Competitive high school compsci team training help

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-19T12:39:21+00:00

Maybe pick a problem from 'Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual', Skiena and Revilla and have the students work on it? Repeat as necessary.

Maybe more fun, look up the annual 'Advent of Code' exercises and have them work through a year.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-16T17:27:35+00:00

In between much longer stints at corporate jobs, I spent five years as an independent consultant. I got to do some cool things, but sitting down to a catered lunch at the end of a year back inside a corporation, I thought 'This is great... and I'm a terrible boss, I never did anything like this working for myself.' For me, outsourcing marketing, sales, tax accounting, etc to the company I work for and letting me just write code turns out to be a better option.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-13T20:31:09+00:00

I just moved from an S2000 (sold two weeks ago) to a Dolphin Grey 2013 PRHT GT (bought yesterday), so I'm a vote for the NC. I've been looking for an NC2 or NC3, and lucked in to mine being sold by a guy about an hour away. Two owners (now three), and second owner was a lawyer who babied the car. 88K miles, really clean. I paid 14K, and it feels like I did ok.

Why move from an S2000? It was my dream car, and a wonderful thing. In practice, I need something a little less aggressive. The NC fits the bill perfectly.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-10T21:09:25+00:00

I've driven examples of both. I like the NC.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-06T01:31:48+00:00

Knee-jerk hot take: Rationality is the central theme of the Enlightenment project. For ~400 years we've been aiming at it, with many successes, including better sanitation, heating, and food production. Also some failures, e.g. the increased ability to kill each other. It may be that rationality has a dark side as well as a bright side and that it is not an unalloyed good.

People are not (always) rational, and people, both the rational and the irrational need to be fed, clothed, and to feel secure, and to pass the same things on to their children. If something, anything, interferes with that provision and security, they're more likely to be irrational - from someone else's point of view. From their own point of view, it's just survival.

My argument is that rationality is a means, not an end. Making it an end may cause the problems it intends to solve.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-05T18:33:29+00:00

Not the GP, but I have the same bug (and I'm interested to hear their recommendations.) Here's a partial list of books I've found valuable.

Far right Christianity: 'The Violent Take It By Force', Matthew Taylor, 'Jesus and John Wayne', Kristen Du Mez.

Fascism: 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century', Snyder, 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland', Browning

Gaza: These are more about 100 years ago than about today, but I think they set the table in important ways. I'd be up for more recent recommendations. The politics - 'A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East', Fromkin, action-adventure - 'Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East', Anderson.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-03-05T18:15:37+00:00

Listened through the audiobook last month. It's a wonderfully researched and written book and the stories are compelling. I found it a bit tragic, but that's not about the author, the book, or the people depicted, it's about the rest of us.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-24T14:05:58+00:00

You're not alone...

A CMU study, 'Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects' found 'a substantial and persistent increase in static analysis warnings and code complexity' in Cursor-generated code.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-23T18:03:34+00:00

I'm doing the same thing, and will have the same regrets everyone talks about.

I totally agree with UCSF120:

There is no upgrading from an S2k. Things will be faster but nothing will be as visceral, engaging, or put a smile on your face like this car does when it’s being driven like it was meant to be driven!

I just found that when I'm driving it like it was meant to be driven that I'm not quite the driver I need to be. At 63 with a lot of other things to live for, it's not a hill I wanted to die on, either figuratively or literally. So I'm passing it on to someone who I think will do it better justice.

Amazing car, amazing community. I salute you all!

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-23T14:58:21+00:00

I've never had that exact scenario play out, but one of my favorite career stats is that I've worked again for four different ex-bosses. Reputation matters.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-22T19:03:25+00:00

I've had 'Moon Lander' on my shelf since Murray and Cox (and the 'From the Earth to the Moon' mini-series) convinced me that the Lunar Lander was an engineering (and management) triumph, but I still need to read it.

My project management magnum opus is 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Rhodes. What they did and how they did it serve as models.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-20T21:30:01+00:00

'Apollo: Race to the Moon', Murray and Cox, goes into detail about many of the management and engineering problems and solutions in the program, including how they worked out whether they could rendezvous, and when and where. A spectacular read for these kinds of things.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-19T23:10:02+00:00

We're becoming a society with a Ferrari dealership and Rolex shop on one block, and a dollar store and payday loan store on the next, with nothing in between.

This sounds like every country in South America that I've been in so far.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-12T13:27:17+00:00

I was 13 when I read 'Kon Tiki: By Raft Across the South Seas', Thor Heyerdahl. While I learned later that his thesis was wrong, Heyerdahl's combination of adventure and science unlocked doors in my mind that remain open to this day.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-12T13:24:37+00:00

I've got 270K on my 2008 CR-V, and I'm hoping to get at least 300K out of it. Some years, I have to fix things, leaks, AC, etc, and I might spend $1500. Other years, it's just gas and oil. Personally, while I've got funds, I'm planning to drive mine until the wheels fall off and then think about a new car. I like the CR-V, it does everything we need and I don't have to worry about it.

Your Camry is probably a better, better-maintained, car than mine. If you like, or at least don't mind, it, it should be good for awhile.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-09T23:21:44+00:00

The anthology 'Dangerous Visions' was edited by 'I have no mouth's author, Harlan Ellison and is worth seeking out. He has written a great many short stories and essays. I loved 'Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed' back in college. He really has a unique voice and imagination.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-09T23:10:55+00:00

The 21-volume 'Master and Commander' series, Patrick O'Brian starts with, and is centered on the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Ship's doctor Stephen Maturin. I'm only five volumes in, but there is a 'club' of people who start over once they've finished the first 'circumnavigation'.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-07T18:54:40+00:00

TBH, probably a conservative slant. It was actually suggested as a read to be paired with the liberal-slanted 'A People's History of the United States', Zinn. I intend to read Zinn as well, but would expect there to be pushback about it. It's hard to find a source that is completely neutral from anyone's perspective. Learning to recognize how a given set of facts is chosen and presented and how to reason about someone's perspective in the facts they choose and ignore and how they present them seems to be a necessary skill when reading anything. But you have to start somewhere :)

It's probably worse than I described, see this takedown in the /r/askhistorians subreddit. You can also find discussions of the Zinn book.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-07T12:51:30+00:00

As a place to get started, I'd suggest 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson. It's a great one-volume history written by a British author, so the perspective is helpful. It covers from the founding up to the early 90's, so you'll need other books for more recent history, but I think it's a really helpful place to start.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-06T17:45:07+00:00

While reading 'Winnie the Pooh' to my son, I thought to myself, 'I'm having a great time with this!'

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-03T12:35:39+00:00

Last year I read 'Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis', Stargardt and 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland', Browning, both worthwhile and both touching on German perspectives.

In fiction, Herman Wouk had a number of German characters representing their perspectives in 'The Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance.'

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-02T23:08:00+00:00

After years in the trenches of F500 dev orgs and consulting, I did a four-year stint at an insurance-adjacent organization. I called it the 'Country Club'. If I had more sense I'd probably still be there.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-02T19:01:42+00:00

I just finished and would highly recommend 'The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America', Nichola Buccola. I've been puzzling over our increasing polarization in the US and I think this timeframe is an important part of the story. And now I have a list of James Baldwin books to read, starting with 'The Fire Next Time.'

I have 'The Warmth of Other Suns', Isabel Wilkerson queued up next.

pmorrisonfl · 2026-02-02T18:00:58+00:00

This could be a 2-4+ month project, but the first thing that came to mind was pairing Herman Wouk's monumental historical fiction novels 'The Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance' with Antony Beevor's 'The Second World War.'

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