Whoa, Nathan! Do we get to know what he's planning on studying? Can I just major in whatever he picks? Doing what Nathan does has worked out really well for me so far.

Hardmath123 wrote:

Do we get to know what he's planning on studying?

I don't think he knows, exactly. I'm rooting for math. He says his eventual plan is to be a lawyer, but I'm hoping he'll get over it.

Aha. Pulling a reverse-Jens. That sounds great to me, tbh.

EDIT: TIL there isn't a “law” major… but IR sounds doable.

EDIT2: Well, maybe not. The IR class I'm currently in is a drag, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

bharvey wrote:

Hardmath123 wrote:

Do we get to know what he's planning on studying?

I don't think he knows, exactly. I'm rooting for math. He says his eventual plan is to be a lawyer, but I'm hoping he'll get over it.

That's an interesting choice. Personally, I find law to be mind-numbingly boring. But he should do what he enjoys, of course.

PullJosh wrote:

That's an interesting choice. Personally, I find law to be mind-numbingly boring.

Really? I think law is fascinating. It's this strange amalgamation of philosophy, ethics, politics, and logic, but also directly pertinent to your day-to-day life! It's hard not to be compelled to study it.

Hardmath123 wrote:

PullJosh wrote:

That's an interesting choice. Personally, I find law to be mind-numbingly boring.

Really? I think law is fascinating. It's this strange amalgamation of philosophy, ethics, politics, and logic, but also directly pertinent to your day-to-day life! It's hard not to be compelled to study it.

This is a really broad statement to make*, but I generally don't enjoy dealing with the details of things. (Some people would say I'm a “big-picture person”.) In the context of programming, this mostly means that I like to take an idea, run with it for a while, and then quickly move on to other things.

Politics on a larger scale interest me to a certain degree, but being a lawyer really doesn't.

* which I suppose is rather fitting

bharvey wrote:

Hardmath123 wrote:

Do we get to know what he's planning on studying?

I don't think he knows, exactly. I'm rooting for math. He says his eventual plan is to be a lawyer, but I'm hoping he'll get over it.

+1 for math.
Personally, I think that it is one of the most beautiful things in the universe.

@hm: InfraRed? Intermediate Representation? Inland Revenue? Internet Registry?

@pj: Just like programming, law has some fascinating big ideas, and a lot of grubby detail. If you do really well in law school, you get hired at a big expensive law firm where they have clerks to do the grubby part; if you do just okay in law school, you go into business yourself, and have to do everything. But, umm, you have to be really, really lucky to get through life as a “big picture person.” Either you inherit a lot of money, or you invent several super important big ideas (like Alan Kay) so that companies (or sometimes universities) are eager to pay you to think in the hope that some of the pixie dust rubs off on them, or you're my age and built a career back when they were desperate to find people who could program computers at all. (Or I guess you're a good enough con man to get someone to pay you to pontificate.)

@both: To me the thing about law isn't that it's interesting or boring, but rather that it works for the benefit of rich people, both because they write the laws in the first place, and because it's really expensive to hire the lawyer or the team of lawyers that you need to win a case. (Think O.J. I know you're too young to remember the actual events, but I gather there was a TV documentary recently.) So, it's okay to be a lawyer only if you're an ACLU lawyer or something like that—and, somewhat to my surprise, those jobs are fiercely competitive; everyone comes out of law school wanting to be a good guy lawyer. Then the ACLU doesn't hire them, and their student loan payments come due.

On the other hand, the LSAT problems are really fun.

@bo: Yup, I agree that it's very beautiful. (Although I was just thinking recently about how in the Hidden Figures days at NASA, and before that at Bletchley Park, they hired good mathematicians and put them to work simulating computers. I'm so glad we have computers now, and Wolfram Alpha, so that mathematicians don't have to do that boring stuff any more.)

P.S. Are they ever going to fix this notification thing, or what?

bharvey wrote:

It's okay to be a lawyer only if you're an ACLU lawyer or something like that—and, somewhat to my surprise, those jobs are fiercely competitive; everyone comes out of law school wanting to be a good guy lawyer. Then the ACLU doesn't hire them, and their student loan payments come due.

That's quite interesting. Plus, it's a great reminder that often people do questionable things for understandable reasons.

bharvey wrote:

P.S. Are they ever going to fix this notification thing, or what?

I believe the solution was to remove the “discuss” tab from the navigation bar so that eventually people forget about the forums its bugs altogether. (I'm joking, of course, but only a little.)

Edit: Wrong type of “its”. I'm a little ashamed…

bharvey wrote:

@hm: InfraRed? Intermediate Representation? Inland Revenue? Internet Registry?

