I agree with you 100%. Tipping is by far my biggest pet peeve followed by hidden surcharges, specialty taxes, and regular sales taxes that are all added on after I've emotionally committed to the advertised price.
What's more is that now almost any place that prepares food has a tip line or a tip jar. Kid behind the counter just scooped some icecream on a cone? "Tip please." Hand me a cup of coffee? "Add whatever amount you want to the already hyper-inflated price of that joe you got there. I poured it, remember?"
The worst offender that I've run into is a sandwich shop called Jersey Mikes. I absolutely love their food but they recently rolled out a new system that has me so annoyed that I will never go back. As part of the payment process you are now required to either select from a predetermined set of tip percentages or explicitly opt-out.
The thing is, I actually feel for the guy preparing my sandwich or the girl that writes down my order and hands it off. I know that unless they are a waiter in a swanky, up-scale restaurant or a bartender pretty much anywhere then they are probably not making a ton of money.
Yet customers are made to feel as though they have some moral or social obligation to bring them up to a livable wage. In reality what is happening is the restaurants & bars are passing on their wages directly on to us. We are expected to pay a tax so that they don't have to pay them enough to survive on.
Ah, this after I laid awake in bed (or so I believe) until 5, decided to get up and get to work. I'm cursing myself with insomnia by cycling in and out of 24, 48, and, in rare cases, 72 hour cycles. Yet I seem to work best with at least some degree of exhaustion.
I generally hit peak efficiency between 20 and 32 hours. Beyond that, I'll have bursts of productivity with the remaining time filled by mindless distractions. Those bursts last anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours but their frequency drops as the day(s) go on.
If I'm well rested I feel a lot better in general but I'm so easily distracted that my productivity drops like a rock.
Having written this,I suspect I'm on a perpetual downward spiral where my sleep patterns fuel an unhealthy lifestyle which I then remedy by subtracting sleep...
This was posted on reddit awhile ago but taken down and reposted several times.
This bio really made me go "wtf?":
> Loraine was born in London. She was an ordinary, hardworking family person, with nothing to worry about beyond paying the rent at the end of the month or keeping the fridge full. Until in 2009 she came to Barcelona on holiday. Soon after she arrived her passport was stolen from her and she had a series of problems with the British embassy. Somebody had made illegal use of her passport. So Loraine found herself in a strange place, unable to get home. She didn’t know anyone there and her circumstances meant she couldn’t ask for help from England, either. She had to sell all her possessions and, in time, learn to speak Spanish. “Living in the street is a wonderful adventure,” she says. In the street she discovered a new city, a new country and a new culture. “There are lots of people who prefer to sleep under the stars.” She also made lots of friends who helped her in a completely unfamiliar world.
I'm not suggesting the company is involved but that story is incredibly suspect. They also seem to somewhat glamorize the "street life" in some of their bios.
I know this is absolutely not the case in large parts of the world, but in many developed countries it does takes some degree of desire to remain street homeless for any significant period of time.
The support is often there for the taking, but some combination of mental health problems, drug dependency, etc. will see a person "choose" to live on the streets.
I am really uncomfortable with your statement. I am homeless. Well before I became homeless, I had a class on homelessness. Which is to say this is something I have both studied and also lived firsthand.
Due to my medical condition, I am unwilling to remain in a homeless shelter. They simply aren't clean enough for my needs. I would take real help in a heartbeat if it were available. But the kind of "support" that is available to homeless individuals is often rather sucky, to say the least.
So, yeah, you could say I "chose" to not go into a shelter and to thus remain on the street. That isn't completely inaccurate. But it sure makes my life sound a lot more empowered than I am experiencing it as being.
Let me put it this way: Many people wind up on the street by leaving an abusive relationship. So you could say, hey, they chose to be on the street. They could have remained with the person providing a roof over their head. But it sort of conveniently sweeps their very real problems and challenges under the rug.
I need help developing an income that doesn't keep me sick. I run various websites. At the moment, I need help figuring out how to get traffic. There are some other things that need work but I think the fact that I don't know how to get traffic is currently my biggest issue.
Somewhat interesting that this occurs weeks after the tariff increase on subsidized Chinese solar panels. I wonder how closely those two events are aligned beyond mere coincidence.
> To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update.
> It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I was still under warranty & nothing changed between that visit and the last. What does it matter how long I waited?
