doorstar

ADA rules also add a lot of expense that is important, I believe, but certainly limits the amount of 'uniqueness' that is possible when building new structures.

In the anonymity of the internet I am not going to pretend that I've never wondered about relationships with people who are unavailable, or despite my own unavailability. It is certainly possible to find people attractive whatever one's personal situation.

I still can't say I've found a better match.

'Happiness' studies show up now and again and I've got to say that I've always found them suspect. The polling, the questions, the conclusions are so fungible that I find it hard to believe that there's any value in them.

Satisfaction is a more interesting measure and isn't necessarily reflected in questions of how "happy" you are. I bet a poll would find that start-up founders are less happy than people with stable jobs at large corporations. Does that prove anything about whether or not someone should do a start-up?

Kind of a strange article with the implication that we've got a wide selection of people willing to marry us and the challenge is to choose the best one.

I really only ever found one person I wanted to marry and I married them. We have similar tastes, we have similar values, and they challenge me at an intellectual level.

If the author feels like that is the wrong criteria - well I'm not sure what the alternative is. There just aren't a lot of other people I want to spend every waking day with.

> maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerge

Whatever ups and downs my marriage may or may not have, I would change nothing whatsoever when I look at the amazing children we have produced together.

Plenty of places have more than two engineers and still paid ransomware. This is like any other cyber-crime, which is to say it happens all over, it's not always publicized, and it's very hard to stop.

I watched a couple of presentations on security recently and just felt like we are all in a losing battle. There are always more bad actors, they get better and better, and they are a lot more motivated than any security team you can put together.

I'm guessing that our hypothetical student must or might take a college-level Biology course as part of their undergrad degree, and that exposure might cause them to change their mind about their chosen field.

I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.

I think it's still going to be hard to get 'middle class' parents to embrace this for their kids - and I am a 'middle class' parent.

If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.

I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.

College vs. trade school isn't just about money or 'social acceptability', it's also about opportunity. A 18 year old who goes to trade school to become an electrician is going to become an electrician, they are not going to be able to change their minds in two years and become a biologist.

That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.

That's an easy allegation to throw out. Someone can advocate for a social safety net and still have bills due next month.

Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.

> a well-functioning court and jury should easily be able answer these questions,

I'm going to ignore the qualifier of 'well functioning' which obviously up for debate. The process of being charged with a crime, being put on trial, wondering at the consequences of the outcome etc., is no joke. It is a tremendously time-consuming, expensive, and stressful processes and even if you are acquitted there is no undoing the damage that has been done. There's a reason doctor's spend huge chunks of their income on malpractice insurance, and if we decide that engineers need the same protection in case they get sued than the biggest beneficiary is going to be the insurance companies.

If insurance companies also had to sigh oaths we might make some progress, but the nature of their game is to spread the risk - which is to say they take money from a lot of people and hope they never have to pay them back. There's only so much regulation can do about that.

It shouldn't just be thrown out as 'well if you make a decision in good faith then you are sure to win your court case'. It is not a reasonable burden to put on someone who cannot anticipate all the possible outcomes of decisions they make.

Have you ever worked at a company where they bring in a brand-new CTO or Lead Architect and they decide after a week or so that the entire dev org has been Doing it Wrong and it's only them, with their clear outsider's view, that can see the true way forward.

I certainly have. It usually leads to 3-4 wasted years of dev time on the brand new architecture that will never match all the features of the old stack, and during that time the old stack has fewer and fewer resources and the tech debt piles up.

It is absurdly easy to come up with a better plan in 10 minutes if you have absolutely no idea how it really works or how complicated it really is.