Honestly, take a test. I recommend this one here:

https://typing-speed-test.aoeu...

Anything above 250cpm is probably "good enough", but just about any touch typists can easily do 300+ without breaking a sweat, and my faster students in my CS classes can usually do 400+ (myself, I rarely reach that score anymore, but then, I'm old...).

Also, error rate should be really low (1-2 mistakes is probably fine, but any more, and you have room to improve).

Since noone mentioned it, the command is

M-x doctor

Thieves are unfortunately a real thing, but it varies by country. It's more common in the south and east of europe. They are not on the train, they are only boarding the trains at the stops for a quick "grab and dash".

The conductors are not cops, they can't do much about that. But you can protect yourself quite easily. Here's what I told my students to do on our night train trip from Zurich to Zagreb last year.

1) Lock the compartment door from the inside.
2) Don't have *anything* that can be grabbed within 1m of the compartment door.
3) If you hear something trying to open the door, make noise / turn on light etc.

1) Doesn't fully protect you because some of these trains are old and the locks are poor, but 2) usually does the job. The thieves only have seconds to get the job done, so if they don't see anything up for grabs, they immediately move on to the next compartment.

My students at first actually believed I was just trying to scare them, but sure enough, after we crossed from Austria into Slovenia, the thieves were there at one of the stops in the middle of the night. However, nothing was stolen, probably due to our precautions.

I have never discovered anything better than c't. While it was arguably better 20 (and 40) years ago, it's stil very very good. If you don't speak german, you can still get their articles through an online subscription and feed them into the translation tool of your choice.

> That's the publication citation index.

That is a terrible system because it is easily gamed. A group of researchers get together, agreeing to cite (for no particular reason) a certain amount of papers from the other members, and they in turn will cite your paper, inflating everyone's citation index by a large number. H-index suffers from the same problem.

Google has turned SPF validation on.

Here's an example how this breaks forwarding:

Let's say I create an e-mail address (let's call it family@mydomain) that is forwarded to multiple people, and one of them has a gmail account, all mail sent from domains with a hard fail policy to this address will bounce.

The three people with an icloud address will get it (because icloud doesn't do SPF checks yet), but the fourth and fifth recipient with a gmail address will not get it, and the sender will receive two bounces.

If you run your own domain, and want to use multiple virtual aliases for it, but forward everything to a domain that does SPF checks, all mail from sender domains with a hard fail policy will bounce.

So yes, for mail delivery to fail, both the final receiver domain needs to do SPF validation, and the sender domain needs to have a hard fail policy, but there are enough of those to make mail forwarding useless.

Apparently there is a solution to this, at least if the forwarding server is running postfix, and that is to install postsrsd, but I haven't had time to implement and test that yet.

The hotfix was just to not allow any virtual addresses that forward to domains (like gmail) that do SPF checks. But that's also bad because I have no control over when a new target domain starts to implement them. Bottom line: SPF is making my life worse, not better. Apparently one of its main purposes is to help with backscatter from spam, but there are other ways to deal with that that don't require breaking forwarding.

SPF breaks e-mail forwarding, plain and simple. There's so many good reasons for e-mail forwarding, the decision to break it was mind bogginglingly stupid. Also, spammers have hundreds of ways to get around it (proven by how much spam that's still in our filters that passed SPF checks), so it's near to useless.

Please please please don't set SPF hard fail policies for your domains!

This.

To quote Susan Polgar: "When men lose against me, they always have a headache ... or things of that kind. I have never beaten a completely healthy man!"

Most chess players would love to see more women play chess, so we have to make sure they have the opportunity to do so without having to deal with so much bullshit.

Most male chess players behave appropriately, but a few assholes can be enough to ruin the game completely for many women.

You have no idea what the hikes around here are.

This is just 5miles from my house and it's on my todo list:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is a comparatively easy hike I've done multiple times, however, still, care needs to be taken:

https://youtu.be/lWGRR1a5TC8?t...

Done this last year:

https://youtu.be/1SnkMSivwuk?t...

This is all very easy for me from a technical point of view (I can climb 5.9 - 5.10), but definitely not mentally. And no amount of exposure so far has changed that much.

While you can do some things with exposure training, it has its limits. It can't simulate the "the stakes are high" situation.

I have a fear of heights, but it's limited to unprotected situations. While I have successfully navigated overhanging walls with 150m drops below me and 20-30cm wide ridges with a drop of 500m on each side, I do these things with a rope and a climbing buddy (that doesn't make it entirely safe, but a fall just means you'll probably get hurt, but (usually) not killed).

However, every time I do something nowhere near as difficult (free soloing in easy terrain, or just walking up very close to an unprotected edge, or walking along narrow ridges), it's super scary, because I know a single mistake (or a piece of rock getting lose below my feet) will definitely kill me. While a bit of fear is healthy, wobbly knees, sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate are not.

There's no exposure therapy here because those sessions are far too likely to end in death, and as soon as I'm protected, there is no fear.

The same for the exam: You can speak in front of people as often as you like, as soon as the stakes are high enough (your entire academic career may depend on the outcome of the exam), the fear is back for some people.

> People still buy programming books? How quaint. Most people I know use the Information Superhighway.

There is good reason to buy books. A lot more effort has gone into their creation compared to random posts on stackoverflow. A book can easily teach you the most important concepts for a certain problem, and in much greater detail than an single article. It also bundles multiple pieces of information in a consistent style.

Sure, you can just google "graph theory" and read whatever comes up, but I'd rather recommend you buy Sedgewick's "Algorithm in C/Java/Pascal" and read the relevant chapters there.

So, you did well in large classes, congratulations.

But that doesn't make it a good learning environment, especially for teenagers (although some students success regardless).

From my experience (> 15 years of teaching), I judge that roughly 20-30% of the student body will cope with any conditions, and about a 10%-20% will do somewhat poorly, no matter how many resources you spend on them. It's the large majority in between that will greatly benefit from small classes, good learning environments and highly qualified (for example, a masters degree for the subject helps), motivated and well paid teachers.

> Our average classroom size is 29,

You are massively under resourced. Classroom size should be below 20. I've been teaching (15-19 year olds, pre-university), and the difference between having 18 and 24 students is massive. If I have 16-18, I can usually keep up with what everyone's doing, how they're doing, who's ahead and needs more challenging stuff to keep interested, and who's behind and needs some extra help. With 24, that's impossible for me. Or if I identify those students, there's just not enough time available to help them individually.

They usually don't *rely* on bugs, they have to work around them. When I still used to do low level graphics programming for a living, some of the worst days were when I came to the office and a PC or laptop was waiting for me showing newly discovered and entirely unexpected driver bugs.

For some reason we were not allowed to touch the drivers (some certification issues for devices used in medical environments) but we were allowed to patch our software and litter them with "if driverVersionIs(some_crappy_and_outdated_intel_or_ati_driver)" code fragments.

>> if you don't memorize a metric ton of patterns, you are doomed to lose

> That does seem to be the case.

Chess player (Fide Master) here. What you are saying is simply wrong. A few simple rules (put a pawn in the center, develop your pieces, castle early) and paying just a little attention (chess is all about tactics, after all) will get you through the opening.

If you don't believe me, run computer analysis on all the games played on sites like lichess and others, and you'll notice that the vast majority is decided much later in the game.