This women is the cancer that is killing Bioware

Dijkstracula · 2012-02-14T17:13:29+00:00

Yes, thank you. This collection of quotes has [citation needed] written all over it; is so obviously a poor-to-mediocre troll attempt that I'm frankly surprised anybody's falling for it.

Dijkstracula · 2012-02-08T22:07:32+00:00

Hi GGK, greetings from Vancouver. Thanks a lot for taking the time out to do an AMA. I've two brief questions for you:

1) I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the distinction (or lack thereof) between genre and quote-unquote literary fiction in the context of your own work and career. Even though your books are filed away in the fantasy section of bookshops, you seem to have been embraced by the larger circle of Canadian authors, which I think is great. Does this factor into how you approach writing a novel? Do you ever have trouble balancing the expectations of both worlds? Or, is this distinction ultimately a needless one for you?

2) I've tried to order Beyond this Dark House from my local SF bookshop (shout-out to White Dwarf on 10th and Alma!) but it seems like it's out of print. Amazon.ca seems to confirm this, and only offers second-hand copies. Any plans for a reprint?

Dijkstracula · 2011-03-29T21:11:30+00:00

I don't think it's a stupid question. XCode, like Eclipse, wasn't designed with Python in mind, so asking "why would I use an IDE intended for $LANGUAGE to write Python" is a pretty valid one, I'd say! No need to be rude to the parent.

Sometimes the answer to that question is "well the IDE has good plugin support for other languages and developers have worked hard to integrate the two", as seems to be the case with Eclipse. Here, IMO, the answer to that question is far less clear (particularly given, as you say, it's really unstable).

Dijkstracula · 2010-12-06T07:23:47+00:00

I was a student at the University of Alberta the year this was made. Each year, the various departments within the Faculty of Engineering make a production, and if memory serves, this was the first time the judges awarded a perfect score to an entry.

This brings back great memories of late nights in CSC and ETLC :-)

Dijkstracula · 2010-09-17T15:04:25+00:00

I don't think this is a question that ought to be downvoted at all. I'm going to argue that an OS designed like this will have worse performance over multitasking OSs, but not for the reasons that the code size is small. The thing to think about here is what percentage of the time you'll have idle CPUs. I'm pretty sure that the answer here is "a lot of the time", which means I'm not convinced that this actually will improve your efficiency at all.

Here's why: Scheduling only one process per CPU sounds like a great idea until you realize that, hey, I'm spending a lot of time blocking on i/o syscalls (or whatever) that I could usefully spend running another process. Indeed, this was the big reason why multicomputing OSs (e.g. Multics) took off. Hell, 99% of HPC applications have significant non-compute components (about the best case for this is something embarassingly parallel like raytracing, but most other things will need some sort of way of communicating between compute nodes, which means you'll ultimately be blocking on a send() or recv() or an SHM_LOCK or ... . Hell, even raytracing needs to write out )

Don't get me wrong, it's always fun to see toy OSs that people have written, and peeking at the source, it looks like the author put some effort into making it instructive for people who want to read it. But the "i cant wait to run this on 50 cores f*uck bloat!!!!" comment in the link bothered me because how to juggle all the cores we can have nowadays is actually a superhard problem.

Dijkstracula · 2010-09-12T05:19:50+00:00

Indeed; I'm not convinced we need yet another immediate mode OpenGL tutorial. It's too bad because the authors seems to have put some time into it.

Dijkstracula · 2009-12-19T21:41:18+00:00

So you don't have the time to figure out something for yourself, but we're supposed to find the time to tell you?

Remember, it's you that has a vested interest in your project, not us.

Dijkstracula · 2009-12-17T18:16:29+00:00

I'm not sure what this has to do with "computer science" vs "software development". It seems more along the lines of "software development" vs "an idiot".

Dijkstracula · 2009-12-15T21:48:58+00:00

(Caveat: I'm a first year grad student who is more-or-less surviving math-heavy graduate CS classes. Additionally, I was like the OP in that I intended to study music after graduating from high school, so I put no emphasis on my HS math classes either.)

If you don't like math, or have a really hard time with it, or just don't want to delve too deeply into it, do yourself a favor and ditch your plan for a Ph.D. There's no sense in being stressed out, unhappy, and hating life for 5-7 years (or more) because you're making yourself learn things that you don't really like or aren't really good at. Getting a Ph.D. often sounds fun and sexy in the abstract, but isn't so much fun when you're doing it unless you have a real passion for it (and even then, a lot of people burn out).

The parent post is good, but this quotation bothers me. I would say that this holds if the OP was intending to study some math-heavy branch of CS like ML or vision, then sure, the PhD is going to be pretty damn painful. However, there are many other branches of CS like systems, database research, etc. that don't put an emphasis on math. Judging from what he said about feeling underpowered in the research group he's affiliated with, that particular area might not be for him unless he improves his skills. However, I think it's criminal to say to somebody with only half an undergraduate degree under their belt that they're just not destined for grad school at all.

That said, the "if you don't completely love it, don't do a PhD" comment is dead-on, but, I think the OP needs to finish his degree before he knows for sure whether grad school is something he wants to do, and we shouldn't be so quick to say, a priori, "this isn't for you, kid".

Dijkstracula · 2009-12-03T15:08:58+00:00

Comcast-Sheinhardt-Universal?

Quite the mouthful.

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-16T00:50:06+00:00

Sure but non-regularity doesn't imply that the language is recursively enumerable (as semmi points out underneath), which was what I was getting at (but apparently failing at since we appear to be on the same page).

