Dilpil

Whenever you claim no algorithm can do something that a human can, you must ask yourself: what does the computer lack that a human might posses?

In this case, there are indeed machine learning algorithms that can do this task.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5533...

A very similar, much longer exploration of the problems with high school (and, honestly, most undergraduate) math education: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

The real estate is part of the business. A large part of the value of the business comes from customers knowing that those businesses were where they were. By stealing the land, Columbia is stealing the business as well.

I think most AIDS patients would gladly take that 10% chance.

From what I understand, no one at Google is making under market rates. Most likely they could get away with that, but from the salary information posted it seems they pay what most companies trying to hire good software developers pay.

The real trick is finding a company and industry where it always makes sense to go deep.

Might I add: on uninteresting problems under terrible working conditions.

Took and passed the two hardest math and CS courses offered at my university: advanced calculus and algorithms.

Learned OpenGL.

Placed highly in the regional ACM coding competition.

Landed exactly the job I wanted out of college.

Most importantly, started a relationship with the most amazing female hacker I've ever met.

Your not the only that does that, I think most people who tinker with computers professionally do that.

Its kind of funny: computer programmers browse the internet the way an operating system does IO.

It is the opposite.

Interviewers are coming to realize credentials, be they Microsoft certs or computer science degrees, are not great indicators of software engineering aptitude.

The more you believe in the accuracy of credentials, the less you would want to ask coding questions in an interview. Better to simply examine resumes for the appropriate certifications and then ask fit questions.

If on the other hand, you believe nothing but on the spot coding demonstrations can prove a candidates abilities, you would do exactly what these interviewers are doing. Perhaps these tests are not the optimal tests, but they sure beat credentialism.

This is humor understandable only by programmers, specifically, programmers who have some understanding of Haskell- I would hardly call that thought free humor.

Wow, this has an utterly horrible interface. The way it bobs up and down as a I scroll is quite appalling. I'd rather have frames than this.

In many cases people simply don't understand or think about what data is collected and out there. One of my friends at work was shocked when I informed him that our IT department might theoretically be able to check what websites we visited, and probably does. This friend was a software engineer.

It seems that if lowering your "production values" makes your product more appealing to consumers, you were using the wrong production values to begin with.

One mistake many recent college graduates make is looking for openings in the wrong places. Its understandable- no one ever tells you how to get an entry level job.

To clarify, craigslist and monster.com are absolutely the wrong places for entry level job seeking. From what I hear, they kind of suck for any job seeking.

The best place is a company's website. Quite a few company's have a "students" or "new graduates" sub-section in their careers section. This is how I ended up at my job.

Networking and on campus recruiting are nice too, but they aren't always an option.

Is working on embedded systems really this fun? I might have to change careers...

Hiring 4 people at the same time to work on the same project is a questionable idea- 40 is just absurd. I hope we eventually hear about the aftermath of this.

What about Neuroscience or Materials Science?

Call me cynical, but it perhaps the equity owners want to cash out before the company kills itself with subscription services.

The real question is, at what price would you buy their stock. Surely if it was $.01 for 1% of facebook we would all buy.

Is there a place we can get financial data for facebook?

Its not that developers want to deal with central marketing and distribution. They don't. But customers do.

On the topic of the Flash Crash:

Arguing that HFT is bad because people sometimes stop doing it abruptly kind of suggests that HFT is good when people are doing it.

Certain trades are obvious winners- index funds available for less than the sum of their component parts for example. Everyone on the street knows they are obvious winners, so usually the trade isn't available for long. Firms have computers set up to constantly scan the markets for these opportunities. Whoever sees the trade first and gets to the exchange first ends up making all the money.

The engineering courses I've taken have actually been pretty crucial at my current gig. If I had majored in liberal arts, I'm not sure where I would learn them.

Mentally accept that bugs with your code are your fault. You'll end up fixing them faster.

"In-game tutorials are both hugely important and difficult to pull off, and today's game-designers have gotten pretty clever about putting them together."

Disagree heavily. Many of the most complicated games from the past had no tutorials, but people were still able to figure them out. Figuring out was part of the fun in fact. Most people I know simply ignore tutorials.

And I can't blame them, because developers tend to be horrible at putting tutorials together. Most tutorials today start with the most basic things imaginable- moving your character and moving the camera. These things don't change from game to game. Only a very small number of modern games have tutorials worth playing.

It's a pretty interesting story to put on a resume or cover letter- I'd imagine he will at least be able to get some interviews.

Keep a spreadsheet of everything you eat. Include the total calories. Pick a max calories per day. This will make you start to think in terms of good taste per calorie- "that snickers bar looks nice, but I'd rather have an entire meal".

Hard to say, depends on many factors:

Am I writing new code, or adding to old code? If I am adding to old code, is it my code which I already understand fully, or someone else's code which I have never seen before? Is it a 10 file project, or a 10 project solution?

Is the task clearly defined? Am I trying to satisfy a previously written set of unit tests or am I incrementally changing my impression of what the final product should be as I am writing the code?

Do I already know everything I need to know to write the code? Do I have to track people down to get explanations of how other system components work?

How delicate and mission critical is the code, and how careful do I have to be? Is what I am writing going to be interacting with a production environment where failure means hundred thousand dollar losses, or do I want to analyze some data files on my machine?

How easy to debug is the type of program I am writing? Are we talking about an application where I can step through the code locally and see the null pointer errors for myself, or are we talking about something that involves hard to trace floating point math and linear algebra?

And of course, how complex is the actual coding? Are we talking about parsing a few log files and throwing them in a database, or are we talking about a custom file system using never before implemented data compression and retrieval techniques?

Somethingawful has 100s of forums, all with wildly different rules. Some have virtually no rules, and are of course filled with trolls.

But of the forums meant for serious discussion, there is far less trolling than anywhere else on the internet. Not that many people are willing to pay $10 per troll comment- though they ban people very regularly.