The Whiteboard

Ampt

12:00 AM

@AshleyNunn The Meta questions?

user15026

@Ampt Yeah

Jimmy Hoffa

or did you not want the actual answer ?

user55340

@AshleyNunn You design smaller systems that do the necessary parts, make the interfaces between them clean, and have larger systems delegate the things to the smaller ones.

user15026

And this is why you are all super awesome.

user15026

Seriously.

user55340

12:01 AM

The issue is identifying what one smaller system does and how to present a clean interface... but thats a matter of practice.

Jimmy Hoffa

obviously I must just be doing OOP wrong, because no true scotsman would write any of that nonsense... :o

Robert Harvey

12:50 AM

@JimmyHoffa Ceremony.

OK, so I completed my first phone interview. He gave me three problems.

The first was "How do you get the third smallest number in a list of 10,000 random numbers?"

I told him "Put the numbers in a sorted list, and do a Linq Take(3)."

He said "but what if you wanted to do it faster?"

The second problem was "How would you get a list of every file in a file system?"

Ampt

I'm not familiar with Linq. Is that largely the fastest option?

user20683

@Ampt yes

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey I hate this canned response -> People have this interview concept that no matter what people answer, they should press them for a better solution because no true scotsman fails to come up with improvements to their code. Sorry, some of us basically get simple things like that right the first time...

enderland

I think I accidentally had a screening interview tonight

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland you didn't bleed on them did you? No racial epithets? You're golden!

enderland

12:55 AM

@JimmyHoffa to be fair there wasn't a qualifier on how the numbers were sorted :P

@JimmyHoffa har har.

psr

@JimmyHoffa "I would get the cars into the parking lot via dependency injection."

enderland

I think it'd be a similar gig to what @Ampt does, actually

Robert Harvey

I told him "Write a function that returns the list of files in a specified folder, and call it recursively for every folder in that folder, and so forth."

Ampt

@enderland You sit around and do mandatory ethics training?

Robert Harvey

He said "How do you write it iteratively?"

I said "by simulating a stack."

enderland

12:56 AM

@Ampt no I'd skip that, I figure it'd be easiest to not go, that's the most ethical amirite

Robert Harvey

Or, you could try for tail recursion.

He said "What's that?"

Ampt

LOL

enderland

lol. I'm getting the vibe Robert you hit a Hr phone screener type who basically wants to make sure you actually can program?

And was reading a script?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt the linq part isn't the fast portion-> the fact that they were in a sorted list kind of solves the problem for you... there's no way to get the smallest number from a list of numbers without sorting it, and using the standard sortedlist implementation in .NET is the right way to sort a list...

Robert Harvey

@enderland He seemed a bit... nervous.

Ampt

12:58 AM

@RobertHarvey So he's been doing this for 6 months and is now interviewing you, an experienced programmer

psr

You could make one pass through the list and keep track of the smallest 3 you've seen. Linear vs. NLogN, and probably actually faster (slightly) as well.

user55340

-1

Q: Where can I ask a question regarding Private sector algorithms becoming available to the public?

Where can I ask a Question regarding the following matter? What this question should ask is: 1. When are private sector algorithms going to be released to the public? 2. Are these algorithms just implementations of scholarly articles and other sources of Academia, implemented in the pr...

user55340

As an aside, if you have difficulty getting the meta question opened here, I would urge you to ask in the whiteboard chat room. Its associated with the Programmers.SE site where the topicality of the question would be more appropriate (though, as I mentioned, as asked this question would likely be closed). The chat room, however, doesn't have such restrictions about open or closed and the people there are familiar with the issues. The room is most active 9-5 M-F (work day second monitor). — MichaelT 11 mins ago

Robert Harvey

@psr I told him there was no way to do it without touching every number.

Ampt

@psr depending on how you implement, you could do 3 comparisons per N, but that's still just 3N or N.

Robert Harvey

12:59 AM

Making it an O(n) problem.

psr

True, but it's faster to touch each number once than sort it.

