enjalot

I like this quote by Isaac Newton

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Sums up the futility and the selfish enjoyment of a life of intellectual pursuit for me.

Here's a useless oneliner: The American Dream is now the American Nightmare :)

I'm sure a bucket full of your source code on bitbucket will serve the same purpose when interviewing. I'm on the job hunt and in interviewing with some YC startups we haven't really gotten to my github, since they more were interested in some of the closed-source projects I've done at other jobs. I think the overall point of the article is to be able to show people you can code rather than just list it as a bullet point in a document.

I've submitted a blog post which extends on my thoughts here. I hope it serves as a call to action that we can actually participate in while we don't have legal teams or large coffers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746190

I know this feeling intimately, having tried a little consulting and having a serious ethical bend towards the truth.

The fact is, the better I get at programming (and math and science) the more I know I don't know, and the less confident I am about any given problem. The thing I make myself remember though, is that I'm damn good at solving problems. I may not have implemented this algorithm yet, or used this technology stack or programming language, but rest assured in a couple hours I will know what I should look out for and how I should proceed.

When I speak with the confidence in my ability to learn, something I have proven to myself, I no longer feel like I am faking or deluding some innocent luddite. I am giving comfort to somebody who needs my problem solving skills.

At least, that's how I justify it :)

I'm with you on this, I'm personally outraged by the situation, and the analogy to mob protection rackets is way too accurate for comfort.

The analogy has me thinking about how real mob protection rackets are dealt with (well, at least in the movies). The individual small business owner can't directly fight back, they have ties to the community that they have a real chance of losing, just like a software house that want's to be able to operate in the U.S. can't just up and leave or afford to fight back. The consequence is a legal equivalent of having your shop burned down. The only real power that can fight this kind of collusive power is that of public opinion. Other commenters have already mentioned this, but we cannot dismiss it because Google is an unsympathetic giant, we have to do something because you and I are the ones in real danger.

We don't have pi billion dollars to hire lawyers or bid on patent bundles, but we are the small guys, the rags to riches, the huslters, the american dream. Software patents are a lie invented by old people to stomp out innovation and maintain the status quo. If anyone can make software patents sound bad and get sympathy it's going to be us. We need to find a way to make these issues matter to people, to put it in their minds and tug on their heartstrings.

I don't know how to do it as an activist, but I bet we could do it as story tellers, as bloggers and media producers. We are the generation building the products and services of tomorrow, we know how things should work and what we want things to look like. In my opinion, we need to produce some pop culture. I've watched a lot of crime drama's, what's to stop us from making a biz drama with the same human impact but set in the context of the information age rather than NY city streets.

Even Google can't fight on their field, what chance do we have going head-on against money and greed. Our best hope is to use the most powerful weapon we have, public opinion.

Don't forget that a particular code might have 2 or 3 paper's worth in it, so releasing the code after 1 paper could mean getting "scooped" on another paper.

I'm left a little cynical after a Master's in computational science, and I still can't believe that open code is not part of the repeatability doctrine. I suppose my goals are not aligned with most grad students since I have no interest in an academic career (at least not after many years in industry) but I got much more satisfaction from feedback on my blog posts than publication.

Hell, each blog post is its own little publication, and it may not be peer reviewed before its published, but the amount of links to them and google searches prove that I have more than a few peers who appreciate my contributions.

I grew up interested in computer games, and I was lucky enough to TA a game design class at my university. I love the ability to create interactions, but my interest has recently turned to designing interactions into things that aren't normally interactive. I had a lot of fun making an interactive data visualization at a recent hackathon, and I'm hoping to do more things like that.

I personally think games and science need to get much closer together, interactive learning is so powerful, and video games can make anything fun. It's definitely something to explore, but there is still a huge divide between science and entertainment and the understanding of the people in each field.

I'm finishing up a degree in Computational Science where we are essentially trained in computational and mathematical techniques used in the physical sciences, and all I can think about is becoming an artist.

I don't think it's the science that adds value, I think it's the programming. The thing is, programming allows you to automate, simulate, measure and visualize complex processes. Science is all about complex processes, so if you have more powerful tools available to understand them, you will be much more valuable. Add to that, many of the physical sciences are hitting limits of physical experimentation and require simulations for further understanding.

I don't think the power of programming has truly shown itself, it should revolutionize every industry. It brings with it a different attitude towards solving problems and opens up new realms of possibilities. Social sciences are finally starting to look like real science thanks to big data and we have new knowledge industries. I'm personally most interested in how much art and education will change thanks to new powers of interactivity.

My point was actually that I fear any corrupt person having access to the kind of data that FB or Google have. If I am that person's target, for any reason (political dissent, competition, just cuz) I am way more screwed. It doesn't have to be a company or a government, it can be a criminal organization or just a crazy individual.

I don't think I was being disingenuous, my point is about how dangerous and powerful the data these companies have is. They probably have more ability to identify and locate an individual than any of the 3 letter agencies. My other point was that the article has a serious xenophobic agenda, something that probably increases readership but is bad for the world.

A lot of xenophobia in this article. The amount of data Facebook, Google and others are collecting on us is worrying when we think of what might happen if it gets into the "wrong" hands. Right now thoughts of China buying Facebook illicit this image easily in our western minds, but we should recognize this feeling as an admission that we don't really feel safe giving so much control to these companies.

I haven't taken many active steps not to depend on them, but it's troubling whenever I think about what happens if a bad apple gets in the bunch. If I were to become a target of someone with access to Google or Facebook level data, there would be nowhere to run.

