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Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

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Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#421

Post by smt88 »

nkozyra wrote: post #254
smt88 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to HS at the #1 school in my state in the early 2000s, and my experience was like GP's, not yours. Nothing s/he said was surprising to me.

I have never really heard high schools referred to by a ranking event though I went to high school at the same timeframe you did. Is this common? What's the measurement? State testing methods? Seems nebulous.

At the time I went to the school, there was a national ranking that used a variety of factors, including number of IB/AB courses per student, (P)SAT/ACT scores, and GPA.

I absolutely don't think the ranking was meaningful, but it at least says something about how many of my classmates had affluent parents who put a lot of pressure on them to succeed.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#422

Post by asdff »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #334
alexhutcheson wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.

If you want to be an engineer and deal with tech culture, sure. We can be a little myopic about that here on HN. Engineering is not "status" oriented, and going to a nice school doesn't have the weight it does, if you want to be doctor and heal people, for example. School still matters. We can't all start startups.

A state school in any state can get you into any public or private medical school. Hit your marks on grades, kill the mcat (by far the most important thing you do), shadow a doctor and wash literally any campus labs glassware for a few months to get your letter of recommendation, and you can go to any med school you want.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#423

Post by WalterBright »

7thaccount wrote: post #405
WalterBright wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AP stem classes are great for easing the transition to college level work, but they are no substitute for college stem classes. If you're a physics major, for example, you need to be taking honors calculus as a freshman, not the weeder classes, and AP calculus is just a warmup. In my experience, every STEM class in college is just paint over a math class. The stronger your math skills are, the more you can concentrat…

It's kinda ironic that you don't really know what classes you'll need until you are in industry (or whatever). For example, I really wish I could've only taken EE classes relevant to power systems + public speaking + several comp sci electives (programming, databases, etc) and as much statistics as I possibly can. The standard major was still good though and set me up to learn on my on.

I tried to select classes that would give me the most flexibility so I could pivot as needed. Though one of the most fun classes was Jet Engine Cycle Analysis. I finally learned how they really work, other than that hand-wavy nonsense that was ultimately unsatisfying. Got a job offer from Pratt&Whitney and almost took it.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#424

Post by selimthegrim »

7thaccount wrote: post #384
selimthegrim wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOPS is a subsidy to the middle class at the expense of those who really need it. Let me assure you as a graduate student at a Louisiana institution (not LSU) I am not impressed by their pouring fuel on the fire of rising college tuition with oil money

Not going to argue with it being funded from oil money. I've never looked into it, but assume it's true as it makes sense. I will say that I left Louisiana and all of my coworkers have $50k-$100k in school loan debt that I don't have to worry a about, so I definitely benefited from the program and would be paying another house note without the program.

The state has scholarships funded from offshore oil royalty trust funds for grad students. I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with Patrick Taylor subsidizing the middle class rather than the poor.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#425

Post by 7thaccount »

WalterBright wrote: post #423
7thaccount wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda ironic that you don't really know what classes you'll need until you are in industry (or whatever). For example, I really wish I could've only taken EE classes relevant to power systems + public speaking + several comp sci electives (programming, databases, etc) and as much statistics as I possibly can. The standard major was still good though and set me up to learn on my on.

I tried to select classes that would give me the most flexibility so I could pivot as needed. Though one of the most fun classes was Jet Engine Cycle Analysis. I finally learned how they really work, other than that hand-wavy nonsense that was ultimately unsatisfying. Got a job offer from Pratt&Whitney and almost took it.

That's an interesting point and can help you go anywhere when starting off.

With what you've done over the past couple of decades (I assume you're the guy that has written one of the first C++ compilers and invented D), would it not have been better for you to take more classes on compiler design or other computer science/computer engineering related courses? Did jet engine analysis (I assume you're a mechE) ever help you once you found your niche?

Btw...you've seemed to accomplish far more (technically speaking) in your life than me :), so I'm genuinely asking and not trying to lecture you.

Edit: I think pretty much all knowledge I've learned has had some use, but surely the applicability would've been higher for you with more computer hardware, compiler, and algorithms related coursework?

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#426

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #118
_5yps wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second-tier compared to the world's top universities; that is, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and their ilk. I've seen posts on this website[0] how some big tech companies almost exclusively skim off the top. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543371

There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies? The notion that you have to jump through hoops to get a tech job is pretty ridiculous. If you know your stuff you’ll have no trouble to find a job even without a degree from a fancy school.

> "There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies?"

Big tech companies tend to have interesting work. Why would anybody jump through the hoops to go to a top university to get an ordinary coding job?

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#427

Post by 7thaccount »

selimthegrim wrote: post #424
7thaccount wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to argue with it being funded from oil money. I've never looked into it, but assume it's true as it makes sense. I will say that I left Louisiana and all of my coworkers have $50k-$100k in school loan debt that I don't have to worry a about, so I definitely benefited from the program and would be paying another house note without the program.

The state has scholarships funded from offshore oil royalty trust funds for grad students. I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with Patrick Taylor subsidizing the middle class rather than the poor.