Robert Harvey

Yes, you only have to touch each number once.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr true enough. I still want to complain about people pressing for improvements just arbitrarily. :)

Robert Harvey

So the right answer depends on whether or not you're only doing it once. If you're adding numbers to the list and still want an answer, it's better to use a SortedList, even though it's more expensive to add the numbers initially.

psr

Or for a large enough list you could do crazy math stuff to crack the random number generator, maybe. Well, I couldn't, but still.

Robert Harvey

1:02 AM

The third problem was "Find the three points that are closest together in an x-y matrix."

Jimmy Hoffa

:18298309 dude, she's with The One, that'll never work.

Robert Harvey

I asked him how many. He said a 1000 x 1000 grid with, say, 10000 points in it.

Ampt

You just gotta follow the white rabbit if you know what you mean

Robert Harvey

I gave him the naive algorithm.

Ampt

@RobertHarvey relatively sparse then

Robert Harvey

1:03 AM

Ah, I see where you're going with that.

It's been a long time since I've interviewed with anyone. I think this first one is a practice run.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Dogma reference, right?

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey so did your last contract appraisal not go so good? Sorry to hear, seems I'm hearing a lot of people losing space in the employed population lately; If I paid attention to economic indicators I might know this is a known thing? shrug

user20683

@RobertHarvey it's mostly to prove that you aren't stupid

Ampt

@GlenH7 Matrix? Really?

user41796

@RobertHarvey Wouldn't sweat it.

user41796

1:04 AM

@Ampt Dogma doesn't have a similar line? #shamed.

enderland

@RobertHarvey what is the naive algorithm in this case? :)

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa The new prime contractor under-bid the contract. A non-trivial number of people lost their positions.

psr

@RobertHarvey Sounds like you passed the screen to me. It's usually to weed out the inept, though it's possible they think the naive algorithm for the matrix isn't good enough.

user41796

BTW: Google Play is giving away a free copy of Deadmau5 4x4=12

Robert Harvey

@enderland You mean with a sparse matrix? Different than the one I gave him. The one I gave him looks at all of the slots.

Ampt

1:06 AM

@RobertHarvey Well I'll still love you no matter what happens.

Robert Harvey

With a sparse matrix, you could probably get away with just looking at the points and the distances.

@Ampt Psssh.

user41796

@RobertHarvey All of your answers after responding with Linq were perfunctory

Robert Harvey

Yes, probably.

user41796

But why bother putting it into a sorted list if you're going to run line against it?

enderland

@RobertHarvey i'm trying to think how I'd do this in an efficient way. I don't want to really look at each possible combination of 3 points.... 10,000x9999x9998 seems like a lot of calculations :P

Ampt

1:07 AM

I'm thinking that this could be put in a graph

psr

Closest together using Euclidean distance?

enderland

@Ampt this is where my lack of comp sci background hurts me :\

Ampt

@enderland Sticks and stones make break my bones but graph theory crushes my soul.

Robert Harvey

@enderland It seems to me like a modified "traveling salesman" problem.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland one of the reasons I bone up on this stuff as much as I do... no CS background-> I had no idea what a lot of things like that were for a long time, eventually it got to me enough to try studying it a bit.. (turned out studying it was as miserable as I thought it would be)

psr

1:11 AM

@Ampt - Are you thinking Euclidean distance of X,Y coordinates?

Ampt

Yeah

But

I think you can remove a lot of the combinations

by looking at the graph

enderland

@JimmyHoffa Yeah. But.. does that mean if I get interested in every one of these conversations and try to figure things out and understand them that I turn into you after 10 years? ha

Ampt

pick two points. every point further than that in either direction can be removed

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland no, you'd have to start out a lot dumber to reach my level of depravity...most people know better from the start and don't follow the rabbit hole until they're lost...

enderland

9 hours ago, by enderland

I will have rabbits doing my work for me clearly

Robert Harvey

1:13 AM

Randomized Algorithms: Closest Pair of Points

psr

Index on X, index on Y, go through nearest in X and use that to exclude Ys until you have no more to check?

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland see, you've already figured out a far better solution

Ampt

There's a solution for this and it's just outside of my memory and it's killing me

psr

Yeah, mine is pretty meh

user41796

@Ampt graphdatabases.com

user41796

1:15 AM

hat tip to @RobertHarvey on that link, actually. But it's a good, free download on graph theory.

