a_lieb

To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."

Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)

The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.

"Rightsizing" is a weird one, because it's occasionally used for benign stuff like reducing the rate of hiring. Much like "enhanced interrogation techniques," the broader meaning provides shelter for what it's really used for most of the time.

Here's a business model for successful open-source projects—one that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or the like about this already.

If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work.

There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.

If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.

Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.

For me it's simply a matter of convenience of searching; even pages with great and comprehensive docs can be hard to search. And the average is so poor that I often don't even bother to check if a particular project actually has a good search feature. If my search takes me to the actual doc page, (and it's good) then all the better!

The easiest way to think about Tcl is simply, "it's a Lisp, but with strings instead of lists."

It turns out that when you make a language like that, you end up something where your code looks and feels like a list of commands (much like a shell script) but is also capable of doing "real" programming stuff where needed without much pain.

The test suite for SQLite is (still!) written in Tcl, I think partly for this reason. You probably wouldn't want to write a test suite in bash, but you don't quite get that feeling of "it's just a list of commands."

I've found that one a lot more common than the "Hello" thing, but I'm sure it varies by the team.

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!)

Nice easter egg from the source code:

  <!-- <audio autoplay="autoplay" controls="controls"><source src="topgun.mid" type="audio/mpeg"></audio> -->

Are there any online stores where we have good evidence that they have good practices around COVID-19? Despite the crushing demand, Costco seems like one employer that might try extra hard to see after the safety of its workers.

Huh, maybe his intro-level materials are far different, then. I'm not going to die on the hill that there's any connection; I don't even know whether he claims there is. But it at least seems that this specific stuff (at least in the early chapters I've read) is both more fundamental and more grounded in math (very basic math in this case) than the other intro theory stuff I've seen.