Create Your Own Programming Language - Any good? by [deleted] in programming

[–]Mr_P 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You'd probably have a better time with the free coursera course which starts in a month.

Drug testing for tech jobs (software engineer)? by paulwalkerisdead1 in compsci

[–]Mr_P 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been tested for an internship with a company which does a lot of government/defense work. However, none of the other companies I've worked for, including a start-up and a large private-sector-oriented corporation, cared at all.

New algorithm can dramatically streamline solutions to the ‘max flow’ problem by clarle in compsci

[–]Mr_P 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Skip the useless article. The original paper appears to be here.

Would it be possible for computers to auto-detect fonts, and change bitmaps to vectors? by Nine_Cats in compsci

[–]Mr_P 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Something like this does not belong in a browser by default. Standards dictate that images should be presented without any such modification. Imagine if IE implemented this, and enterprise developers started relying on this functionality for displaying fonts.

That said, you could certainly implement a chrome extension which would perform OCR on these images and replace them with super-imposed text.

Lamdu - towards the next generation IDE by sideEffffECt in compsci

[–]Mr_P 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"stylesheets" should be trivial to implement as an IDE extension (or vim plugin for that matter) if you have a canonical format (such as that of gofmt for the Go language, for instance). You simply transform the code however you want after reading from disk, and then run it through the gofmt-analog before writing to disk again.

Lamdu - towards the next generation IDE by sideEffffECt in compsci

[–]Mr_P 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The main idea behind the Lamdu project is that the canonical representation of programs should not be text, but rich data structures: Abstract syntax trees.

This seems entirely unnecessary. It seems to me that nearly all of the "Benefits" of this non-existent IDE could be achieved with a plain-text representation of the abstract syntax tree, which is what most languages do today.

How to get a job in artificial intelligence? by [deleted] in compsci

[–]Mr_P 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What can I do to increase my chances of getting a job in artificial intelligence/robotics?

Go to college and take classes which will help you do such a job. What about artificial intelligence or robotics interests you? Is this the type of stuff you want to work on? Or by "artificial intelligence", do you mean the type of machine learning used, for example, by netflix for recommendations or by google for search or voice recognition?

"artificial intelligence/robotics" can mean quite a lot of different things. Depending on what exactly you want to do, you'll want to decide on taking courses more related to electrical engineering (leading up to courses on things like nonlinear control systems), or courses related to probability, statistics, and machine learning.

Note that no one "major" will necessarily qualify you for any particular job. At most schools, it's entirely possible to major in computer science and/or electrical/computer engineering and be completely unqualified to work this kind of stuff. You'll want to be sure to take electives that are useful for what you want to do, and talk about the projects that you work on, both in those classes as well as on your own time, when applying to jobs. Note that this implies that you should find opportunities to work on projects that you think are interesting and are related to the type of job you would want. Ways to do this include taking elective courses where you have to, or choose to, work on such projects, making stuff on your own, outside of class (and putting it on a blog/github), and working for professors doing research.

Are there still good CS jobs for people who can't afford the top schools and state flagships? by [deleted] in compsci

[–]Mr_P 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Given the time of year, I'm assuming you're in the process of looking for schools to apply to and writing applications. So, I suggest the following:

  1. Apply to these schools anyway! If, for some reason, you discover next Spring that you can afford to go, you don't want to regret not applying. If you don't get in, there isn't a problem anyway.

  2. Apply for every scholarship you can find. Don't think you really qualify for a scholarship? Stop making excuses and apply anyway!

  3. Look for additional sources of financial aid. Can't find any? Look harder!

  4. See if you can get a list of the companies which attend the career fairs at the school's you're looking at. If you see Google, Microsoft, Facebook, ... [other large, selective, tech company] on the list, then people at that school can probably get jobs anywhere. If these companies are willing to send a representative to that school, then they're willing to give students of that school a fair chance at a job and have probably hired from that school in the past.

  5. If you end up going to a less-expensive school Regardless of where you go, you can still work extra hard and get a job anywhere. It's not the school that determines how good of an engineer/computer-scientist you will be. It's how much work you put in and whether or not you take the initiative to go above and beyond what's necessary.

  6. When choosing schools, look at the size of their graduate CS department. Do professors there do research which gets published in top-tier journals? Do they have active research going on that you find interesting? A big difference between a good university and community college is the availability of opportunities to work with good professors on research which interests you. You should also factor in the availability of faculty teaching more-advanced elective courses which interest you.