Ampt

@GlenH7 I hear that's what they use at FB for perfromance

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt in soviet russia, your soul crushes graph theory!! No wonder those guys are so good at C++ and math...

Ampt

Ah, here's a possible candidate, Nested Triangles

enderland

@RobertHarvey my brain hurts and it's late and basically friday for me

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland do the sensible thing, pour a glass of scotch, and wash it down with Netflix.

enderland

1:17 AM

@JimmyHoffa I was thinking the book I started last night

Ampt

(or payday 2)

pew pew, there goes a few cops

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland amazon.com/Trust-When-Goes-Forged-Bloodlines-ebook/dp/…

@enderland ? yeah I know, my wife's pestering me to read it too...

enderland

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

The nonfiction book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour is the first full narrative account of the Battle off Samar, which author James D. Hornfischer calls the greatest upset in the history of naval warfare. Published by Bantam Books in February 2004, the book won the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature in 2004 from the Naval Order of the United States. A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Military Book Club, the book tells the story of the remarkable two-and-a-half-hour sea battle fought on October...

Robert Harvey

The optimal algorithm would exclude looking at points the distance of which is clearly going to be larger than your closest distance found so far.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland mine sounds way more entertaining, and far less stressful.

Robert Harvey

1:19 AM

Oh, sorry. Talking about books now.

Ampt

No, I'm not

I wonder if you could look at the perimeter as some sort of indicator

user55340

amazon.com/Hawk-Vlad-Taltos-Book-14-ebook/dp/B00J6TWICO

Ampt

if two points are further than that you could automatically exclude them

enderland

@JimmyHoffa that sounds like all the ridiculous things in the past years put into one book

psr

@RobertHarvey Any candidate who didn't know that off the top of their head would be an immediate no-hire, yes.

enderland

1:20 AM

@Ampt I had initially thought to find the distance all points are from 0,0 and then order them by this, and do some sort of check on every 3 point combinations going up the list

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland yours sounds like a hellish time of wet, cold, death, and misery. I get enough of that at work.

enderland

@JimmyHoffa I am far too interested in world war two history

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa not installed on this commputer. trying to install payday 2

been downloading it for like 2 hours... my gfs internet blows

stupid ass comcast thottles her internet to piss

user15026

@MichaelT I keep thinking I should read these

user55340

@AshleyNunn they're good. Not too long, though on the flip side after reading one, you may find yourself re-reading all of the ones prior.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:23 AM

@Ampt this is why for the first time in years, I got off comcast when I moved last...couldn't have been a better decision. All that "DSL is slow" shit I remembered from the 90s; so not true anymore...

user15026

@MichaelT Ah, fair enough :)

Jimmy Hoffa

my DSL is way better than the throttled-to-shit comcast I had last time I had to setup internet...

user55340

Sometimes, the book requires a rereading just up front because of how its written.

user15026

I am reading a local author's book right now about a kid who gets sucked into a LoZ like video game world

Ampt

yeah DSL can get you pretty good speeds

enderland

1:23 AM

our internet is capped at 3mbp/s

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland have you tried turning it off and back on again?

enderland

@JimmyHoffa nah we're cheap

user55340

He does wonderful things with chapter titles / flavor text. For example, one starts out with a prologue with a laundry list (blood spot on shirt). Then, each chapter, that bit of clothing that lead the chapter flavor text needs to get cleaned for the reason in the laundry list in the prologue.

enderland

speedtest.net/my-result/3855097011

user55340

In another book, it seems like's he's jumping back and forth between two timeframes. And he is. The chapter flavor text seems a bit odd... and then in the end you realize that it was a spell being cast taking place at the end of the first timeline and just before the second timeline.

Robert Harvey

1:25 AM

I think I may have figured out an optimization.

The naive algorithm is O(N^2), but if you store the nearest neighbor with the point, you only have to take the hit once.

user55340

If you glance at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Brust#The_Dragaeran_books you'll note the chronological order of novels has some jumps all over the place.

user15026

Yeah, I knew about that (friend of mine loves the books, and explained that to me)

Robert Harvey

Ack. That's not going to work. You still have to recalculate each time.

