This is exactly the reason. Academia is a business just like any other. Academics do what they are incentivized to do. I guarantee that if NSF, DOE, NIH and the other US government funding agencies made publishing your code a requirement for funding, and actually checked that you did, you would see everyone start doing it immediately. Right now NSF requires a "data management plan" as part of the proposal, which includes information about sharing, reusing and archiving data and code, but nobody ever checks that you followed the plan after the money is awarded.
#1 is the reason I abandoned Fedora too. Things change so quickly and break so often that it was too much effort to maintain the machines I was using it on. I replaced it with CentOS.
... which is the entire point of Fedora and EL (CentOS, Scientific Linux, RHEL) - Fedora is fast moving, EL is stable.
FWIW, I've used Fedora for my primary work system (laptop, actually) for years. Never had it seriously break unless I did something stupid, and the fix was always simple. Bugs that I hit (mostly video) would have been encountered in any distribution.
I agree with your sentiments about Java. I wish I could just have my GOPATH contain 1) the source directory for my project, and 2) one or more directories with versioned Go source tarballs for my dependencies (gar files?).
This captures exactly the reason I am thinking about leaving academia. I got into research because I like doing research, but you can't have a career in research anymore. After completing a PhD, the only way to have a career is to spend all your time writing grant proposals, attending workshops, organizing meetings, cultivating useless collaborations, and promoting yourself. There is no time left for research, and teaching becomes a burden to avoid at all cost. You have to get PhD students and postdocs to do all the work, and take as much credit for their ideas and efforts as you can. Academia has become a dead-end job for people who want to do research.
I myself am worried about this. I have worked my ass off to get into the PhD program where I'm at, but in the end, what does a PhD in CS get me (outside academia) that an MS CS will not?
I think it makes the other people in the room feel less awkward.
I'm often the only person in the room without a PhD when I go see a customer. They usually want me to either fix something 10 minutes ago, prototype something next week, or invent something next month. I do.
There are websites around that list me as having a PhD in my specialty (I just have a four year degree). Most recently, one aerospace organization flat out refused to correct their page because it looks less professional if I'm not listed with a degree I don't have.
As far as advisors taking credit instead of their students... ten years ago I saved the life of an asshole and the conscience of a friend when said friend came to recruit me to be a spotter while he attempted to kill his advisor after he'd published something my friend wrote, under the advisor's name. I talked my friend into merely destroying the prof's car.
I realize that I talk about violence a lot in my posts. It happens, it is part of life, it must be dealt with even in techie or academic circles.
De-escalation sometimes requires causing a small amount of damage in order to prevent much greater damage. It's like felling a few trees to build a firebreak.
I don't give a damn about the advisor, other than he's a human being and has the right to live his wretched life out, but I do know that my friend would've been haunted by his conscience all his life if he actually hurt someone... and haunted by his pride just as long if he didn't exact some form of revenge, because this is what our culture demanded.
I don't want to kill my advisor (he's a pretty good guy, honest, and generally not a douchebag... in all honesty I have in the past and would in the future have a beer with him ).
It just seems like everyone is a cog everywhere -- in academia, the real world, whatever -- and there is no escape.
That's what really sickens me. There's no room for original ideas unless you found a startup, and then, what, you sell your company to IBM/Google/Microsoft/whoever in a year or two and it's the same damn song and dance.
A PhD isn't a requirement to be a cog -- it doesn't even seem to make you a big cog that drives a lot of other gears and functionality in the clock, going by those I know with one. It seems (from the inside) like a lot of extra effort and stress. So, the letter hit close to home.
I wonder if we will need to have a license to operate a self-driving car. Certainly we will need a driver's license in the short-term, but after some time when people trust that self-driving cars work, will we decide that it is no longer necessary for the person using the car to know how to drive? If so, then that seems like it would open up a pretty anonymous way to travel. Of course, the vehicle will probably be licensed, but if you rent it from a company, then they company will know who is using the car, but the government will not. Will the government require rental companies to check ID's and provide them with the information? Maybe, but they already do that, and the government would need a warrant to get the information.
I was thinking the same thing. When is something just a library, and when is it something more? Think about concurrency in Go. Goroutines are cool, but what makes them more than just a cooperative threading library? Channels? Those are just concurrent data structures. The special sauce in Go is the select structure. It allows you to easily express control flow that cannot be expressed without select (or at least not easily). What is the special sauce in these probabilistic programming languages? What could not be implemented using a library?
Hahaha. I've been using the new GMaps for ages, and always thought it was fine. So I thought, I'll check out the old one and see how different it really is.
Holy crap it's fast. Wow. There's no loading or giant pixels, zooming is instant, scrolling around is instant. I can't get over how much faster this is. Woof.
i can tell you, unambiguously, that it has always been this fast. those tilesets are almost certainly statically cached and served at lightning speed with practically 0 overhead from some regionally located cdn server.
server load would have a statistically imperceptible impact here; never seen a google product roll out with scale-related issues, especially one as mature as their gmaps architecture was at the time of the GL switch.
EDIT: the image-based maps is a great example of the "Choose Boring Technology" thread [1]. the benefits of the GL maps, IMO, do not justify the enormous speed sacrifice, at least to the end users. i'm sure google's ultimate plan was/is to merge google earth and "3d/vr/augment all the things!", but for basic maps it is just terrible. i'm really sad about the whole situation because they really have great looking, readable tilesets, much better than OSM (even if less complete). sadly, they never did get the pixel-density-appropriate versions made for mobile devices and all the features looked tiny when implemented using their js maps api :(
Sponsored listings and ads in map search are already a thing on mobile. If I search for certain common terms ("Smog Check", for example), some pinpoints are already highlighted differently because they correspond to ads in the search results list.
Agreed, and the search input stealing focus at page load when I'm trying to use the zoom shortcut keys always gets me. (So I see a lot of "===" or "---" in the text field and have to fight it by clicking on the map, usually twice as we face off in a tug-of-war.)
I see this kind of behavior every day in gmail and it drives me batty. I'll use the 'l' shortcut to bring up the label drawer, start typing the name of my label, and three to four characters later gmail is actually ready for me to start typing.
Then I'll backspace out and re-type what I already typed, and Gmail highlights and decides I must want the third entry in the list for some reason, and makes it highlighted. So I'm moving over to the arrow keys.
The same kind of behavior in the search input as you're describing, too. Sometimes I get auto-suggest appearing after only one keystroke, sometimes it takes two. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, other than after a while I can usually somehow predict when my query will begin to be understood by the suggestion engine.
The inconsistency is really jarring, but just below the threshold where I start looking for another service because of how much it annoys me. Sort of like when my external monitor is physically positioned on the left side of my desk, but every time I plug it into the laptop it gets the virtual location off the right side of my screen.
This is amazing! Thank you! I always get so frustrated when I go to use Google Maps ever since the UI update. The floating drop-down search box infuriates me to no end.
I'm not sure the classic output mode fixes the problems. I still see some street names not showing up, and it still arbitrarily resizes my map and moves around when I do a search, which it never did in the really old versions.
Maps was the one Google app I thought I'd miss when I switched to Blackberry.
And, it is. But Blackberry Maps is soo much nicer for the "just show me where I am on a map" use-case. Street names are shown, and displayed in large font, and the interaction is much faster than GM now. Google Maps has better data and more information like shops and transit... but the experience of using it is frustrating in comparison.