I had started to use a monitor and got a macbook air for when I needed to go mobile just so I didn't have to spend a day dealing with it. Over time I just forgot about it and if 10.9.2 hadn't been released preventing me from using my display, I probably would have kept going.
Sure, I spent a lot of money creating a temporary solution that I used for too long but that doesn't negate the facts:
1. It was a warranty issue, I was still under warranty (or a day out, but they explicitly told me that was fine)
2. Due to a mistake on their end, I wasn't able to get the repairs done when planned and was promised that I could bring it back whenever
3. Their reasoning for denying the warranty claim was due to light damage to the case. That damage occurred well over a year before the flickering started and there were notes backing that up.
"Uninspired rails port" is a far cry from accurate. I've worked with both rails and asp.net mvc. I started with rails in the 1.x days but also had clients that used .net. I despised web forms for a variety of reasons so I jumped on the mvc bandwagon as soon as the fist community preview was released.
Hack, Connery, Hanselman, & Guthrie openly acknowledge that rails was a source of inspiration in their book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470384611?ie=UTF8&tag=scob... but so was Spring, among others. Above all, I think the .net mvc framework was trying to capture the fasted-paced, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants essence of the rails way more than anything else. In doing so, they unearthed a lot of awesome concepts previously unknown to most .net developers like domain-driven design, tdd/bdd, dependency injection, scaffolding; old hats to Java and ruby guys.
The mvc .net team did an amazing job of breaking stride with the asp.net mentality of letting the framework do as much as possible. Yet .net was still very much confined by it's own structure, forcing the mvc framework to remain rigid. They opted for configuration over convention which, in my opinion, was by far the biggest differentiator in rails to the mvc frameworks that preceded it.
They also filled it up to the edge with Ruby-like magic all over the place.
ASP.NET MVC is the only place I've ever seen in mainstream compiled languages where the code can break in untraceable ways if you change the name of a method parameter (f.ex. for controller actions). Or where models suddenly don't get data because you forget to add "{get; set;}" to the code somewhere. Absolutely no way to find out why it went wrong. The data just isn't there.
Sure, you can learn this and then not make the mistake again, but the reason I don't use Ruby or Python much anymore is because I've had with with having to spend a full day going through a framework's source code to find out why my bug is a bug. In an ecosystem and language like C#, you expect things to either work or to get a pretty OK error message, preferably at compile time. The more magic, the more time I waste tracing bugs.
What's the point of using a compiled language if half your code is a dynamic viewbag of string keys and liberal JSON parsers that just ignore fields it doesn't expect or can't fill?
> Sure, you can learn this and then not make the mistake again, but the reason I don't use Ruby or Python much anymore is because I've had with with having to spend a full day going through a framework's source code to find out why my bug is a bug. In an ecosystem and language like C#, you expect things to either work or to get a pretty OK error message, preferably at compile time.
No, that's what you expect. I expect that the traits of frameworks you describe to be features of particular frameworks and to be largely independent of language, except that in languages that don't provide introspection/metaprogramming facilities that enable them, you probably won't find them (probably, because usually there may be elaborate ways of hacking around language limitations to do magic, and then even examining the source code will make the magic less obvious.)
You can easily have magic-free frameworks in Ruby or Python, and easily heavy-magic frameworks in most (mostly) statically-typed compiled languages like C# and friends as long as they have some introspection/metaprogramming facilities (and optional dynamic typing like C# makes this more viable, too.)
If you want to choose a language so as to avoid any need to examine the traits of particular frameworks so that you don't run into a heavy-magic one, you are going to need a much more limited language than C#.
> What's the point of using a compiled language if half your code is a dynamic viewbag of string keys and liberal JSON parsers that just ignore fields it doesn't expect or can't fill?
The point is the other half of the code. (The part that, in Python or Ruby you might be tempted to drop down to a C or Java [for JRuby] extension to do.)
convention over configuration is the motto on Rails and ASP.Net MVC is actually the opposite so that's why OP says it was the biggest differentiator between the two frameworks.
Upon seeing the list of commands, I immediately thought "this is great! I could alias betty to b and then maybe a few more aliases here and there. I could take "betty next song" and make it 'b n s'!"
and then went "oooooh, so that's how this all started."
"You have to show your work Chance" was the sentence that drove me to despise school. As a 6th grade visual spatial student in a "gifted" algebra class, I could see the answer as if I were reading english but struggled to show my work.