Never mind. [slinks away]

user55340

For example, Tiassa takes place in the early bits, the late bits, and the very late bits... the last two bracket another book that was released just before... and so the additional insight into the setup in Tiassa makes Iorich make a bit more sense... so you go back and re-read it.

user15026

Oh, I see how they get you ;)

Ampt

1:28 AM

@enderland my ISP just doubled my internet from 30 to 60 for free

user55340

Though, I'll still suggest that you should always read the books in publish order (unless its re-reading a specific one).

user41796

@RobertHarvey But that's programming - you take an approach; see if it works; and re-evaluate from there. Claiming anything else is just lying.

user15026

@MichaelT Thats how I generally approach new series

user55340

Dragon is another jump around... and Orca is one that makes you go back and read all the prior ones with some additional knowledge.

enderland

man we're all here all day every day, or at least United states time zones

Jimmy Hoffa

1:30 AM

@RobertHarvey the algorithm design manual is free online (just google it) and it opens immediately to a bunch of graph stuff and talks in pretty simple terms, worth poking at if you're concerned about getting more questions like that as you interview etc

user55340

If you happen to be a fan of the Three Musketeers...

user55340

Khaavren Romances

The Khaavren Romances are a series of fantasy novels written by Steven Brust and set in the fictional world of Dragaera. The novels are swashbuckling adventure stories involving war, intrigue, and romance. They are heavily influenced by the d'Artagnan Romances written by Alexandre Dumas. == Books == The Phoenix Guards (1991) Five Hundred Years After (1994) The Viscount of Adrilankha, published in three volumes: The Paths of the Dead (2002) The Lord of Castle Black (2003) Sethra Lavode (2004) The title of each book roughly corresponds with its equivalent in the d'Artagnan Romances. The Phoenix...

user55340

Three musketeer novels: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte of Bragelonne.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt we're giving out free (throttled) bandwidth! Everybody sign up with us, 50mbps? Done! 200mbps? Done! 1tbps? Done! As much as you want (throttled)!

I tend to take those numbers with a grain of salt anymore

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa nah, this isn't comcast/TWC

user55340

1:31 AM

The Khaavren novels: The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, The Viscount of Adrilankha.

Ampt

it's a small local company

@RobertHarvey Did you look at that nested triangle problem?

you would do that and find the smallest one

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt I kid, just funny how that stuff is advertised by the big companies; the numbers really don't mean shit when they just throttle you to whatever they feel like

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa Oh I agree

it's some bullshit

Jimmy Hoffa

we'll give you 20mbps, but if you try to use 20mbps we'll throttle it to 10...

Ampt

and if you use 10 we'll throttle it to 5

It's magical!

Robert Harvey

2:00 AM

Closest pair via Divide and Conquer

@JimmyHoffa Thanks!

@ampt: ---^^

Ampt

2:18 AM

well that's 2 pair

now you need another

the problem is that the closest pair may be a ways from the next closest, meaning the smallest area doesn't necessarily have the smallest pair

Robert Harvey

2:32 AM

@Ampt It's a recursive algorithm. I don't know quite how it works yet, but I'm going to study it when I get the chance.

Anyone here know a good OCR program for a one-time OCR job? (about 30 pages)

Is FreeOCR any good?

user20683

3:41 AM

algorithms badge :D

user15026

Congrats!

7Blue_Beast7

Anyone know where the C# room is?

