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khwang

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I graduated from UC Berkeley a year ago, and I remember CS161 being known as one of the easier technical upper divs at Berkeley. Although I never took the course myself, these rules seem like quite a departure from the norm.

I wonder if perhaps the professor is trying to scare people into dropping the class?

The point of this exercise was to show that opacity has an effect on element position, which was surprising to me! It matters because it might fix a z-index bug you have one day (:

Algorithms [pdf] 14 years ago

I took a class that used this book at Berkeley. I think it's kind of like a wikipedia article in a book--it's clear and easy to read (well, easier than most other textbooks!)

Hackathon No More 14 years ago

That's why over at Berkeley we at Hackers at Berkeley decided to start hosting Hackjams. They're twelve hour events from about 1 PM to 1 AM. We have much less pressure, more emphasis on fun and trying things out and showing what you learned, even if you don't have anything approaching a product (I once showed an awful demonstration of all that I had managed to learn about Three.JS in five hours).

Thanks for the pointer! My first language was Scheme and I always kind of joke around about eventually learning Haskell. I think I might actually start doing it though.

Hackathons aren't always about just making good software. For me, if you're at a hackathon and not pushing your limits, then you're not really getting into the spirit of the entire affair. I have good memories of one in particular where I submitted the awful, horrendous results of me trying to learn computer graphics in just twelve hours. I could have just sat down and made yet another CRUD app, but instead I learned about Three.js, and now that I got over the initial hurdle of just sitting down and tinkering with it, I've been more inclined to just play with the framework.

It's like the proverbial journey that begins with a single step. Sometimes all you need is that first step to force you to go try something out, immediately.

I couldn't agree more--I browse both HN and Reddit. I think the purpose of the two boards are different and I'm fine with that.

I do like the idea of having it as a capstone. It's what Brian said: "I wish we could teach SICP both to incoming freshmen and seniors before they leave." I definitely understand a lot more of everything the second time through as a TA!