I don't foresee becoming a target in the near future, so I haven't done much to 'liberate' myself or switch to open solutions. For now the services provided give me many more benefits than worries. I just wanted to point out that this article is playing on xenophobic fears and we should be careful of doublespeak.

I don't think this is what you are looking for, but when you said poetry it came to mind http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M1SJtT_...

(the original seems to be down)

I also use Facebook for personal and Twitter for work/code. I try to spill over a little of each so that my friends can see my work and my peers can see I'm a human. My blog has a mix of technical and personal, but lately it's mostly technical.

I think the author has a point, but I think it should be up to the user to be able to "subscribe" to different identities rather than having to choose which one you will post under. I think stuff like tags and categories will help with this. Until then, I'll just keep making noise, I think if it's signal to someone, it's worth it.

Coming from a smaller city in Florida I was surprised at how many cash-only restaurants there are in Berkeley, I mean, it's the Bay!

Granted, Berkeley seems to have its own notion of what it's culture should be and people don't seem to mind paying cash only. I think it's important to realize that you are projecting your own expectations onto other people's products, and in their minds they are perfectly happy losing your business so that they can focus on cultivating the kind of customer base they want.

Take Starbucks as an example of the opposite extreme, they take credit cards, drive thru, have uncomfortable chairs and loud music to discourage seating all in the effort to move as much coffee as possible. Starbucks does pretty well, but it's probably in this guys best interest not to try and copy Starbucks.

I agree with your statements, but perhaps the appeal of a github for science isn't the technology, it's the culture that comes with it. You can run your own git servers and submit patches over email, but when you can fork with the click of a button and do a pull request with another click, it encourages that much more sharing.

I've had this discussion with some of my professors, mostly just about open sourcing research code (I'm in Scientific Computing) and some of them wont do it because they want to squeeze a few publications out of one code and don't want anyone 'stealing' their publication. I find it disturbing, but it's ingrained in the culture. Changing it is important to me, but I don't see how yet.

click on 'filter listings' in the bottom left. uncheck "Show Full Leases" and all you are left with is sublets.

I'm looking to stay in Berkeley from mid May to August so I've been browsing padmapper and this made the searches much more efficient.

OpenCL

I'm almost certain this is why I failed my phone interview. It wasn't that I implemented an inefficient sort right away, its that I didn't talk about how/why it was and what I could do about it with more time.

I really don't like the idea of solving contrived puzzles, but I'll never make the mistake of keeping my thought process hidden again.

"mo money mo problems my ass, you'se a naive cat if you still believe that, thats just some shit they tell you to keep you where you at" -ODB

Same here, they gave me a free student account so I have the private repo I need now, but rest assured it wont be long before I start paying them!

dll inject all the other programs?

rootkit and write your own display driver?

I came here to say this. Not just graphics, but indexing arrays in general on the GPU for use in OpenCL or CUDA. We are working on optimizing our neighbor searches using this.

A good book: Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures by Hanan Samet 2006

A good paper: Interactive SPH Simulation and Rendering on the GPU by Goswami

I tried 3 pictures and it only seemed to scan the top 1/8th as well before it gives up.

Chromium on Ubuntu

While I don't hold your personal philosophy, after reading several of your posts I can see where you come from. I'm inclined to be an OSS zealot but you know what they say, give an inch and they'll want a mile!

It does make me want to rant about scientists who hold this philosophy though...

I know a professor or two who do the same thing and it bothers me to no end. It stands directly against scientific principles, where you are supposed to share your research with the community. On top of that without the source, an experiment involving software isn't fundamentally repeatable.

> It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using

This statement assumes faculty are comfortable using Blackboard... I have yet to meet one who is. I've had to use it for my TA duties and the expression about running nails across a chalkboard is ripe for a pun.

Collision detection absolutely affects performance, if you can run with 100 objects naively, but you can run with 10000 objects by being efficient, your performance has been affected. Computational power is never enough!

How are you storing your objects in the grid container, is it actually a container or just an array with an index pointing to the object in some kind of object array? It's possible to do the grid without actually creating it as a datastructure, you just "hash" the point you are at:

  px = (int)(p.x-grid_min.x)*grid_delta.x;
  py = (int)(p.y-grid_min.y)*grid_delta.y;
  hash = px + py * grid_width
  cell_list[hash] += [p.index]

Where p is your object and grid_delta is the cell size. The cell_list could be implemented a couple ways, but if you think of it as a hash table with each entry as a list of objects in the cell, then all you need to do to get potential colliders is calculate the hash of an object and get back all the indices.

This is a technique we are using to speed up neighbor checks in some 3D particle simulation code, it works quite well on the GPU but its simple and you already have a grid in your code.

Another option would be a quadtree, I haven't looked, are there not JS implementations already out there?

wallhack is something you can't get around, a user can always control how their graphics are displayed, hence you can't trust them. You either accept this or change the game.

You can make it harder to do (Blizzard's Warden, Valve's VAC) but people will get around any technical barrier you put up.

Fog of War (maphack) would be a more apt example, you only send the client what it is possible for them to see. Speed hacks are another that can be stopped, the client asks the server if it can move X units, the server responds with how many units the client moved.

never trust the client. but let it do its thing and set it straight if it tries to stray.

there are two ways to build the tallest building; build it higher, or destroy the buildings around you

OpenCL - this year I've been learning about GPU acceleration, and while it may not be good for everything it is looking very interesting for various applications.

While my area is currently graphics/simulation I'm wondering how effective adding GPUs as accelerators to large scale web problems would be. It's really taking of in the Super Computing area, so I'm sure there is room for it!