Links anything please?

user55340

3:58 AM

@7Blue_Beast7 chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/7/c

7Blue_Beast7

@MichaelT Thank you ^.^

user55340

@7Blue_Beast7 (its part of the StackOverflow set of rooms - you can see all of them at chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms )

7Blue_Beast7

I did find the room but I saved the link you gave me just in case

user55340

Oh, thats nice. (sqllite browser for firefox... addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager ) - don't want to have a full blown database and all its headaches (how many things can go wrong?) for the interview 'homework'.

user15026

4:20 AM

@MichaelT They gave you homework?

user55340

Two programs. One a web app, the other a system admin type script.

user55340

Its material for them to use that has a consistent interface that can allow part of the interview to be a code review.

user15026

Makes sense, I guess, it is just so far out of the realm of the relatively normal non-programmer stuff I experience :)

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT [takes test, writes employer's program for free]

Seriously, though; they're making you write an app?

user55340

@RobertHarvey The web app is a trivial one - crud with four fields. The sysadmin script is also a rather trivial one and would be the afternoon hack of any sysadmin.

user55340

4:28 AM

@RobertHarvey Part of the job description is secure programming. There are far to many php types that when writing a crud app completely ignore sql injection... much less XSS possibilities.

user55340

Without some sense of what the person will write, you've got no idea of if they actually understand the issues that exist.

user55340

Cross-site scripting

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in Web applications. XSS enables attackers to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy. Cross-site scripting carried out on websites accounted for roughly 84% of all security vulnerabilities documented by Symantec as of 2007. Their effect may range from a petty nuisance to a significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable site...

user20683

@MichaelT And nearly all of that is the ECMAscript's standards committee's fault. f***ing globals.

user55340

Its not a big deal to fix it so its not an issue, but one should be aware of it and write secure code in the first place. As I'm using Dancer: search.cpan.org/~bigpresh/Dancer-Plugin-EscapeHTML-0.22/lib/…

Ampt

2:40 PM

pew pew pew breakin tomcat all day

56

Q: "It was working yesterday, I swear!" What can you do?

When you arrive in the morning, you find that your software does not work anymore, even though it did when you left yesterday evening. What do you do? What do you check first? What do you do to stop being angry and start working on your problem? Do you blame your colleagues and go directly to th...

testing debugging

Close votes please!

user41796

3 to go

Ampt

2:58 PM

3 2

user41796

1

Ampt

3:50 PM

Emacs is in beta? what?

Oh don't be sour.

user41796

It was in jest

user55340

5:19 PM

@WorldEngineer There are other attacks that one could do... for example closing the form and then creating another form to which the person enters the data which gets sent to a server you control - that doesn't involve javascript at all.

user55340

6:29 PM

amazon.com/dp/1558608664

Robert Harvey

6:43 PM

(removed)

user55340

~~(removed)~~

Robert Harvey

Mod powers FTW.

Jimmy Hoffa

shit, I was sniped...

user55340

Interview confirmed for next Tuesday.

user41796

@MichaelT congrats

user41796

6:53 PM

@RobertHarvey Because some days you really just have to test and see if you can run out of binding close or delete votes?

Robert Harvey

Gotta abuse my powers at least once a day.

user55340

Gotta abuse a mod at least once a day.

Robert Harvey

Touché

Ampt

Alright Robert, show me on the doll where he Touchéd you.

Robert Harvey

That's none of your business.

user41796

6:57 PM

(this is gonna go downhill fast, I'm afraid)

Robert Harvey

Did you see the Divide and Conquer algorithm for two points closest together?

Turns out you cut the space in half, check the points nearest the dividing line (which is apparently a linear operation), and then call it recursively on the two sections.

Closest pair of points problem

The closest pair of points problem or closest pair problem is a problem of computational geometry: given n points in metric space, find a pair of points with the smallest distance between them. The closest pair problem for points in the Euclidean plane was among the first geometric problems which were treated at the origins of the systematic study of the computational complexity of geometric algorithms. A naive algorithm of finding distances between all pairs of points and selecting the minimum requires O(dn2) time. It turns out that the problem may be solved in O(n log n) time in a Euclidean space...

Ampt

how how do you do 3 points

or N points I would suppose

Robert Harvey

I can't remember whether he said 3 points, or 3 pairs of points.

I thought it was 3 pairs of points.

Ampt

I believe it was a triangle

well

thats what you said yesterday

changes the problem completely

Robert Harvey

My notes say 3 points. God, that's what happens when you get old.

Also, you forget how to use chat properly.

user55340

7:02 PM

The annoying part of the dynamic programming / specific algorithm questions is either you know the answer, or you don't. If you want to see if I can code, use something trivial. If you want to see me write complex code, give me the algorithm.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Was this with the R&D shop you had mentioned a while back?

