brooksbp

Thanks. Fixed.

Profile doesn't show what school you're from...

feedback?

cliche... torvald totally would take a pill to boost metabolism...

Yep. Sorry for the late reply. I don't believe the two original authors are still here at CU. Though, you may contact Michael Main or Andrzej Ehrenfeucht with any concerns. They both have been around a while and are closest to theoretical CS.

It's a great read. Enjoy.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~main/theory.pdf

Facultly contact info can be found here: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/people/faculty/bytitle.html

This is awesome. My Theory of Computation professor put his 150+ pg book online for free. Great stuff... go academia!

Great point. Did not consider the competitiveness aspect. There are ~50 students majoring in CS in my graduating class, ~40 class below, <30 below that...

dear god, our field is already challenging enough, though we could use some competition amongst us in corporate! :P

So true. I can relate pretty close, doing an internship and seeing these exact traits.

bliss: http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/1683/picture1te5.png

I wrote a prototype in Perl ~300 lines within a few days. The C implementation is just taking forever and involving too much pure software engineering overhead that I can't stand. It's driving me away. I can't get motivated. Too boring, too simple.

It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack (extremely boring task that will take a while without proper tools)... but every time I start looking, I start wondering how I would construct the barn differently, or how the stack of hay came to be, if it could be organized to find the needle more efficiently, or who owns the barn and what they plan on doing with the barn and the needle and the hay... etc...

you see?

EDIT:

The only really thing I've been trying to do that will keep me focused is trying to learn C better. Writing more elegant code, reading books like "Expert C Programming", etc... but at times, I feel like this might be counter productive because it's not really helping me get work done, it's just helping me understand the code and refactor it in a better form. It doesn't necessarily boost my short-term productivity, but good for knowledge of C and long-term benefits.

I am a language-junkie though, and still relatively young in academia world. I feel as though if I'm not reading papers published on SIGPLAN, reading RSS (reddit, news.yc), doing school-related work, doing research, talking to professors, etc... then I'm not that excited.

Maybe software engineering isn't for me? Or is this project/company just too PHB-like and traditional? Thoughts? experiences?

Thanks for the feedback because I've been wondering this for a while and always doubting myself, but I love CS... just would like to hear what other people have to say about this.

I agree with this point of view, but I think it could be taken the wrong way and I don't think that it should apply to all wannabe entrepreneurs. There's a fine line between a good product or driving force of a startup, and just creating shit because someone gave you a little kick in the ass...

This basically marks the transition from software engineering transforming into hardware engineering. No longer is it about sequential algorithms, it's not about linearity. It's about destroying sequential algorithms; breaking down large sequential algorithms into smaller algorithms manipulating the same data at the same time. This requires a great amount of brain power and essentially helps us understand algorithms in greater detail, and make them run faster, but in no way would I agree that it helps software functionality.

EDIT: It provides more power to the programmer. Power that is useless for a programmer that wants to develop functional software. This is why new languages and more CS/EE research will be involved. More power == more levels of abstraction. It depends on the level of abstraction that you're working with to decide whether you're going to benefit from performance or expressiveness (code expressiveness, which I like to directly correlate to software functionality independent of code performance).

I love shitting my brains out on this type of stuff; Could be right, could be wrong. All I know is that the future is undef... and I enjoy it...

Can't stand crap like this. People who reinvent the wheel (poorly), or try to, make the world a worse place... something related to 'visualization' -- psychological stuff. People who fail to visualize and truely, intimately understand things will often invent breakthrough technology as JavaScript 'sockets.'

Sad, but true. It's horrible coming in as a naive freshman and figuring out that you've exhausted most profs, funding, opportunities, etc... within a field that your university isn't familiar with

True. The author does not draw the line between using getters/setters and other methods to access data. I guess this is the motivation for ideas such as "leaky abstractions."

The only reason why they're a fashion statement is because they were born into a fashion-aware community. Check out my comment about the Boulder Country Club above.

Other than that, yes they are extremely light and comfortable...