Isn't TOPS available to all that graduate highschool with 4 years of math, English, and 2 years of foreign language (i.e. everyone)? It seems pretty egalatarian to me. Granted, the rich can afford to study and hire tutors, so getting a 32 on the ACT is far easier for them, than someone that is poor. That's more of a problem with our failing public schools though.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#428

Post by asdff »

_bxg1 wrote: post #328
idoby wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the "popular kids" at school were the overachievers, not the jocks This may be a silver lining in an otherwise very gloomy comment page? When I was in HS (though not in the US), popularity was highly correlated with wealth and/or political activism.

Yes and no. It's not great that people start the rat race so young now. Especially since it doesn't actually make that much of a difference: extra "accomplishments" in HS are only loosely associated with better colleges, and the college you go to is only loosely associated with how well your life actually goes afterward. The things that really end up mattering are a) choosing a field that the economy happens to want…

It reflects a failing to teach these things. You spelled it out ABC and I agree that it's as easy as that, but all kids here are extracurriculars and APs and this and that, since that is what their high school teacher is telling them them, not someone in the wider economy-based workforce.

There were some extremely smart people in my high school that ended up being sold that siren song of humanities major in small expensive new england private school, only to end up in an an irrelevant career due to a lack of networking opportunities. Those that made it out alive had a fund in their name set up at birth.

My advice is to take active steps to improve your chances. You want an opportunity, so go where there is more of them for you to chase at a large school in a large city to increase your odds of running into one of these opportunities, both within the school or in the local economy. It also makes it easier to pivot into another field if you really don't like where you started. Chances are, that niche liberal arts school in rural Maine might only be really strong in that one department, but the state school will be decent in 10 because larger state schools have an easier time securing funding for more departments (unless the private school is Harvard).

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#429

Post by baryphonic »

Nasrudith wrote: post #399
deagle50 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on your point - I am starting to believe that the political correctness oozing out of teens and those in the early 20s today is actually compensation for a new form of selfishness that comes from being measured in real time on a global scale, and drives the non-stop status games you described.

There are always poseur idiots in any movement (see the "Blockchain!" zombies and "Raw Water") but the political correctness is a result of actual moral standards based upon harm and could be called a successor or an usurper backlash to the hypocritical "morality" that was utterly obsesses with sexual norms while ignoring every other aspect of it. It isn't spoken of in such terms usually but what "political correctne…

> [...] political correctness is a result of actual moral standards based upon harm and could be called a successor or an usurper backlash to the hypocritical "morality" that was utterly obsesses with sexual norms while ignoring every other aspect of it. It isn't spoken of in such terms usually but what "political correctness" generally is referred to as detractors is essentially "new morals". > > They were judged unfairly by a broken, hypocrital and insane system and now they flip the table and judge it back harshly.

Interesting that you admit that PC culture (or "new morals") is explicitly reactionary.

> The failure of the previous generation's systems of morality is literally a meme "Ok boomer" - and it certainly wasn't the first to judge back.

Also, the existence of a meme is hardly dispositive, unless 4chan and reddit are really our moral overlords (perish the thought).

> There is still plenty of status shit in various forms going on top which matters to varying degrees subculturally if they give a shit or not but there is still a recognized objective moral "line in the sand" roughly where excuses aren't tolerated. "Everyone was doing it" as an excuse only further indites a complete lack of morals. A standard which evidently terrifies many who were alivr during the judged segment part of the everyone given the jump to embracing moral relativism.

This is not quite right. If there really was an objective "line in the sand," then presumably we'd all know what that line in the sand was. The problem, of course, is that there is no objective line in the sand. A couple years ago after the heat of #MeToo had turned up, did the line in the sand say that Sen. Al Franken should go or stay? Were his unwanted advances less or more harmful than losing a reliable progressive in politics? Different people within PC culture came to different conclusions.[1][2] The same thing is happening right now with this slow-rolling story about Joe Biden. The media writers and personalities who have been extremely eager to create a frenzy in this #MeToo era and were very eager to #BelieveAllWomen during previous scandals (with 'R's after the name instead of 'D's) are now very reluctant to even acknowledge that Biden has been accused and that his accuser has indirect contemporaneous evidence of her claims. What's the objective rule that determines who is right or wrong? There is none: the "objective rule" depends on the consensus of those in the culture. The consensus can (and does) change moment to moment. Thus, the "new morals" are no more objective than the ones they're replacing. Rather, they are the exact same as those you claim they are reacting to.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/1... [2] https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17352230/al-franken-accusation...

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#430

Post by asdff »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #397
franze wrote: post #14

I became a young father with 19, after way too much party starting from 15. So naturally I was concerned that my son would behave like me at that age. Or even just 50%. So I was kinda dissapaointed how well behaved he is now with 22. Mostly interested in E-Sports, Tinder and his CRM job. Said that, becoming a father at 19 was a great career move. Got a job making websites in the dot-com area as I needed money and was…

The older I get the more I'm convinced that having kids young is the right decision. I had my first daughter when I was 24 and now that I'm entering my prime earning years I don't have to worry about child care or being around 24/7 the same way I did when my kids were babies. I also have less "free time" now than when I was in college and I had way less than most college kids. It sounds counterintutive in this day an…

I'm in my 20s and I'm not sure how I would be able to afford shelter, food, and daycare at the same time this early in my life.
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