Robert Harvey

TheBrain.com

Yes, the mind mapping folk.

user55340

Pi = 4 * ( 1/1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ... ). Write a program that computes Pi to 10 decimal places.

Robert Harvey

And takes all day to run.

Actually, that was the program I wrote on the Commodore 64 for calculating pi.

user41796

<--- Is a little slow today

Robert Harvey

7:04 PM

It would calculate an arbitrary number of decimal places. If you had the time to wait.

Or the universe cools down, whichever comes first.

user55340

@RobertHarvey My father enticed me to do it on the Apple ][+ with $10 back then (and no, thats not the String 10... yes, I did write it in Basic...)

user55340

There's some other math that you can use to determine how many iterations you would need to use to get it.

Robert Harvey

It was the only program I ever wrote on the Commodore 64.

Well, besides 10 Print "Hello World!" 20 GOTO 10

user55340

The other program from my youth was compute prime numbers. $10. And then a number of performance enhancements for $5 each... I got about $50 for that... and that was in the late 70s. I enjoyed spending that.

Robert Harvey

Your pop paid you to program impractical algorithms for fun and profit?

user55340

7:07 PM

Incidentally, the prime number one... that was also the final project for basic programming in high school... I pulled that one out quick.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Yep... though think of it this way "spending money to interest his son in computing beyond games..."

Robert Harvey

I have the sinking feeling that that's how many of my interviews are going to go.

I'm not good at thinking on my feet that way.

Interestingly, the brain guy wasn't all that interested in the cultural fit. He was more interested in my experience, my requirements (we talked about the commute), and my basic technical knowledge.

user55340

Its a technique thats useful for fresh college students where the rate of code being whipped up can be quite fast. Older interview candidates, if the company is smart, should be asked about larger architectural things, responsibilities in past projects and the like - thats what we can bring.

user55340

Different interviewers may be focusing on different things.

Robert Harvey

Well, I looked at the Lockheed openings in Palmdale this morning. Embedded developers. There's two tiers; the ones with professional experience in C++ and embedded, and the "associates;" those with degrees and some programming experience, but not necessarily in embedded or C++

I think I fall into the latter category, even though it screams "Entry level."

The "professional" ones require a secret or top-secret clearance.

Jimmy Hoffa

7:13 PM

@RobertHarvey interviewing is done so poorly... There's this huge focus on figuring out what people don't know, instead of looking at it from a perspective of "We need help" ergo "Let's figure out what this guy can do" -> then you can decide if he's able to help. But there's not enough logic like that in how people approach interviewing. It's an attempt at stack-ranking an anonymous person, so it starts out adversarial most times to begin with which is a failures approach to assessing someone

user41796

@RobertHarvey One of the local manufacturing shops has a wide assortment of developers, even though their "core" is embedded. I wouldn't necessarily rule that group out as there's still a lot of application space outside of the chip.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Which you can't get unless an employer sponsors you....

Robert Harvey

I had a Secret clearance at my last job, and supposedly it's good for 5 years.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey sadly .NET is falling out of favor for anything but front-end UIs, C++ and some Java being favored for anything that's not just the front-end on a website

user41796

@RobertHarvey Yes, it carries with you.

Robert Harvey

7:15 PM

@JimmyHoffa That's good to know. I've already decided to learn some C++ and Java.

user41796

Already having clearance will bump you up on the interview list

Robert Harvey

Well, maybe I'll apply for each tier, and see what happens. But there's like 30 openings. Do I apply for all of them, or just one in each tier?

user55340

It means they don't have to turn you down if you don't get it, because you already have it.

Robert Harvey

Employer^ wanted the clearance within a year of accepting employment there. Interestingly, I never touched anything classified. The clearance was mostly a really deep background check.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I'd go for one in each, but would double check the contact info within them. If it's all the same contact info, you should be fine. And it doesn't hurt to reach out to HR and ask.

user41796

7:19 PM

I'm assuming the reqs are identically worded.

