If my job were to solve TSP instances, I'd not bother trying to tell someone why it's hard. I'd through Iterated Lin-Kernighan or something similar at it and go get some lunch.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be surprised if this defense was particularly robust anyway. It seems you'd just have to argue that there's some slight difference in the situations and that's why I'm doing something that guy shouldn't do. But either way, you're not taking away the correct message from his example.

It takes some knocks for not really containing anything about how to use CLOS. Instead, it's how CLOS is built. At a higher level, it's "how to build an object-oriented language/object system from scratch" using Lisp as a vehicle.

Granted, I have no inside information. That just fits the externally observable information and the tiny amount of corporate politics that occasionally makes its way public.

Also, it's a very good practice to iterate through the neighbors in a random order (if you're doing next descent, for steepest descent obviously it doesn't matter).

In grad school, I did a lot of work on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_assignment_problem). If you model that "key reachability" metric as two-key sequence difficulty instead, you actually get a QAP instance to solve. I built a little toy project that would look at the source text of my dissertation in LaTeX as well as the accompanying C++ source code for bigram frequencies, and I mapped out a flow matrix manually in a similar way to the author here, but including that successive keypress difficulty, and ran my multiobjective QAP solver to generate a range of keyboards optimized for my specific dissertation work.

I did this as a fun little gimmick as part of a sort of "ignobels" within my department, so the results weren't really a thing you could use. To generate a usable keyboard layout, you need to also include a ton of heuristics for things like "put all the number keys together" and the idea that you can treat "a" and "A" as the same letter, but "2" and "@" may make sense to separate, none of which I really properly handled. But I think with some work one could actually formalize the problem of finding a real layout for normal people to use.

    UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983

I remember installing cogito to act as a front-end for git because very early on it seemed obvious that (a) git was going to win, and (b) it was going to win in spite of its UI, which was saying something.

Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.

Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.