kaosjester

When I was a TA, I'd have students constantly try to add me on Facebook. The conversation would go nearly exactly like you'd describe:

> Are you on Facebook? Is this your profile?

> Yes, but I'm not gonna accept your friend request.

The reply was usually a bit snarky with a bit of a chuckle, and that did it for most college-aged people. The few times someone persisted, I explained that Facebook is an aspect of my social life, not my professional life, and I intended to keep it that way.

This doesn't account for the whole picture. The tax benefit is dwarfed in comparison to the losses in social security people at and below the poverty line will suffer.

> How can you blur the line? It's either online multiplayer or it isn't, there's not really an in-between. You can't "kind of" have other people connected to your game. They're either there or they're not.

Dark Souls does precisely this in a fantastic way in two major mechanisms. The first is the shared player "graffiti", wherein players can write messages that are then propagated into others' games. The second is the shared "death ghosts', which play back a player's last moments before death in others' games as a ghost you can't interact with. These make the game feel like you're playing with others in a large world without having to actually put you in the same instance.

It seems like this could be fairly easily resolved by the management having a rigid "we pay everyone the same, deal with it" position, perhaps up and and including a formula for salary computations.

Could you explain what this means?

Don't forget the part where those graduate students do some 80% of the work and make <20% of the income of their their supervisor (and, in many cases, <10% or none at all in several), and the university hosting the lab absorbs some 50% of all grants "off the top." A half-million dollar grant pays a single graduate student less than 20k/year for maybe 5 years, which, in the context of other companies that get these grants, is absurd. Independent research firms working from the same grants pay their employees competitive wages and still accomplish research. If these companies could issue Ph.D.s, academia would shrivel and die: imagine working at a company for 4 years, getting a salary 3-4x what a graduate school would offer, doing real work in a professional setting, doing enough research to write a dissertation, and receiving a degree. The entire incentive to attend a university would melt away.

As someone with years of experience writing interpreters, this seems a rather sloppy solution to a straightforward problem. There are two canonical solutions, and he uses neither:

1. The first canonical solution, which the author even describes, is persistent environments. Unfortunately, this requires passing the current environment as part of the recursive pattern, which means heavily modifying the existing code. He doesn't do this because it would require revisiting too much.

2. The second canonical solution, which you would find in any modern compiler, is to uniquely rename all the variables. His "resolver" traversal has ample opportunity to do this, and would provide a far cleaner solution (with less space overhead than his expr/scope depth lookup table).

Instead, the author creates a stack of environments and annotates variables with information akin to de Bruijn indicies for scopes. Compared to the alternatives above, this is over-engineered and inelegent, plus it complicates reasoning about scopes far beyond what's necessary.

As an aside, this assertion is also completely absurd:

> Shadowing is rare and often an error so initializing a shadowing variable based on the value of the shadowed one seems unilkely [sic] to be deliberate.

Don't forget the Harry Potter branding association. That's what will end up bringing in the big bucks.

Also, this gem:

> We ate on the balcony and, as we shared a bottle of wine and listened to the chorus of insects, I began to think that the year of groundwork I had put in was about to pay off. Marylin stayed the night.

You should re-record the entire intro video and leave out all the 'um' and 'uh's. It makes the product seem far less professional.

My wife got angry quite a few times in graduate school because the university's Women in Computing group forcibly signed her up to their mailing list at the start of every academic year. She unsubscribed every year and, without fail, they silently added her back. Apparently they thought a woman in computing couldn't manage without being part of this group!

It's one thing to give people the space and support they ask for. It's quite another to shove space and support, unsolicited, upon them.

To be fair, GitHub is large enough that they'll have a dozen applicants by the time you're out the door. If resolving a problem is harder than firing part of it, well... that's the layer cake.

I'm moving out of a house right now in the midwest that bumped my rent by $100/mo each year, but they listed it back at my original rate this year. For some reason, being a multi-year tenant cost me an extra ~$3000.

I'm not saying it isn't faster, I'm merely pointing out that it was a pretty serious investment in comparison to the other points of the build, and attempting to defend the idea that liquid cooling isn't insane if you're going all-out with other aspects, too.