Viewing profile — 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 p…

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 languag…

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 attendi…

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. On…

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 supp…

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…

_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 in…

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 …

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 la…

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 progra…

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 du…

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 no…

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 u…

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 i…