International relations. (IR majors are the coolest people! They average like 4 languages each and can tell you all about the way the world works and make you feel like you spent high school studying entirely the wrong things. I would gladly trade my knowledge of the PNG file format for a working knowledge of Latin American politics…)

I take every opportunity I get to go down to the law school, and what I've learned is that those people know how to conduct themselves with more grace and eloquence than I've ever seen in a CS major.

Hardmath123 wrote:

International relations. (IR majors are the coolest people! They average like 4 languages each and can tell you all about the way the world works and make you feel like you spent high school studying entirely the wrong things. I would gladly trade my knowledge of the PNG file format for a working knowledge of Latin American politics…)

Luckily, they don't scoop out all the unused neurons when you graduate from high school. I basically only knew or cared about math and a little–very little, compared to any of you–CS when I got out. Then I went to MIT and for almost all my time there did pretty much the same thing, except that I really stopped learning math (to my later regret) and instead spent my time at the AI Lab learning applied operating systems, and at the radio station learning 1964-68 British rock. Luckily, well, luckily in terms of this conversation we're having, I decided at the end of junior year that I wanted to drop out for a year and be a DJ, but I couldn't, because they would have sent me to Vietnam, and that's when I discovered that I cared about politics.

All of which is just to say that you're still very young and have plenty of time to learn anything you want.

But if you want to know how the world works, I strongly recommend a shortcut: Go read Value, Price, and Profit (also called Wages, Price, and Profit depending on which edition you find) by Marx. It's a short book, you can finish it in a weekend, and it will innoculate you against all the lies Americans suffer through.

I take every opportunity I get to go down to the law school, and what I've learned is that those people know how to conduct themselves with more grace and eloquence than I've ever seen in a CS major.

Hmpf. The elegance part is unfair; that's a job skill for lawyers, so of course they're good at it. And a lot of them were probably rhetoric majors as undergrads, or at least that's how it works at Berkeley. I have mixed feelings about grace, a quality I've been told I lack myself. Some days I wish I were better at it, and other days I think it's really just a synonym for, umm, bovine fecal matter. It's a weapon that people who like how things are use against people who want to change things.

That probably sounds ungraceful, but all that stuff about knowing which fork to use for the fish, and using one knife to transfer a chunk of butter from the butter dish to your bread plate, and then a different knife to spread it on your bread, is explicitly a weapon of class warfare. When I took a sociology course one thing I vividly remember from the reading is that rich people have wood shingle houses, while middle-class people have vinyl siding, because wood shingles rot and have to be replaced periodically, at great expense, whereas vinyl siding never even needs painting. The rich people choose wood shingles to show off that they can afford to pay for the maintenance.

I'm really curious whether what you describe is Stanford-specific, or whether you'd have the same experience at Berkeley. Stanford is historically very much, and even now still somewhat, a school for the rich, whereas Berkeley is the University of California, an institution whose mandate from the beginning was to provide opportunities for poor Californians. Rich people are graceful because they're taught to be from infancy.

Hardmath123 wrote:

I take every opportunity I get to go down to the law school

By the way, what do you do there? I mean, do you just walk up to some random person and start a conversation, or do you crash law school classes, or what? (This question is related to my icon…)

</offtopic>
I forget, which of you lot wrote SAFELY TRY? Here's a bug report:
https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap–Build-Your-Own-Blocks/issues/1941

bharvey wrote:

</offtopic>
I forget, which of you lot wrote SAFELY TRY? Here's a bug report:
https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap–Build-Your-Own-Blocks/issues/1941

404 error?

BookOwl wrote:

bharvey wrote:

</offtopic>
I forget, which of you lot wrote SAFELY TRY? Here's a bug report:
https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap–Build-Your-Own-Blocks/issues/1941

404 error?

Scratch's auto-linking hit a bit of a hiccup. Working link: https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap–Build-Your-Own-Blocks/issues/1941

This is a reply to the Brian Harvey's discussion here about the students of “international relations” (IR) with Hardmath123. I share your sentiment of envying the gracefulness you find in the IR students.

When I was a college student, the IR students were sharing the college building with our sociology dept where I studied quantitative research (social sciences) methodology.

One day I was waiting for an oral exam together with one of them. I was nervous and not graceful at all, as you can imagine, while he showed no nervousness at all! He kept smiling (at my disbelief) as if nothing can undermine his ambitions/dreams coming true (sooner or later). And, twenty-five years later, he's a speaker of Parliament of the country I live in.

