estate.
As a ComSci Major, I'm a bit confused about this as your dog whistle. I understand ASCII, but barely understand UTF-8 or ISO/IEC 8859-1. It really hasn't come up.A character encoding is just a function that converts a sequence of bits into two things: a 'letter', and - critically - another number of bits which tells you how many bits to move forward in your data stream to get the next letter. With ASCII you always move forward exactly eight bits (technically only 7 bits so you can use the last one as a checksum which might be useful on ancient teletype machines - but most people used an extended set with an extra 128 characters)
As somebody who used to labor in the translation mines, I believe I speak for everyone when I say "Please bother to learn that." Especially before you code anything that might have to handle Spanish, let alone Japanese.These days, if you just use UTF-8 for everything, life should be pretty good, as long as you remember that characters might be more then 8-bits. (Obviously that might not help if you have to deal with non-ascii legacy files, though)
Oh man, one of my students claimed in an essay that 99% of successful people were college dropouts. 99%! Really?Well, someone that dumb isn't going to be one of them.
When I challenged him on it, he changed it to "most." It took a lot of arguing with him to get him to change it to "many." (I have no problem with the fact that many people are, that many successful people don't go, and that the system is screwed up and broken, but I also take issue with the "Let's highlight a bunch of anomalously lucky and privileged people while ignoring all of the counterexamples on both sides!" narrative.)
But it's not what this article presents. This article starts out with a cartoon stating "College is for suckers." It attempts to glamorize this view by stating "'Here in Silicon Valley, it’s [dropping out] almost a badge of honor,' said Mick Hagen, 28, who dropped out of Princeton in 2006..." It denigrates higher education by quoting someone who calls it managerial training. And it attempts to bolster its argument by pulling a quote from a fictional character on a TV show.Is it just me or is it starting to seem like Silicon Valley is a huge bubble? They always say that the way to tell when something is a huge bubble is when it enters into popular culture, like when real-estate speculation started to become a cultural thing, thats when you knew it was over.
Learning about character encodings [in a computer science degree program] would be about as relevant as learning about accounting systems for a degree in mathematics.It's not that it's hard to understand UTF-8 or hard to teach it. It's just that it's one standard among thousands that might come up in some job, in some industry, at some point. So while your experience might teach you that programmers (not all of whom have taken any C.S. courses, incidentally) need to know this particular standard well, that might not be the case in, say, the audio software industry, where knowing some other crucial standard is much more relevant. It doesn't make sense to focus on any particular microscopic topic in a university curriculum.
Well, no. It would take about an day, however long it takes in all relevant languages to set your databases & codebases to default to Unicode for any text input/output. The ASCII default of most languages/IDEs I see as an infectious holdover of the DOS days.
It is not hard, and it's a fairly painless way not to punish the poor bastard who's inherited your code base when the company decides to enter the world market; or when your agency is required to support legally mandated languages x, y, or z.
There's other stuff to do or not to do, but that is the bare minimum, and it is NOT HARD.
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Because this is not what college is for, or really how apps work for most people who try that?
posted by Blasdelb at 9:39 AM on December 2, 2012 [90 favorites]