pacman128

I've been on both sides of the interviewing process and I agree with you.

It's the questions like "what is you greatest weakness?" that tick me off where an honest answer at most places will probably kill you chance of getting the job. Instead you are told that the "right" answer is to pose a strength as a weakness. I don't see the point of asking questions like these. What are you learning about the candidate from getting the expected BS response?

Ironically, I think having the self awareness to recognize your own weaknesses is a great strength, but this question subverts this.

Is it too much to ask for interviewers not to ask questions where the "right" answer is to give a BS answer?

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

Fun fact, George RR Martin still uses the MS-DOS version of Wordstar for his writing.

Look into the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I'm a recently retired atheist and moved to a new city. My wife was brought up UU and they welcome all beliefs. We started attending services at a local fellowship a month ago and have been welcomed and are starting to make some friends there.

This Philby story (father of the infamous double agent Kim Philby) is a key plot point in Tim Powers' book _Declare_. It's a mash up of a John le Carre spy novel with Lovecraft. One of Powers' best novels.

No, I'm not actively working on it. If I ever find the time, I might update it to 64-bit.

https://pacman128.github.io/pcasm/

Nice to see NASM is still going strong. I used this for a class I taught back in the 90's. The class supported both Windows and Linux (but most students used Windows) and NASM supported both and was free.

I ended up creating my own free online textbook for the course. It's sorta out of date now since it was for 32-bit processors.

Paul Carter here. Yes, as someone already replied. It's online. I would have liked to update it to 64-bit, but I jumped to industry and don't have the time to do a decent job of it. I didn't realize that Randall had a 64-bit version out. I'm sure it's very good. We both used to hang out on comp.lang.asm.x86 back in the 90's.

_Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms_ by James O. Coplien

It showed me how to really use C++ effectively back in the 1990's. It was at the time in a class by itself. (Pun intended).

rec.arts.sf.written was the one I was referring to.

I just recently started looking back at one of the groups I frequently read years ago and found that there was a small community still using it. Even recognized a few of them. The trolls and spammers were gone.

Really sad to hear this. The TRS-80 Model I was the first computer I ever owned in high school. I spend many, many hours programming on it. Taught myself BASIC and Z-80 assembly language on it. Definitely was a major factor in my professional life.

I taught college CS for 10 years before moving to industry. Cheating wasn't a huge problem, but I did run have some issues.

Gave a makeup exam to one student with an altered programming problem than the original exam. The student answered the original problem, not the one on the exam they was given. That made it very clearcut.

I also had a written requirement that students must be able to explain their homework programs to me. Had a few that couldn't explain what parts of "their" own program was doing.

It was published 3 years before his death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

It's actually the prequel, 'A Deepness in the Sky', that has this. Both very good books.

I thought the same at first. I worked on the Air Force AWACS E3 (https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...) program as a contractor in the 2000's. It had dual IBM-360 computers and wireframe-like graphics for their radar displays at the time. This was the Block 30/35 version. It looks like from the link that they may have completely transitioned to the Block 40/45 version which replaced the 360's. They were talking about this move when I worked there 16 years ago.

Completely agree. I usually start with a trivial step and then build from it. Keeping notes on paper, in a markdown doc or jupyter notebook as appropriate is also useful. I have notes that I still look back at to remind me of details of areas I haven't used in a while.

It's definitely a type of Platonism. The question isn't how hard it is, but if it's possible at all.

I'm not talking about physical measurements. How do you make a simulation that makes the sum of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ... not equal to 1.0? It really comes down to whether math is universal. Maybe it's not, but I certainly don't see a trivial way to simulate this.

We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series. They were computing pi, not measuring it. This wasn't changing the curvature of space, it was changing math itself.

This brings up the thing that really bothered me about Carl Sagan's novel _Contact_. A book that I really liked otherwise.

Warning, this might be considered a spoiler:

A pattern found deep in the computed binary digits of pi are used to "prove" that the universe was created by an intelligence.

How would they contact the owner of the device? All they know is the IP address of the device.

I was also lost for a while working on my physics Ph.D. The course work ended with the state of physics in 1930 (this was the late 80's). I was also trying to do Lattice Gauge theory which involves many different areas: statistical mechanics, high energy, ... I really struggled trying to get up to speed on these.

My wife was finishing her finance doctorate so I had a deadline. I had already worked on some statistical mechanics projects and had the idea of downsizing and just expand on them. After this decision, I was done in a year (and before my wife was finished).

As the essay shows, it is very easy to get lost working on a physics Ph.D. After getting my degree, I ending up teaching CS for ten years before getting into software development. While it was stressful at times, I don't regret my physics education. I learned a lot (sometimes by being thrown into the deep end).

99% Invisible just had a podcast on the advantages of peat and bogs over forests. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-love-of-peat/

I don't have a copy of that book, but the abstract of this paper from 1937, co-authored by Einstein, claims that gravitational waves are a prediction of GR: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00160...

Do you have a source for this? I thought they were a direct prediction of GR and this link says the same: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-are-gw

Quoting from the link, this is what gets me:

Nim is case- and underscore-insensitive (except for the first character). Thus HelloWorld and helloWorld are different, but helloWorld, helloworld, and hello_world are all the same

I really don't understand this feature of the language.

The trick I've seen to deal with this problem is to use a pair of doubles: one for the integer part and one for the fractional part.