I read/write slow and I have an incredibly hard time memorizing anything so I rebelled. Even after I got my act together, got my GED, and went to college I suffered through the various levels of Calculus because it was the same tune all over again. Classes like Linear Algebra were a lot harder for me to "see" but it was still faster & easier for me to take the time to visualize it.
My girlfriend's brother has this same problem - he definitely knows the material, but he gets really frustrated because it's so tedious to write out something when you can just write the answer down and go onto the next problem.
When I went over it with him, I showed him several spots where he made careless mistakes - he added where he should have subtracted, he multiplied where he should have divided, he screwed up a decimal point, whatever. I told him, "It's easy to spot your errors now because these are easy problems. But when you get to harder math, it's going to be much harder to find out what you did wrong, and a teacher isn't going know whether you made a careless mistake or just don't know it at all. By showing your work, you show the teacher that you actually know it."
Nowadays he understands the reason why he needs to show his work but still hates it. I'm hoping that he'll be like this only while the math is easy.
By showing the work, he's busy proving himself instead of learning. This demonstrates that, intentionally or not, public schools have become primarily credentialing institutions and not teaching institutions. I offer a thought exercise...
If you could be given a magical amulet that let you teach students better, more quickly, and more permanently than ever before but at the expense of never being able to test them to see exactly what it was that they learned, or you could be given a magical apparatus that let you test them perfectly so that you knew exactly what it was that they learned and did not learn but gave no insights or help into how to teach them those things that they failed at, which would you choose?
Which would your local school administrator choose? Which would your children's teachers choose? Which would the legislator writing education policy choose?
Everything else is post hoc rationalization. Having decided what it is that we want public education to be, we need to have some sort of justification for it even if it doesn't make sense.
Do you know what people who don't show work do when they move on to more difficult problems? They start scribbling it out on paper, without any prompting. The more difficult problems are interesting enough that they want to get them right, and when they notice that basic mistakes are interfering they strive to avoid those.
Or, in some cases, they just don't bother. When you solve the Poincaire Conjecture (spelling? didn't want to cheat and look it up) no one gives a crap whether or not you "showed your work" because most of the other mathematicians can also "just see" the boring details, and are interested primarily in the truly insightful portion of the proof.
I suspect that we're actually selecting for accountants and not math geniuses when we harp on "showing your work". How many Perelmans did we discourage and how many math stooges were praised last year in public schools?
As I said, the problem is that when a kid is having trouble, it's very difficult to figure out where he's going wrong if he isn't showing his work. To take a simple example, let's try factoring a quadratic. The kid doesn't show any work and just writes down "x = 1 and -5." He's wrong. Well, how did he get there? Did he make a careless mistake when factoring it? Did he try the quadratic formula but mess up a term? Is he just guessing? I don't know because he didn't show his work.
Meanwhile, if he shows that he's factoring the polynomial and writes a 5 where he should have written a 3, I can immediately tell that he knows what's going on but made a careless mistake. Alternatively, if he writes down a bunch of gibberish, it means that he doesn't know what's going on and needs someone to go over the concepts again.
It's like a compiler. Do you want a compiler that compiles really, really fast but just throws opaque error exceptions, or do you want a compiler that is slower but gives you detailed warnings and error messages? I'd rather take the latter. Maybe once I'm perfectly sure that my code works, I'll do it with the former.
> As I said, the problem is that when a kid is having trouble, it's very difficult to figure out where he's going wrong
The correct (though inefficient) approach is to keep trying until you see that he starts understanding. However, this is impossible when there are 25 other students in the classroom. Each might require a different manner of teaching to "get it", or learn at different speeds. And so if you're trying to crank out graduates on an assembly line this just won't cut it.
So instead of figuring out a solution where each student can get the education he deserves as a human being, we instead seek to change the student so that he can be programmed with the education that is possible in an assembly line system. This also explains the dearth of highly competent, highly respected teachers... you don't staff your factory with gifted artisans who could carve the pieces. You want someone who will push the button and have the product stamped out in 0.75 seconds.
If you calibrate everything perfectly, some number of students will get a highly optimal (for them) education where everything was timed perfectly, using the easiest-to-understand lessons. For everyone else, for the slow and learning disabled, for the quick and talented... it will be an awful experience. And, whether you call it luck or circumstance, neither of those groups will be educated well enough to be able to express their criticism easily.