I worked at the Boulder Country Club, where most of the cofounders of Crocs were members. Those shoes blew up at the club; before I knew it, I was receiving all sorts of pairs in different colors as 'bonuses' or gifts from the members.

It not only takes smart business operations as detailed in that article, but a strong community. Crocs birthed in a community full of power and wealth, and that helped a great deal. Hell, Michael Jordan received a few pairs of Crocs when he came to the club for a golf tournament...

+1 for the awesome comment

EDIT: Misleading title--nothing to do with neurons or 'unreality'...

1) Hacker News, Google Reader, Lambda the Ultimate

2) Computer books, Steve Yegge, Paul Graham, Knuth

3) Digg, Google Reader, Facebook

4) Google, Official Docs/Specs (for projects/languages), irc.freenode.net

Nope, not at all. The reason why I am slightly offended is that people are treating "virtual interviews" with the same seriousness as traditional, face-to-face interviews. There will be no substitute for real human, spoken, face-to-face interviews; more to take out of a person like body language and emotion. Human collaboration within a close environment is crucial to most aspects of business and production. It is nothing more than silly for an individual to feel accomplishment from a job interview via SecondLife; feeling successful, bypassing face-to-face interaction. Though, I feel this position might seem too harsh.

To be completely honest... that lost a ton of integrity as soon as I read "I showed up at the Amazon.com’s booth, with my well-dressed and custom-skinned avatar which, as a bonus, has my same name, Simone Brunozzi (don’t ask me how I got it because it’s a secret)."

Cmon now... what is this virtual ^&*#$@! coming to? Really Amazon.com? Really??

Edit: Not only that... but look at the view from his office... I'm practically speachless at how BS not only that job position and article, but Amazon.com's participation and movement in that direction is...

Been using SCP... it's a great tool for copying files between machines... but it's a shitty tool for prod deployment... capistrano ftw!

This is great from a beginner's stand-point, but might seem to realize that all web frameworks are basically code generators with a bunch of glue. Which, for 90% of the useless crap out there on the internet, is fine.

+1 Obviously haven't read much Yegge when making statements like that. Ontop of the above defense, there's a video on Youtube...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1QD9XQm_Jd4

emacs (...or vi... sigh). hands down.

Generally, it is. Just wording / thinking of it the wrong way.

New languages and tools arise because of need. Therefore, if you feel forced or uncomfortable with your current tools & languages, use different ones.

People who feel forced and don't understand the particular programming model of Erlang shouldn't be using it. That simple. Google App Engine... that's another story...

You simply cannot argue that caching doesn't work if the data is different for everyone. I understand that. It's aggregation. But the metadata lives within a database and it is imperative for that to be glossed over with a RAM based cache.

I really hope my initial post wasn't interpreted the way it was to validate that response. I don't take back anything I said--and I'm sure it's not what I want to hear. Architectures scale, not languages... Twitter simply cannot be distributed... it's not news, I've written about it earlier.

Database scaling isn't their problem. Sure they push lots of data around, but great programmers should be able to architect an optimal caching layer between the app and the database.

So now that metadata caching is out of scope here, we turn to frameworks, architectures, and application design. The issue Twitter has is in aggregation of their meta data. People who propose a distributed solution for Twitter obviously miss the inherent nature of Twitter; it's a centralized system. Twitter should remain as it is, but ditch RoR and become more modularized. This is where they start developing real systems; the type of systems they talk about in those mundane CS classes, like programming in C -- that stuff. Modularize the applicaion, develop systems that scream for aggregation, cache the hell out of everything, and start applying some computer science.

Twitter was born as one of those next-gen Web 2.0 "keep track of your friends" hip Ruby on Rails insertbuzzwordhere application. Now it poses actual architectural challenges. It's so similar to the evolution of Facebook. Just take a step back and look at it.

RoR is an architecture. Kind of ironic because I claim that Ruby, as a language, has better support for scaling in the networking/dist.systems view than PHP. Yet, I would like to claim that PHP scales better than RoR in the web app domain. Though, it takes deep knowledge of RoR internals to make a correct judgement; which, very few have.