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To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.18 -
Never realized with a industry that changes by the second how relevant and timeless a single book(set) can remain. 52 year old book.
The work that knuth put into this collection to keep it timeless and language in-specific keeping it to theory rather than details of syntactical details is amazing.
Sure there are other timeless classics out there.. the algorithm book, K&R C, the dragon books, the wizard book.
But I think this single book outweighs them all in the abstraction point of view... AND it’s abstraction in the “opposite direction”... abstraction to a machine language architecture that is purely theoretical... brilliant.
21 -
Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.
What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.
Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.
Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.
So far the theory.
In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.
They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.
configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))
You might immediately guess what has happened here.
DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.
Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.
Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.
But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....
Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....
What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.
This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.
So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.
At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).
It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...
So much joy for such a stupid thing.18 -
Rant
So a couple months ago, my dad called me to try and solve a problem he was having in his work.
You see, my dad owns a driving school and he was teaching 14 and 15yo kids how to ride mopeds and their theory exams are made in the school's facility, by going to this website of the entity that rules the moped teaching thing. When the time to have the exams came, they couldn't even see the exams and one of the kids had one of his attempts wasted (they had 3 attempts). We mailed and called the entity multiple times, to no avail, as they told us to "check the website, the instructions are all there". They were also trying to get it together but they couldn't. Here's the "funny" part: the software in which the exams were done ran on XP and there was no way in hell we could make it work on our W10 PCs. Not to mention this is a natiowide problem.
We reinstalled Java to v.7.9 (I think...?) as the "instructions" told us, with no results whatsoever.
So my dad decided to call me and asked me to bring a PC that didn't run W10. The closest thing to XP I could think of was my uncle's Toshiba, that had Vista, so I went to his house and grabbed it and drove to my dad's school. Even in compatibility mode, it didn't work. Everyone was in despair LoL. I was even put on the phone with the entity's technician, who didn't know how to solve it either but was trying, as well with our tech guy.
After a bit of running around and crying inside, our secretary remembered we still had a tower on site that ran XP. We went for the thing and connected it and booted it up. After reinstalling Java and setting security to "medium" (required), and meddling with zoom (the window was too small to show the whole exam and if the window showed up before we set the zoom to 75% or so we couldn't choose the answers) it was finally set to do the exams.
I've never felt so relieved for solving tech stuff LoL. It took me 3h to get it done and I feel it would have been easier if we had remembered about the tower earlier but oh well what can one do.8 -
Oh boy, finally something to rant about.
I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.
First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.
Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.
Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.
When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.
In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.
The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?6 -
This whole Microsoft & GitHub thing is how it begins:
1) Embrace
oh it's really cool, Microsoft is adding some cool features we've been missing for a while, GitHub is still great
2) Extend
Alright, there's this new `msgit` that has some really cool features for rebasing and merge conflicts, I won't need to worry about fucking up my git history
3) Extinguish
`msgit` is not compatible with `git` and GitHub requires us to use it, but what can we do, all our code and build triggers are set up..
They are doing the same thing to JavaScript with TypeScript and stopped the development of the Internet for ~10 years...
I don't want to paint dark clouds, but I heard this theory at work and it makes sense that Ms would take it in a direction where people are locked in to their ecosystem. It won't happen immediately, but all signs point to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...2 -
Taken partly from an article I just read.
Russels paradox is a problem discovered by Bertrand Russel in 1901 when studying set theory.
He describes a set that contains all sets which do not contain themselves. The set of all pornstars does not contain itself for example, so it can be include in Russel's set, as well as many others.
But what about Russel's set itself? It doesnt contain itself so shouldnt it be included as well? But that would mean it DOES include itself which means it DOESNT belong to the set. And it would keep switching like this, monotonically, forever. Hence the paradox.
If it is monotonic then where we begin in the sequence doesnt matter. So lets do away with that bugbear.
Now if russels set IS the set of all sets that dont contain themselves then we get a paradox.
However if russels set merely *has* as a single subset, all sets that dont contain themselves, then shouldnt russel's set with one level of indirection, contain itself?
15 -
*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.
While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.
Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.
So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.9 -
So I'm on my morning stroll. Walking, enjoying, watching the world around me.. It's nice how cherries blossom. They smell very tempting to stop there and enjoy the moment. Some flowers under the cherry...
Why do plants blossom again? Oh yeah, that's right, to exchange some speciments in order to grow fruit and seeds. To have their offspring. Just like every other living macroorganism [with a few exceptions ofc]. Life has no other way to survive but to exchange genetic material between two parties and only then trigger growth of the new life.
And that is a very strict rule. No more, no less: it takes exactly 2 organisms to make new life. But why is that? If my memory serves, theory of evolution says that life is like business: cut the losses and let the profits run. Over time it discards everything not required for the organism in order to save energy, and only successful new "investments" remain in the genome. The unsuccessful ones die before they proliferate, so the bad genes shall not survive.
It also says that very simple things, very simple changes lead to very complex outcomes. Us. Life.
