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*barges into thread, panting, out of breath* Break ... Points! Have you heard of them!?
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Jul 18, 2019 18:48
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JawnV6 posted:in college i was part of a research group, a lowly undergrad working on glue verilog garbage, and in my first meeting one of the grad students said he was having issues nailing down a race condition on a 8 core simulator. "well what did you change?" "oh, just added a couple printfs!" Yeah, getting gaslit by printf debugging while doing MT projects in college was how I realized it was... not going to be good enough.
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Jul 18, 2019 18:58
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I don't have your fancy hardware bugs that involve oscilloscopes, but I do have bugs that happen exclusively on client systems once in a full moon that some CC representative agreed to raise as a high prio issue, and the GDPR nightmare it is that on some occasions we have to get a full copy of a client database, unscrambled... We're not dealing with medical records or anything like that, but it's still worrying enough.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:40
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The most I ever use a scope for is ”Line went high/low” and ”This bus looks like it's sending data.” I think I have only ever verified the data via a scope once. Then again, all of my low-level stuff is Linux kernel based.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:44
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Sounds like you might get more benefit from a logic analyzer instead of a scope
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Jul 18, 2019 19:49
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taqueso posted:Sounds like you might get more benefit from a logic analyzer instead of a scope Eh probably, but I already have the scope.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:51
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I'm a little late but this is my favorite take: Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:53
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Nude posted:I'm a little late but this is my favorite take: Real Programmers wrote in machine code. The odd line breaks made me read it like beatnik slam poetry. Try not to read this quote:Mel balked. Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfWIuymme50
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Jul 18, 2019 20:13
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Last time I used a scope was to track down some "flash chip responds with bad data on the first read after a system reboot" thing. Never root caused it, just issued a dummy read at start of day and threw away the data.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:16
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Ola posted:The odd line breaks made me read it like beatnik slam poetry. then they fulfilled their intended purpose
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Jul 18, 2019 20:31
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Fart huffing professors is what drove me out of CS in college. It was like, are we going to write any actual code, or are we gonna do math equations on the blackboard while stroking ourselves until we solve for Big-O? FFS.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:33
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Doc Hawkins posted:then they fulfilled their intended purpose When I started reading it I assumed it was poetry, but there wasn't much rhyme or rhythm to it so then I thought they are just odd line breaks, but it still works as poetry. Then it turns out it is poetry. Is this another one of Mel's loops? 
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Jul 18, 2019 20:37
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Ola posted:When I started reading it I assumed it was poetry, but there wasn't much rhyme or rhythm to it so then I thought they are just odd line breaks, but it still works as poetry. Then it turns out it is poetry. Is this another one of Mel's loops? Apparently it was originally written as prose but someone added the line breaks afterwards to make it into poetry.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:40
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Fart huffing professors is what drove me out of CS in college. It was like, are we going to write any actual code, or are we gonna do math equations on the blackboard while stroking ourselves until we solve for Big-O? FFS. I gravitated towards CS in college because it was by far the easiest for me of the science/engineering subjects for me. Being a math major or a physics major sounds like it would've been challenging. I wouldn't say it was that big a help professionally though once you got past the interview questions.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:42
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Ola posted:When I started reading it I assumed it was poetry, but there wasn't much rhyme or rhythm to it so then I thought they are just odd line breaks, but it still works as poetry. Then it turns out it is poetry. Is this another one of Mel's loops? Apparently it was edited, the original was in paragraphs. But I feel like I wouldn't of read it if not for the poetry format.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:43
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Knowing algorithmic complexity is helpful in selecting data structures and deciding if potential algorithms are feasible. I don't think knowing it in incredible detail is much help for day to day stuff, but it is useful to know something about it.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:47
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taqueso posted:Knowing algorithmic complexity is helpful in selecting data structures and deciding if potential algorithms are feasible. I don't think knowing it in incredible detail is much help for day to day stuff, but it is useful to know something about it. Oh absolutely. There is very little or hardly any bullshit theory taught in CS, but there certainly are bullshit ways of teaching theory.
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Jul 18, 2019 21:05
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Qwertycoatl posted:Apparently it was originally written as prose but someone added the line breaks afterwards to make it into poetry. As far as I know, it kept getting more mangled over time as it got FWD: FWD: FWD:ed. The current format is just what it looks like if you remove all the '> > >' line beginnings.
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Jul 18, 2019 22:02
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taqueso posted:Knowing algorithmic complexity is helpful in selecting data structures and deciding if potential algorithms are feasible. I don't think knowing it in incredible detail is much help for day to day stuff, but it is useful to know something about it. I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to really think beyond "some kind of binary tree, some kind of map, some kind of list, or some kind of sparse list"
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Jul 18, 2019 22:21
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Volmarias posted:I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to really think beyond "some kind of binary tree, some kind of map, some kind of list, or some kind of sparse list" Ah, javascript?
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Jul 18, 2019 22:24
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Volmarias posted:I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to really think beyond "some kind of binary tree, some kind of map, some kind of list, or some kind of sparse list" That list of data structures you gave (and how much work is done for their operations) is the bulk of what I was getting at.