Robert Harvey

They are very close. There's some variation on things like Verilog experience.

user41796

I've seen companies go both ways - they'll duplicate the req for the number of slots open. Or they'll put within the req that they have X slots available.

user55340

The other thing to do is to ask how to interview for both from HR there. You don't want to waste their time applying for two if its the same people and they can hire you to either position.

user41796

They may be going to different departments then, which makes your life more difficult. You don't want to spam the hiring managers, but there very well may be 30 different hiring managers....

user55340

Employer^^ had a general 'all managers interview' and then the one that is most in need and a good fit for the skills makes the offer.

Robert Harvey

7:32 PM

What do I need to know about networking?

user41796

It's a social skill that many programmers dislike

user41796

^^^ Is not all that helpful... :-D

Robert Harvey

Well, some of the advice that I've gotten so far is

user41796

Networking knowledge depends upon the domain, I have found. In one gig, I basically needed the skills of an entry-level network person

Robert Harvey

1. Go to job fairs. Do informational interviews.

user41796

7:34 PM

But in other roles, I haven't needed much beyond a cursory understanding

Robert Harvey

2. Shore up your online footprint.

user41796

(realizes you were talking about the social skill...)

Robert Harvey

Yeah, was just gonna say...

user41796

You've got a linkedIn profile, right?

user41796

I have found my profile there to be excellent for getting unsolicited recruitment contacts. I'd make sure everything is current on there, and make sure you indicate you're actively looking for work now.

user41796

7:38 PM

I've heard mixed feedback on Careers 2.0 profiles here within SE. For some, they've worked but for others not so much. Certainly can't hurt to have that up to date and open to companies being able to search for it.

user55340

Gah... our newest questions are nearly categorically bad.

user55340

-2, -2, -4, -3, -3, -6, -1, 0, -4, -4, 0, -1, 3, -1, 0, 0, -3, 0, 9, -1, -3, -3, 15 (on hold)...

user41796

58% closed or migrated in the most recent 50

user41796

And a lot of the open ones are meh

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I've been reading this guys blog lately and now I want to try and come up with a predictive function for our question quality after seeing you list it like a signal...

user55340

7:51 PM

@JimmyHoffa There was a machine learning project for SO awhile back...

user55340

Blog - Stack Exchange: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

Kevin Montrose on August 21, 2012

Over the last 4 years we’ve built up quite a bevy of moderation tools here at Stack Exchange. We’ve got closing, editing, deleting, flags of all sorts, voting, commenting, review queues, and more.

Plus our super secret mod tools.

These all work great, but they all require action after a post is made. This is a lot of work for the community, and not particularly friendly toward those posting, particularly new users. In a perfect world, we’d be able to offer specific, targetted guidance for authors whose posts were likely to be shot down, before they ever showed up on the site, and without requiring as much up-front effort from our community. …

user55340

It gave an image of the secret mod tools...

user55340

user55340

And thats still not that great resolution... oh well.

user55340

You can see some of the submissions if you poke around: github.com/saffsd/kaggle-stackoverflow2012

user55340

7:56 PM

Also neat from that contest: kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-questions-on-stack-overflow/…

user55340

10:04 PM

@rolfl have you ever considered activating the blog (or doing so as part of graduation) for code review.SE and then posting some longer explanations of standard issues there?

user55340

5

A: "Silly program" for moving the mouse and doing other things

Please do not use using namespace std. Read this Convert magic numbers like 1440 and 900 to global constants with meaningful names. I would do the same for string literals like \\explorer.exe and taskmgr.exe, but maybe that's just me Your formatting is not consistent. Sometimes you assign variab...

user55340

That "Please do not use using namespace std. Read this" part.

rolfl

@MichaelT Yes, we begged for it ;-) But the blog system has been suspend pending a set of massive overhauls. When it goes live again we have been promised we will be firs in line.

user55340

While correct, I suspect that you (code review) could do a better job with a blog post that summarizes the material appropriate for code review.

user55340

"Why indenting is important"

psr

10:06 PM

Anybody know any good JavaScript Monad libraries?