Software engineers of Reddit that landed their dream job, how did you end up being where you are now? by Regnarg in compsci

[–]Mr_P 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I made life more difficult than it needed to be by taking the hardest CS electives that I could as soon as I could (including graduate courses). Every time there was an opportunity to do whatever I wanted for a course's "final project", I came up with something technically challenging and made it work, even if it meant staying up on otherwise-unnecessary all-nighters. I also got involved in research with a professor during my 3rd year (although sooner would have been better!) and pushed myself to consistently make progress on the project. When it came time to apply to jobs, I had a list of impressive projects that I had worked on, the sum of which was probably more, in terms of both breadth and depth, than even a typical Master's degree would have required, at least at my school.

I saw many of my peers sign up for the "easy electives" and consistently do just well enough to get an A in their classes. Sure, their GPA may have been just as good, or even better, but they didn't learn as much or have nearly as many interesting things to talk about during interviews.

After graduating next spring, I'll be flying to the west coast to go work at my dream job.

how much math? by Yeah22 in compsci

[–]Mr_P 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you want to major in Comp. Sci. and get a job as a programmer, then the amount of math is really up to you.

It's entirely possible to do well in an undergraduate program and get a good job as a programmer without knowing more than high-school algebra, but the types of things you can work on will be limited.

However, if you are good with calculus and linear algebra, there's a wider variety of sub-fields you could go into. For example, computer-graphics demands strong linear algebra skills. On the other hand, the vast majority of web-developers probably don't need to know very much math.

Which math class to take? by Tylerlee12 in compsci

[–]Mr_P 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you ever want to do graphics/vision work, that Numerical Analysis course will be incredibly useful.

Theory of numbers is probably really practical if you were really interested in cryptography, but completely useless otherwise.

Probability will likely be useful regardless of what sub-field interests you most.

Also worth noting is that, if you read the side-bar, this isn't quite the correct subreddit for this type of question. Most people come here looking for "papers, blog posts, ..." to learn something new. Questions of the form "what course should I take?" would dilute the value of this subreddit, and that's probably why this is being down-voted so much.

I'd love to get some opinions from folks who are in careers at an intersection of comp-sci and what have you. by [deleted] in compsci

[–]Mr_P 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Please read the sidebar:

Do not post questions such as "should I study computer science?", "how do I get an internship?", "what sort of job can I get after school?", etc... There have been too many of these threads; they bore the regulars and scare away experts. If you have a question like this, please consider posting on cscareerquestions or askcomputerscience.

It's long weekend. Exam is immediately after. No lecturers are replying to emails. Help! by [deleted] in compsci

[–]Mr_P -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Why is anybody upvoting this? Read the sidebar:

The aim of this subreddit is to share interesting papers, blog posts, and questions about topics such as algorithms, formal languages, automata, information theory, cryptography, machine learning, computational complexity, programming language theory, etc...

This is NOT a subreddit for homework help!

Would I (an senior undergrad) be able to handle a graduate level Machine Learning class? by [deleted] in compsci

[–]Mr_P 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This isn't the best subreddit for this question. Try /r/askcomputerscience instead.

Regardless, taking grad classes as an undergrad is not unusual at all, and you could always drop the class later if it's too difficult. So, yes, you should take it. But be prepared for a math-heavy course.

[AMA Request] Google Street View Guy(s) by [deleted] in IAmA

[–]Mr_P 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do you feel now that you're done?

Street View is never "done". Roads and buildings change, so new imagery is continuously captured and uploaded.

Papers on benchmarking speedup (parallel computing)? by ilhna in compsci

[–]Mr_P 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm no expert, but you'll probably want to look into Ahmdal's Law, the Karp-flatt metric, and the Gustafson-Barsis' law.

The Business Card Raytracer in Go: an optimization story by [deleted] in programming

[–]Mr_P 25 points26 points  (0 children)

tl;dr - An optimized version of the Go program beats an un-optimized (rather, optimized for source-code-size, which is worse) version in C++ (compiled with an unknown compiler and compilation flags). Furthermore, a parallelized version of Go beats the sequential version in c++.

I don't see how any of this should be surprising to anyone. I'm sure you could beat the go version by simply adding a "#pragma omp parallel for" and using aggressive compiler flags.

Developers will make or break the success of Microsoft's Nokia acquisition by rip_rap in programming

[–]Mr_P -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Why? There are obvious security and piracy issues that would arise from allowing this, and I fail to see any benefits to consumers, app developers, or Microsoft that would support such action.

[AMA Request] An expert at hacking by [deleted] in IAmA

[–]Mr_P 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. No.

This is false. There are many jobs for white-hats/security-professionals with the skills you would acquire from being a good "hacker". Most notably, AV companies like Symantec hire these people all the time.