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Jul 18, 2019 22:24
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Volmarias posted:I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to really think beyond "some kind of binary tree, some kind of map, some kind of list, or some kind of sparse list" This is the thing with mathematically provable stuff though. Working it out is hard, but using it is super easy once it's worked out. Every day, grandmothers all over the world are doing Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, radix sorts and balanced trees in the palm of their hand. The job of a university shouldn't be just to tell you the best one to pick and leave it at that, it should bring you up to a level where you understand how it works so you're competent enough to start a research project on a new algorithm of your own. But some professors pick up this ball and run too far with it, so students have to demonstrate their understanding of something by re-doing the academic work of the team that discovered it, instead of simply providing a well written reason for picking one algorithm over another. And yes, I'm still bitter.
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Jul 18, 2019 22:32
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Fart huffing professors is what drove me out of CS in college. It was like, are we going to write any actual code, or are we gonna do math equations on the blackboard while stroking ourselves until we solve for Big-O? FFS. Like I'd get a list operational semantics for some system they came up with, implement it, and then find out that there's really no good way to evaluate it on a real machine. I'd be like, "despite these strategies I tried, this is still hella slow because of ~how computer actually works~," and they'd always come back with: "well it only takes n reduction steps! So how could that be? I don't need to know all of this hardware stuff, just make it work!" Like, Ola posted:How many billions of IQ points are stuck in tweed, hopelessly currying and uncurrying pipes, but haven't read single page of the history of ideas of anything that would help them understand what job software does in modern society. Hint: it's not provable math.
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Jul 18, 2019 22:38
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Fart huffing professors is what drove me out of CS in college. It was like, are we going to write any actual code, or are we gonna do math equations on the blackboard while stroking ourselves until we solve for Big-O? FFS.
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Jul 18, 2019 23:07
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dougdrums posted:
At least it's operational semantics and not denotational. Of course, for implementability you want them big step, but people use small step for provability.... Edit: for those that don't know, kinds of formal semantics: Big-step operational: define language as a recursive interpreter Small-step operational: define language by doing incremental rewrites on AST Denotational: define language semantics as a function by using a boatload of fixed-point combinators to get things like loops and recursion and name references to work. Execution? This is math, who cares as long as you get a nice clean function? OddObserver fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jul 18, 2019 |
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Jul 18, 2019 23:26
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Volte posted:To be fair, that's what computer science is about. It sounds like you wanted to be in software engineering. Maybe that's the real problem. For most people in most parts of the world, those two are synonyms. And if there was some education program called software engineering available to me, it wouldn't have the same cachet in the job market. In Norway we have institutions that literally translate as "high schools" but are university level institutions that deal with vocational stuff, regulated degrees such as medical nurse or civil engineer. But their "computer engineer" syllabus is basically the same as the university degree I took, and their attitude to quality control is also the same. "Let professor Smartypants decide, and let said professor also reform the course based on the student feedback said professor also gets to review". It's a bit of a gap in education. We don't teach civil engineers mostly how to invent new concepts of bridge building, we teach them how to build bridges with the current state-of-the-art principles. And broken software can kill way more people than a broken bridge. Volte posted:I think I wrote code in less than a quarter of the courses in my entire CS education, and most of those were combined classes with the software engineering students. In the ones that weren't, we could generally pick whatever language we wanted, as long as we demonstrated the computational knowledge required. The only code I wrote during courses for my graduate studies was in Agda. Getting your software engineering experience elsewhere is pretty much required if you don't want CS education to rot your brain when it comes to practical programming. The above said, perhaps the best thing I learned at university was that when people ask me "oh a programmer, what language did you learn", I can reply with (somewhat fake) conviction, "it doesn't matter". dougdrums posted:
Thanks!
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Jul 18, 2019 23:26
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Ola posted:It's a bit of a gap in education. We don't teach civil engineers mostly how to invent new concepts of bridge building, we teach them how to build bridges with the current state-of-the-art principles. We do though? If you’re a civil engineer day 1 is not firing up an FEM analysis package, it’s learning static mechanics and materials and so on. And if you’re going for a civil engineering PhD then yeah you’re absolutely learning these things at that level.
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Jul 18, 2019 23:33
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Volte posted:To be fair, that's what computer science is about.
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Jul 18, 2019 23:52
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I dunno, I didn't get a CS or a software engineering degree but I feel like it's always been apparent to me that they were two different things. I still remember that I considered a CS degree and my advisor warned me that CS is all about math and theory and not about making cool software. I mean, your random person on the street doesn't know the difference, but I find it surprising that a person interested in either field wouldn't know about there being a difference or find it out very quickly.
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Jul 18, 2019 23:58
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dougdrums posted:Yeah I'd agree. It's worthwhile to push the envelope, even if it's not immediately useful or practical. Or ever practical for that matter. The good bits get picked up over time as they're found useful. But (some) professors acting like they'll be the next lord and savior jesus christ of the hordes of lowly software developer sinners gets grating. I guess this isn't unique to CS or academia for that matter, but it seems compounded by some existential fear that all their work is for naught, instead of being content with contributing to the aggregate.