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr I wrote an Either monad :o

github.com/JimmyHoffa/Machinad

(if you actually want to use it- I can remove/change the totally illegit license, I don't actually care; it was a joke.)

though to be more specific- no, I don't know of any off hand. What specifically would you want? JQuery could be called monadic in a sense... as could others...

Robert Harvey

@GlenH7 TheBrain contacted me on Stack Overflow careers, and I don't even have a complete profile yet.

Need to finish that today.

Jimmy Hoffa

(monads are so easy to implement, it's not generally worth a lot to go using other peoples libraries for it)

Robert Harvey

Another one of those things in computer science with unwarranted mystique surrounding it.

But (higher-level) math tends to do that... Complicates things more than it has to.

So I leave my office for a few minutes, come back, and my computer is saying that it has crashed, tried an automatic repair, and asked for a System Restore. I said no to the system restore, and it chewed on the repair for awhile. Then it said "repair unsuccessful." I hit cancel, and the computer rebooted like nothing ever happened.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey ...I've been seeing this shit with windows 8, seems to choke on the ACPI shit...

don't know if that's the same as you saw

and it's a bit overzealous in deciding "Hey I should uh repair uh ...something..." when it's booting

psr

10:23 PM

@JimmyHoffa I have a JavaScript library (in node) that has an object that runs basic MUMPS commands, either synchronously or asych. There is a framework on top of that which makes many low level synchronous calls. It might benefit from some IO Monad love by having a monadic wrapper that lets you write basically the same code but can generate a MUMPS routine and execute the batch server side. (Mostly helps if we call it asynch, but that shouldn't be the hard part).

You did similar in C#, but had the advantage of the same language on both sides.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr well when you're talking about code generation one thought is always to model an AST for it, and then you can create functions f:: a -> AST B, and compose with the bind AST a to f, then bind to f2 then bind to f3 etc, where the options of f/f2/f3 are handed in so it's actually f :: opt1 -> opt2 -> opt3 -> a -> AST b, such that (f opt1 opt2 opt3):: a -> AST b, so you can take (AST a).bind(f(opt 1, opt2, opt3)) to do things like: employeeQueryAst.bind(returnIfNotNull())

(I'm mixing a lot of pseudo syntaxes in there, I hope that makes some sense? It's beer friday here...)

key in code generation if you're going to start doing lots, or having lots of variations, is: Model your AST. spend most of your time on this and you can worry about how to compose the AST generation later, maybe a monad doesn't even really matter, but definitely your AST's model matters

(if you have very few variants in your code generation, then you probably don't need to worry about either, and should stick to least-abstraction until you have reason to think that'll change)

psr

10:42 PM

@JimmyHoffa Composing it matters because if it looks to weird then everyone will probably give up and write synchronous low level access code. Monads seem to be a promising way to have the code you write to generate an AST look a lot like the code you would write to execute immediately, but I haven't tried.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr yes, this is probably true. Keep in mind, the list monad gives us LINQ, and a list is nothing but a graph; it's not a far stretch to do similar things to other graphs of which an AST can be treated, so the list monad is one place to start looking conceptually. The monad code I linked is about control-flow, would likely be less useful for your particular scenario.

Practical Graph Handling on the HaskellWiki

^-haven't read, but may be of use..

ah maybe not, that's all about Haskell and working with graphs in it...

psr

In any case, you're right that I really need to think about what AST I need. I'm looking through some things people hand-coded to run synchronously to think about what's useful and reasonable.

Jimmy Hoffa

codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/01/18/…

psr

@JimmyHoffa Why does everyone keep saying that to me?

It does look pretty relevant.

whatsisname

11:29 PM

oh man

just got owned by order of operations again

and bitwise comparisons

Robert Harvey

11:54 PM

Linq is a list monad?

Monad (functional programming)

In functional programming, a monad is a structure that represents computations defined as sequences of steps: a type with a monad structure defines what it means to chain operations, or nest functions of that type together. This allows the programmer to build pipelines that process data in steps, in which each action is decorated with additional processing rules provided by the monad. As such, monads have been described as "programmable semicolons"; a semicolon is the operator used to chain together individual statements in many imperative programming languages, thus the expression implies that...

Wow, that describes Linq to a T.

(no pun intended)

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