But what is simple about life having to need 2 other lives? Exactly 2. It's either simple or efficient, depends on perspective. BUT IT IS NOT BOTH. Look at cells. They just split in half and multiply. Dead simple. It takes one of them to make another one. But with mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and other macroorganisms [excpt fungi] this is not the case! Why?!? I can't think of any scenario where two generic microorganisms, following some dead simple mutations, would come up w/ something that inefficient and overly complex. Like they're living on their own, multiplying by division, and smth very simple happens and they can no longer divide, only mate in pairs. The primitive, efficient and simple mechanism gets terminated and replaced with a different one, incredibly complex one!
Sure, we have protozoa which have similar reproductive mechanisms. They exchange genetic material to multiply.
But look at our, human cells. They dont need that! Look at some reptiles, some plants that only take one to make another. They don't pair as well! It's simple. Efficient. Why do protozoa need 2 for the species to survive?
It's not simple and efficient [tho helps us adapt, but its not my point for now]. See, things like this make ne wonder. What if we, the life, are not as accidental as we think? What if this whole mechanism was set off by someone or something billions of years ago? That's mean there are much older, much more superior cognitive organisms than us. What if protozoa was version 3 of new life [the first two did not survive]? Viruses - v2? Sea creatures - v3, reptiles - v4, and so on until they came up with us, mammals? That'd surely mean we are not alone in this universe. Are they watching us? Will they create a new species any time soon? What's our purpose, are we just an experiment?
And so, from cherry blossoms to existensial dilemma, my stroll is over. Time for breakfast :)1 -
Maybe I'm severely misunderstanding set theory. Hear me out though.
Let f equal the set of all fibonacci numbers, and p equal the set of all primes.
If the density of primes is a function of the number of *multiples* of all primes under n,
then the *number of primes* or density should shrink as n increases, at an ever increasing rate
greater than the density of the number of fibonacci numbers below n.
That means as n grows, the relative density of f to p should grow as well.
At sufficiently large n, the density of p is zero (prime number theorem), not just absolutely, but relative to f as well. The density of f is therefore an upper limit of the density of p.
And the density of p given some sufficiently large n, is therefore also a lower limit on the density of f.
And that therefore the density of p must also be the upper limit on the density of the subset of primes that are Fibonacci numbers.
WHICH MEANS at sufficiently large values of n, there are either NO Fibonacci primes (the functions diverge), and therefore the set of Fibonacci primes is *finite*, OR the density of primes given n in the prime number theorem
*never* truly reaches zero, meaning the primes are in fact infinite.
Proving the Fibonacci primes are infinite, therefore would prove that the prime number line ends (fat chance). While proving the primes are infinite, proves the Fibonacci primes are finite in quantity.
And because the number of primes has been proven time and again to be infinite, as far back as 300BC,the Fibonacci primes MUST be finite.
QED.
If I've made a mistake, I'd like to know.11 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
Avoided IoT(IoS - InternetOfShit) for a long time now, due to the security concerns with retail products.
Now I looked into 433 Transceiver + Arduino solutions.. to build something myself, just for the lolz.
Theory:
Smallest Arduino I found has 32 KByte of programmable memory, a tiny tiny crypto library could take around 4 KBytes...
Set a symetric crypto key for each homebrewn device / sensor / etc, send the info and commands (with time of day as salt for example) encrypted between Server <-> IoT gadget, ciphertext would have checksum appended, magic and ciphertext length prepended.
Result:
Be safe from possible drive-by attacks, still have a somewhat reliable communication?!
Ofc passionate hackers would be still able to crack it, no doubt.
Question: Am I thinking too simple? Am I describing just the standard here?14 -
Fun story
tl;dr; analog FTW!
so we've just had a nice game. A few teams internationally gathered together in the aws gameDay. We had aws accounts set up [one per team] and our goal was to maintain our t2.Micros to deal with incoming load. The higher the latency - the less points we get, the more 5xx - the more points we lose. The more infra we have, the more points we pay for it.
So we are quite new in aws, most of us know aws only in theory. And that's the best part!
So at first we had some steady, mild load incoming. But then bursts came up and we went offline. It's obvious we needed an lb w/ autoscaling. Lb was allright, we did set it up and got back online. We also created an autoscaling group and set it up.
Now what we couldn't figure out is how the f* do we make that group scale automatically, as a response to traffic! So we did what every sane person would do - we monitored LB's stats and changed autoscaling group's config manually 😁
needless to say we won the game w/ 23k points. 2nd place had 9k.
That was fun!3 -
Me: "tokens are not mined in general, instead there are gas fees"
Them: "you will charge us for gas fees?"
Me: "no that's not us, that's the decentralized network doing that"
Them: "but we are using hyperledger to generate tokens."
Me: "yea in theory there are no gas fees, but you now have to manage the decentralized network"
Them: "i see, so since there is only probably 2 or 4 in the network, do we still charge ourselves? how do we define gas fees?"
(You don't see...)
Me: "i don't think there are gas fees"
Them: "got it, who set the gas fees"
(Um you don't got it...)
Me: "https://stackoverflow.com/questions..." -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.
1 -
That the equivalence of sets isn't a relation is the dumbest aspect of mathematics I've encountered so far.
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