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Jul 19, 2019 00:15
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Ola posted:Maybe that's the real problem. For most people in most parts of the world, those two are synonyms. And if there was some education program called software engineering available to me, it wouldn't have the same cachet in the job market. This is my big rant. You're assuming that many institutions of higher learning even OFFER a software engineering course, or one that's radically different from CS. quote:The above said, perhaps the best thing I learned at university was that when people ask me "oh a programmer, what language did you learn", I can reply with (somewhat fake) conviction, "it doesn't matter". 
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Jul 19, 2019 00:17
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Ola posted:Maybe that's the real problem. For most people in most parts of the world, those two are synonyms. Those are extremely different things and it's mostly Americans who conflate the two, leading to confusion for everybody else, because they don't have a protected title for software engineers. (Disclaimer that I think that protected titles are dumb.) Computer science is about theory and software engineering is about practice. Sort of like every other scientific vs. engineering discipline. A computer science course will teach O(n) like a physics course will teach e=mc2; engineering is where you'd learn about building apps or bridges or whatever. xtal fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 00:21
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The only difference between SE and CS where I went is that SE curriculum had less electives. So I went with CS because I wanted to choose what courses I took.
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Jul 19, 2019 00:36
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US schools are slowly coming around to the idea that CS and SE should be different programs, but I think it'll still be another decade or so before there's consensus, and after that it's still going to take a while to switch programs.
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Jul 19, 2019 00:41
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xtal posted:Those are extremely different things and it's mostly Americans who conflate the two, leading to confusion for everybody else, because they don't have a protected title for software engineers. (Disclaimer that I think that protected titles are dumb.) Reminder that academia moves at a snail's pace and Computers is a relatively new field in STEM, so they're much more likely to keep broadening the one course and letting you specialize in more "engineering" or "science" oriented disciplines, than split it in distinct courses. After all Computers started as a specialization of Electronics.
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Jul 19, 2019 00:41
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Qwertycoatl posted:Apparently it was originally written as prose but someone added the line breaks afterwards to make it into poetry. nooooo 
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Jul 19, 2019 00:42
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Ola posted:The above said, perhaps the best thing I learned at university was that when people ask me "oh a programmer, what language did you learn", I can reply with (somewhat fake) conviction, "it doesn't matter". The correct answer is always, "Whatever they'll pay me to learn." Or, to be precise, "Whatever looks like getting me the next job."
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Jul 19, 2019 00:54
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Phobeste posted:We do though? If you’re a civil engineer day 1 is not firing up an FEM analysis package, it’s learning static mechanics and materials and so on. And if you’re going for a civil engineering PhD then yeah you’re absolutely learning these things at that level. Yeah ok, I picked some topic off the top of my head that I thought would support my argument. But perhaps it does in some way. Isambard Kingdom Brunel didn't have any FEM analysis package and rail bridge students don't spend much time re-doing his work. My point was that CS professors get stuck in the past invention of ideas and shun the practical way of using the ideas, but just like them I struggle with finding a good way to communicate. "Professor" is supposedly a synonym for "teacher" in most western higher education institutions, but most professors sadly think that teaching is the tax they have to pay in order to fund their ridiculous pet project, so they spend zero effort getting good at it. Not all, some are great. xtal posted:Those are extremely different things and it's mostly Americans who conflate the two, leading to confusion for everybody else, because they don't have a protected title for software engineers. (Disclaimer that I think that protected titles are dumb.) In Norway we have protected titles for "traditional" engineers but not computers. I.e. you can get a computer engineer grade from a computer engineer grade school, but the job you apply to will not necessarily require an engineer school degree. But it's not necessarily trivial to say where CS theory ends and software engineer practice begins, nor is the aging idea of a big difference between theory and application keeping up with reality. There is no difference between bridge building theory and bridge building practice today, yet super high standards are applied to building bridges. Why? Because bridge building has reached a zenith and humanity is really good at it. So I don't think protecting the titles matters that much, it's all in the quality of teaching the institutions choose to adopt.
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Jul 19, 2019 01:08
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A software engineering program that never covers asymptotic complexity is just pushing a bullshit credential.
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Jul 19, 2019 01:46
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Ola posted:"Professor" is supposedly a synonym for "teacher" in most western higher education institutions, but most professors sadly think that teaching is the tax they have to pay in order to fund their ridiculous pet project, so they spend zero effort getting good at it. This is a fairly common misconception but it's very wrong. In theory, a professor's job duties are roughly 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. In practice, this varies considerably by university. In a major research university, grants (i.e., money for research) are a very large part of the university's income, so someone who's bringing in that money can get away with a lot, and someone who isn't will be shown the door in short order. At least in the US, there are institutions where teaching is much more important, but even the professors there are expected to contribute to their academic field. ultrafilter fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 02:14
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