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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#161

Post by smokel »

npsimons wrote: post #116
dmvdoug wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a Tell HN that is just an 800-comment-long thread full of these stories because I love them.

> There should be a Tell HN that is just an 800-comment-long thread full of these stories because I love them. As gratifying as they are, they get repetitive. Once you've heard one, you've heard them all. I'd much rather hear about the place that fixed a policy problem that was blocking such progress in the first place. Software is easy, getting people (and orgs) to change is hard, tedious, boring, but absolutely nec…

I agree that software is easy, and managing (human) processes is hard. Just the other day I advocated for a Free Management Foundation [1], in the same vein as the Free Software Foundation. Anyone care to spend their life on that?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37968979

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#162

Post by genewitch »

bee_rider wrote: post #133
oytis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching people a scripting language when the language has been already chosen for them, platform has been prepared, data preformatted etc. might be easy - a non-trivial share of my classmates couldn't comprehend a for loop though. To have real transferrable programming skill - I am not talking about one that will get you a software engineering job, just basic problem solving - you need to know an awful lot about how…

It might be the case that a better language for this sort of thing would have to be designed. Maybe somebody needs to take another crack at the sort of Visual Basic/Excel type environment. I think someone on this site chimes in occasionally with a sort of “spreadsheet, but each cell runs a line of Python” type program they’ve been working on (although I can’t remember the name unfortunately). That could be a good bas…

vb (6?) may have been copy and paste back in the day but with the advent and continuing "work" on .net VB is just as impenetrable as all the others now.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#163

Post by JohnFen »

asdff wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

She will not be unemployed in this situation, nor will her peers in similar situations. Available labor is always gobbled up and not left idle for long. Case in point: we've obviated jobs like the horseshoe maker and the stable boy and yet unemployment rate today at 3.8% or so is half of what it was in the 1900s when we had all these horse and stable jobs.

In the long term, yes. But shouldn't we have some compassion for those who get screwed in the short term? The horseshoe makers who were thrown out of work at the time may not have been able to find decent new employment. We have copious modern-day examples of jobs that have been obsoleted and those who were immediately affected still haven't been able to recover.

These sorts of labor shifts can't avoid harming those who get the short end of the stick.

Saying this is not to say that such changes shouldn't happen. It's inevitable and necessary in order for society to adapt to changing conditions. But I very often see a disregard for the reality that people really do get hurt badly in these shifts.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#164

Post by genewitch »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19
glandium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.

I mean not exactly the same thing but just last night Apple Maps was directing me to turn down a street that had clearly been closed for some time. Computers "make mistakes" all the time in most peoples' experience and after you get burned a few times (especially if you get badly burned, like getting fired over the "mistake") you learn to not blindy trust computers.

I once got fired because i upgraded a company's wifi network from a single apple wifi bridge (the residential one!) to a managed linksys or netgear deployment, and there was a bug in the firmware. I don't recall the bug, but it made the chief lawyer's apple laptop drop connectivity to their printer or something a few times the first day. I opened a support ticket, and got confirmation of the bug - at around 8PM, forwarded the email to my boss, and was fired the next afternoon.

what a crap company. They folded within 4 months IIRC, and listed me as the "financial contact" for the fiber optic internet links - got a bunch of nasty phone calls later in the year about needing to pay 5 digits in billing arrears!

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#165

Post by JohnFen »

LtWorf wrote: post #146
JohnFen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Because it makes her job easier or improves her performance? That's why I automate things at work, anyway. Being rewarded by my company for doing it doesn't really enter into the equation for me.

What happens to her if her performance is improved?

That entirely depends on the company she works for, and her own disposition.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#166

Post by leephillips »

LtWorf wrote: post #146
JohnFen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Because it makes her job easier or improves her performance? That's why I automate things at work, anyway. Being rewarded by my company for doing it doesn't really enter into the equation for me.

What happens to her if her performance is improved?

Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly. This is why it’s bad to be an employee. If you earn a living by knitting scarves in your house and work out a way to make them faster or better, or both, you’ll make more money or have more free time. If you knit scarves for a salary you’ll probably suffer for doing it faster or better.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#167

Post by bee_rider »

asdff wrote: post #64
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Take it a step further and teach actual data analysis and statistics that are not coin flip/compound interest plug and chug into the calculator problems. No matter what sort of job you do in life, being able to pull a csv from all your different credit or debit accounts and draw some inferences from that would be so useful.

I’m not sure what “actual data analysis” is exactly, but it sounds like something that would be better handled in a stats or science class.

Though, if programming were taught as a basic problem solving tool like writing and arithmetic, just stuck in the toolbox, a science class would probably benefit from having it there. For example, if it was expected that a kid could do programming as well as they can write a lab report, then it would probably be easy enough to add some sort of “call Numpy to do a linear regression” type section at the end of every lab report.

This sort of programming is an everyday force multiplier, and it ought to be taught as such.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#168

Post by onetokeoverthe »

bee_rider wrote: post #132
eru wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different? Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard. And most people can do basic arithmetic, right? The goal, I think, to start should be to get to the point where an office of 10 or so people has at least one or two who can string together basic scripts.

[dead]

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#169

Post by leephillips »

ethbr1 wrote: post #125
delusional wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report. I happen to work in a midsized bank, and we have TONS of these sorts of manual processes. My favorite unintuitive fact is that 90% of them turn ou…

When I stumble across things like this, I always remember this scene from Babylon 5 (and Peter Jurasik's delivery!) (Context: they've found an attache and friend they thought was dead, alive but forgotten in a prison cell) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kCj-Rnd5SsA

That was pretty amazing. I have to watch this show some day.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#170

Post by bee_rider »

smokel wrote: post #154
TeMPOraL wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think this one would be any different? Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life , in a direct and apparent way.

No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with. Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.

It seems like a negative feedback loop or something, nobody uses these sorts of features, so nobody implements them, and then the skills are less useful…
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