At least for public universities, how about sidestepping the lenders entirely, and replacinh tuition with payment of a fixed percent (say 20%) of 10-year post-graduation income?
Aside from the effects that wealth can have on early education (which can't really be dealt with effectively so late in the education process anyways), this would eliminate wealth as a barrier to higher education or to continuity of higher education, and protect students from both predatory lenders and misleading marketing by universities. This would also incentivize colleges to invest more heavily into the aspects of education that actually contribute to career success (e.g. practical skills over fancier stadiums) and to rebalance the number of degrees they offer in each field to what is actually valued by society. For example, if they graduate too many people with degrees in communication, and only half get jobs and pay for the education, then maybe they offered too many communication degrees. Likewise, if every mechanical engineer graduated paid highly for their educations in the 10 years post graduation, they should consider offering more of those degrees. Interestingly, this would incentivize high-value education without any more information than level-of-payment; if, for some unknown reason, all of a university's 'basket weaving' graduates make tens of millions after graduation, then you don't need to know how they made so much money to know that you did something right in how you educated them.
I also wrote my own static site generator using Python [0] that I use to generate my personal site [2], and that I introduced as a blog post here [1].
Posts are written in Markdown with simple formatting, templates are HTML/CSS with Jinja2 templating, and it includes support for things like automatic table-of-contents generation for posts, blog index pagination, tags, related posts (manually tagged, for now), comments (using utteranc.es and GitHub issues), and automatic image compression/scaling/caching (between builds). Eventually, I intend to add things automated 'related posts' list generation, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
For a cheaper, less toxic development process (but only for B&W), run a quick Google search for Caffenol. Instant coffee, sodium carbonate (washing soda), and vitamin C is all you need.
Blog post generation from Jupyter Notebooks is definitely something that I plan to add to mine. Hopefully `nbconvert` and my Jinja2 templates get me 90% of the way there; having yours as a reference will be useful if anything really trips me up.
Taking a look at your blog post, don't forget that Bootstrap has a lot of classes built in that make prettifying things like tables really easy [1]. In Sitegen, I apply a few Bootstrap classes to all tables in the BeautifulSoup object like so:
for table in soup_body.find_all('table'):
table['class'] = 'table table-striped table-sm table-hover'
return soup_body
Refer to the `add_table_tags` function here [2] to see what I did directly.
Great work! I like your site quite a bit - both in appearance and content. I'll have to take a closer look when I get the chance.
It's pretty cool that, despite using different languages and implementations, we converged on fairly similar outputs. That said, I may need to borrow some ideas from yours!
You aren't wrong — indeed, many static site generators are capable of doing exactly that — but I wouldn't go so far as to say that no other existing solutions were adequate.
As for Hexo, it looks like a great option, but it's written in Javascript — a language and ecosystem that I'm not terribly familiar with. While I could certainly learn it, doing so specifically to use Hexo (which I'd then need to configure, and possibly extend to my liking) adds an extra yak I'd need to shave to get started. I'm sure I could use it without learning Javascript, but troubleshooting or extending it would be more difficult, and I'd still need to adapt to the workflow it was designed around.
I was looking for a static site generator with all of the features I knew I wanted (like table of contents generation and seamless image compression/scaling), and all of the features I didn't yet know I wanted (like specified/fixed table column widths), so it needed to be easily extendable. I also wanted to get off the ground quickly, so it needed to written in a language that I was already comfortable with. Lastly, and most subjectively of all, the workflow needed to feel right.
Ultimately, it came down to the choice of (a) spending my time learning how to adapt to someone else's ideal solution, or (b) spending my time creating my own (or something like it). I chose the latter, and like you said, it was a great learning experience.
Thanks for the detailed reply! I understand now. There's a huge overhead to learning a new framework/language/ecosystem and it might not even meet the requirements you need.
Even if there's something that's good enough, I still like that people go through the process of making their own system. Completely fresh approaches are great way to learn and appreciate the time that goes into a framework and how hard it is to achieve; extensibility, performance, flexibility, security...etc
I had a quick look at the Github and it's great to see how concise and easy to follow the framework is, that's a lot harder with older Frameworks like hexo.
Many thanks! I'll definitely keep working on it, albeit a bit more slowly now that the blog is up and running.
Next, I'd like to make improvements to navigation and article discoverability on the site; I'm not yet sure what changes I'll make to the generator to accomplish this, but I'm sure there will be some (if you have any suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them). After that, we'll see!
The well goes deeper still. Another mode of epigenetic regulation involves histones, the proteins around which DNA is wrapped, and the many ways they can be modified (by methylation, acetylation, ubiquitiylation, sumoylation, etc.). Both DNA methylation and histone modifications modulate how DNA wraps around histones, and thus how readily any given segment can be accessed and transcribed into RNA (and eventually translated into a given protein).
This barely scratches the surface. This process, along with others that modify how DNA is folded, brings certain genes closer together (while moving others farther apart), increasing (or decreasing) the likelihood of all sorts of first, second, and third order (...) interactions between them and their products.
Epigenetics are fascinating. In my D&D headcanon, the reason Drow Elves are so obsessed with spiders is because they picture DNA as a three dimensional web whose spatial arrangement is central to gene expression.
> This barely scratches the surface. This process, along with others that modify how DNA is folded, brings certain genes closer together (while moving others farther apart), increasing (or decreasing) the likelihood of all sorts of first, second, and third order (...) interactions between them and their products.
> And we've only just begun...
Horribly vague, care to elaborate mathematically or at least provide some study links? The 'DNA folding' you propose begs resolution from some study using quaternions or attractors, or ... ?
Aside from the effects that wealth can have on early education (which can't really be dealt with effectively so late in the education process anyways), this would eliminate wealth as a barrier to higher education or to continuity of higher education, and protect students from both predatory lenders and misleading marketing by universities. This would also incentivize colleges to invest more heavily into the aspects of education that actually contribute to career success (e.g. practical skills over fancier stadiums) and to rebalance the number of degrees they offer in each field to what is actually valued by society. For example, if they graduate too many people with degrees in communication, and only half get jobs and pay for the education, then maybe they offered too many communication degrees. Likewise, if every mechanical engineer graduated paid highly for their educations in the 10 years post graduation, they should consider offering more of those degrees. Interestingly, this would incentivize high-value education without any more information than level-of-payment; if, for some unknown reason, all of a university's 'basket weaving' graduates make tens of millions after graduation, then you don't need to know how they made so much money to know that you did something right in how you educated them.