He felt he had nothing to be nervous about, on the other hand, my family was poor for generations so that in late 19th Century (1880s) my great-grand-father decided to go look for work as a miner in America and went from Europe (read: Austrian Empire, until the end of WW1, Slovenia was part of it) by ship, over the ocean, to end the poverty, but after many years spending in the mines, the mine accident killed him, so my great-grand-mother returned even poorer to Europe with a kid, my grand father, who was at the time only a young boy and just finished the 4th grade (born in Chicago, after they came to America), now poor and fatherless, but the family story continues with the WW1, and especially the WW2, during which the military forces of Mussolini's Italy occupied most of the Slovenian territory, burning down whole villages, including my grand-father's house, and sent civilians to the fascist Italian concentration camps - one of them wikipedia on Rab concentration camp, where the annual mortality rate was higher than the average mortality rate in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald (15%) - but, luckily, my grand-mother and grand-father just lost their house, burnt down by fascist Italian troops, since they were alarmed to run and hide in the woods and build a new one in another village, where my father was born one month before the Fascist Italy surrendered.

So, Brian, you're right but let me rephrase:
Rich people are so much more graceful than ordinary people, because they're privileged to live from infancy in a family that could afford to be graceful, because they were way above the poverty line, so they had never have to worry about not being able to pay bills and be pushed below the poverty line, since the line was so away from them for many generations.

bharvey wrote:

Hardmath123 wrote:

International relations. (IR majors are the coolest people! They average like 4 languages each and can tell you all about the way the world works and make you feel like you spent high school studying entirely the wrong things. I would gladly trade my knowledge of the PNG file format for a working knowledge of Latin American politics…)

Luckily, they don't scoop out all the unused neurons when you graduate from high school. I basically only knew or cared about math and a little–very little, compared to any of you–CS when I got out. Then I went to MIT and for almost all my time there did pretty much the same thing, except that I really stopped learning math (to my later regret) and instead spent my time at the AI Lab learning applied operating systems, and at the radio station learning 1964-68 British rock. Luckily, well, luckily in terms of this conversation we're having, I decided at the end of junior year that I wanted to drop out for a year and be a DJ, but I couldn't, because they would have sent me to Vietnam, and that's when I discovered that I cared about politics.

All of which is just to say that you're still very young and have plenty of time to learn anything you want.

But if you want to know how the world works, I strongly recommend a shortcut: Go read Value, Price, and Profit (also called Wages, Price, and Profit depending on which edition you find) by Marx. It's a short book, you can finish it in a weekend, and it will innoculate you against all the lies Americans suffer through.

I take every opportunity I get to go down to the law school, and what I've learned is that those people know how to conduct themselves with more grace and eloquence than I've ever seen in a CS major.

Hmpf. The elegance part is unfair; that's a job skill for lawyers, so of course they're good at it. And a lot of them were probably rhetoric majors as undergrads, or at least that's how it works at Berkeley. I have mixed feelings about grace, a quality I've been told I lack myself. Some days I wish I were better at it, and other days I think it's really just a synonym for, umm, bovine fecal matter. It's a weapon that people who like how things are use against people who want to change things.

That probably sounds ungraceful, but all that stuff about knowing which fork to use for the fish, and using one knife to transfer a chunk of butter from the butter dish to your bread plate, and then a different knife to spread it on your bread, is explicitly a weapon of class warfare. When I took a sociology course one thing I vividly remember from the reading is that rich people have wood shingle houses, while middle-class people have vinyl siding, because wood shingles rot and have to be replaced periodically, at great expense, whereas vinyl siding never even needs painting. The rich people choose wood shingles to show off that they can afford to pay for the maintenance.

I'm really curious whether what you describe is Stanford-specific, or whether you'd have the same experience at Berkeley. Stanford is historically very much, and even now still somewhat, a school for the rich, whereas Berkeley is the University of California, an institution whose mandate from the beginning was to provide opportunities for poor Californians. …

Design problem for y'all. How should we render “diffs” for Scratch blocks?

I'm not particularly happy with this:

blob8108 wrote:

Design problem for y'all. How should we render “diffs” for Scratch blocks?

I'm not particularly happy with this:

My gut says “exactly like git does”. Display the context (surrounding stack blocks). Put a gry ellipsis stack block in between diffed sections. And for changed blocks, add a + or - prefix to the part that changed along with tinting the block green or red respectively.

Or, you know, you could ignore me because I jumped into this thread with no context and am spewing nonsense

bobbybee wrote:

Or, you know, you could ignore me because I jumped into this thread with no context and am spewing nonsense

Hey, this is a totally new sub-thread anyways

blob8108 wrote:

Design problem for y'all. How should we render “diffs” for Scratch blocks?

Convert to tosh, then do a normal git diff