> It's like a compiler. Do you want a compiler that compiles really, really fast but just throws opaque error exceptions,
But a compiler isn't a person, and a person isn't a compiler. I don't want to treat people as if they were machines... I especially don't want to treat children like they are machines, it's almost certainly even more damaging the earlier that happens to them.
I'm a programmer too, I do this for a living. I know all too well how easy it is to think of human circumstances and other people as if they were machines to be debugged, and it feels awful. Imagine what the 7 year old kid feels like in school when he's a bug to be solved on the teacher's trouble ticket system. Especially when he's probably marked "low priority, fix when time allows".
You're no longer talking about a system where learning is considered the primary goal. It may not even be a goal at all.
> If you calibrate everything perfectly, some number of students will get a highly optimal (for them) education where everything was timed perfectly, using the easiest-to-understand lessons. For everyone else, for the slow and learning disabled, for the quick and talented... it will be an awful experience. And, whether you call it luck or circumstance, neither of those groups will be educated well enough to be able to express their criticism easily.
This is a really good point - the public education system isn't an artisanal workshop; it's a large, industrialized factory where "raw materials" are turned into "product." Every grade is another step in the factory process. And while I guess it might be optimal given the very limited resources that we devote to education, it's heartless and doesn't work very well from an absolute standpoint.
Personally, I didn't get a lot of my education from school. Sure, I was there ten hours a day, but I mostly learned from my father and the homework that I did. I would get assignments, and my father was the one who really taught me whenever I ran into problems. I would then go back to school and pass tests.
Unfortunately, my situation was atypical and very lucky; I was blessed with a loving father who was fascinated with a large variety of topics and loved teaching. Most kids don't get a resource like that and get stuck with school as being the only avenue for learning. How can you reach them? I think the only answer is more money, which will go toward more teachers. Cut down the class size to ten kids per class, and you'll get a much more individualized curriculum. As long as you have 25 kids in the classroom, you're going to end up with the factory approach.
Lots of kids see the answer directly for the simple problems, and so don't see the point of showing their work.
The point of showing the work is to learn the mechanics of solving the problem. If you do not learn the mechanics of solving for simple problems, you will not be able to apply the mechanics to more complex problems where one can no longer intuitively see the answer.
Yep, I understand the motive behind the requirement. There's a lot of good that can come out of it; students are forced to learn the "steps" or "mechanics," teachers can see where things went south and give partial credit or offer assistance, and finally it is a great way to circumvent cheating.
I totally get it and it makes total sense except for when it doesn't. The problem with our education system is that it's fundamentally flawed. It is designed to work best with the typical student being taught from a skill set chosen for optimal widget-making. People learn/think differently and yet we cater more and more to the mantra of pump-and-dump where children with the ability to retain the most frivolous information wins.
It took until my junior year as a comp-sci student for me to figure out what I personally needed to learn the material. I absolutely had to understand the big picture before I could ever attempt to solve the problems. If I didn't and I relied entirely on memorization then I was destined to fail.
In order for me to understand the big picture, I had to ask questions, sometimes a lot of them. Abstract questions would annoy some professors and certainly other students. Engineering classes, like most college classes, are full of people brought up in a system where the slide-show-after-slide-show of formulas, facts, or bullet points was all they needed. My questions were irrelevant and an interruption to their note taking.
What's more is that now almost any place that prepares food has a tip line or a tip jar. Kid behind the counter just scooped some icecream on a cone? "Tip please." Hand me a cup of coffee? "Add whatever amount you want to the already hyper-inflated price of that joe you got there. I poured it, remember?"
The worst offender that I've run into is a sandwich shop called Jersey Mikes. I absolutely love their food but they recently rolled out a new system that has me so annoyed that I will never go back. As part of the payment process you are now required to either select from a predetermined set of tip percentages or explicitly opt-out.
The thing is, I actually feel for the guy preparing my sandwich or the girl that writes down my order and hands it off. I know that unless they are a waiter in a swanky, up-scale restaurant or a bartender pretty much anywhere then they are probably not making a ton of money.
Yet customers are made to feel as though they have some moral or social obligation to bring them up to a livable wage. In reality what is happening is the restaurants & bars are passing on their wages directly on to us. We are expected to pay a tax so that they don't have to pay them enough to survive on.