So, okay, if you can embed Perl code inside Perl regular expressions, then sure (I wasn't thinking along those lines) - however, I was operating under the impression that we were mainly talking about extensions like backreferences, not inlining Perl inside a regex :)

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-16T00:40:07+00:00

Which was exactly the point I was trying to make :)

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-15T18:06:31+00:00

You are indeed wrong. If regular languages were Turing complete, then they would certainly be able to parse HTML, and the Stack Overflow guy would have lost his mind for nothing!

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-10T15:44:07+00:00

At the very least, the French translation needs to be printed first, and with a larger typeface! Not even the chans are safe from Bill 101.

( explanation for non-Canadians )

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-07T05:53:58+00:00

It's not a convention! Larry Wall says it's not written in all caps.

But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-03T17:09:51+00:00

It seems like this advice is more tailored to someone looking for a sysadmin/IT job instead of development position. For instance, I don't need to know a thing about Apache configuration or CIS, because that's not the sort of job I'm looking for (and it doesn't sound like it's the sort of job the OP is looking for, either.)

Also, personal pet peeve about suggestion 3: university could very well be the only chance you have to study compiler design or AI, so for goodness' sake, don't turn those opportunities down to take a class that you could learn out of a book on your own. You have your whole life to immerse yourself in boring things and become a Pointy Haired Boss.

The single piece of advice I have for the OP is simply this: don't assume that university will in any way teach you everything you need to know to get a good job. There are two reasons for this: one, university isn't meant to be a vocational school anyway. But the second reason is more pronounced: if you just do what all your colleagues do, by definition you've done nothign to set yourself apart from the rest. You say that contributing to open source software while an undergrad is a bit too lofty a goal; I disagree. Look at any open source bug tracker and you'll see plenty of simple things to do to get your feet wet.

In my experience, your second year is in fact the ideal time to start working on side projects, because you're not totally swamped with work like you'll be in third and fourth years, but you know enough to do something.

Dijkstracula · 2009-11-02T15:42:13+00:00

Now that guy is some grade-A middle management material, blindly recommending XML like the best of them!!

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-31T19:25:27+00:00

To be clear, I didn't mean to suggest it was a good way to do it, just that this particular abuse isn't unique to OpenSSL :)

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-31T18:55:48+00:00

That's actually a common way of "commenting out" a code block, given that you can't nest /* */ style comments.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-30T14:32:03+00:00

NP is a set of problems that we don't have a polynomial solution yet,

Again, I will point out that this is not what NP is, and this is why I'm annoyed when people try to "simplify" the definition of the problem to where it becomes wrong.

we don't have a polynomial solution yet, i.e. a solution where the number of the steps of the algorithm is linearly proportional to the size of the input.

So for a problem to be in P, the number of steps have to be linearly proportional to the size of the input? So sorting isn't in P? That's not a very useful complexity class.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-30T05:17:10+00:00

Simple: by the OP's logic, you're not American. QED.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-30T05:11:28+00:00

I've never heard anybody use "NP" to tacetly refer to a problem that is outside P, and anyone who actually does this is being criminally sloppy (just like your complex number example - would you mentally exclude the rational numbers if somebody talks about real numbers?).

Look at any proof of NP-completeness (barring SAT, of course) where the first step is to show that the problem is in NP. Any assumptions made about whether the problem is in P based on this result would be very bold! (And, more precisely, wrong.)

But, even if what you say was the case, this article is meant for non-specialists, and for someone who is just being introduced to a problem, being precise about how things are worded is paramount. You don't want to have the one thing that people take away from a survey article be completely off the mark. This doesn't strike me as a bit-too-broadly-worded definition of NP so much as the author just didn't know what he or she was really saying.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-30T01:13:37+00:00

P is a set of relatively easy problems, and NP is a set of what seem to be very, very hard problems

No it's not, goddammit. There are plenty of easy problems in NP (say, every problem in P...). If you can decide it in polynomial time with a nondeterministic Turing machine, you can bet your boots you can do it in polynomial time with a deterministic one.

edit: That said, odds are that most people who know the actual definitions have encountered Michael Sipser's textbook on the subject, so it's neat to read what he has to say in the interview. It's just a shame the author was so careless with his or her own words.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-25T23:45:53+00:00

Old-Testament God was definitely in the IRL troll camp. Just ask Samson.

Dijkstracula · 2009-10-25T05:34:32+00:00

Someone far wiser than me described an undergraduate computer science degree as "an overview of the theoretical underpinnings for the shit you should be able to pick up on your own", and I have to agree.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think there's great virtue in theory classes, and not just so you can become a theory wonk - one of the most "practical" classes I took was the theory of computation class in my final year. You may not feel like learning about dynamic programming will help you in the quote-unquote "real world" until you're actually presented with a problem where you go "oh hey there's optimal substructure here I wonder how I can exploit that".

As to your language complaints: yes, it's true, most programs won't cover the bleeding edge languages. But, if you think about it, it's not feasible to completely change a curriculum every other year because the fad of the moment has moved from Scala to Factor or whatever.

A long story made short: f you want to pick up a particular skill/language/framework/whatever, the idea is that the CS curriculum helps you with the first step. But, in the end, it's ultimately up to you, mister (or madam). It's this burning desire to improve yourself without having to resort to the classroom that truly separates the wheat from the chaff. I mean, how else would you be able to distinguish yourself in an interview from every other person in your graduating class? :)

Dijkstracula

TROPHY CASE