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Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

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Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#131

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #120
cma wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper boun…

Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.…

I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size.

I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem:

Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions.

1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1.

2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices.

If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#132

Post by intopieces »

Given the rate that autism is showing up nowadays, it seems like spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed. People who were once just odd-balls or non-social are now being lumped in with people who have moderate to severe issues, and it's to the detriment of both groups.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#133

Post by ovt »

erichocean wrote: post #58
nibs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read SJobs bio(s). My father, brother and fiance have Aspergers. My father and brother especially relate more to Woz and are scared of people like Jobs. I relate more to Jobs than Woz, and I am more OCPD. If Jobs is Aspergers, he is also very manic spectrum. My father/brother are strictly unipolar. Here is more on the OCPD thing if you are curious: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201..…

Oh for sure, I didn't mean to imply that Jobs was _only_ on the spectrum. I work in film (in addition to tech) and know a lot of people on the spectrum that I think people who only meet autistic programmers would have difficulty recognizing. Even in TFA, one of the descriptors is: > They generally marry the first girl they date Maybe, but in my experience, that's only one specific kind of person with Aspergers (who I…

I don't follow PUA stuff and had to look up sigma. For anyone else: It's a term for the cool outsider/loner who gets the chicks.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#134

Post by digler999 »

jesserayadkins2 wrote: post #105

I was diagnosed with Aspergers early on in life. For a long time, I tried to ignore it. But there's parts that you can't. It's difficult to make friends when you can't read people's intentions or read between the lines. I don't have a great interest in hanging out with people because I often don't feel like I fit in. In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played ga…

can you (have you) put your projects on github ? maybe if you put 5+ non-trivial projects on there people can see your breadth and depth of skills.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#135

Post by dschiptsov »

sotojuan wrote: post #92
dschiptsov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asperger is nothing like Forrest Gump or the Rainman characters, BTW. It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver, or the Deer Hunter, or Rocky the Bum.

> It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver > actually good to have Something doesn't add up.

Even being a fictional character Holder Caulfield seems to be way smarter and remarkably clear thinking fellow compared to modern cosplaying hipsters.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#136

Post by jesserayadkins2 »

digler999 wrote: post #134
jesserayadkins2 wrote: post #105

I was diagnosed with Aspergers early on in life. For a long time, I tried to ignore it. But there's parts that you can't. It's difficult to make friends when you can't read people's intentions or read between the lines. I don't have a great interest in hanging out with people because I often don't feel like I fit in. In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played ga…

can you (have you) put your projects on github ? maybe if you put 5+ non-trivial projects on there people can see your breadth and depth of skills.

I have a github account established, and it has a couple of projects on it. One, a telnet client, is missing. I keep forgetting to add that in. I've been meaning to, once the language is more established, to spread the packages out into different repositories.

I know I should have more of a variety there, the trouble thus far has been the 'what'.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#137

Post by dschiptsov »

Squarel wrote: post #102
dschiptsov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asperger is nothing like Forrest Gump or the Rainman characters, BTW. It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver, or the Deer Hunter, or Rocky the Bum.

Or like the people who are unable to have jobs, even programming ones, despite being very skilled at it, because their aspergers causes them so many problems that they cannot work in an environment with other people or to deadlines, so, instead they are stuck unemployed, living at home, and terrified about what happens when their parents die and how they will cope, while people make fun of them for being basement dwe…

Hell is other people. And yes, it is difficult to hold a programmer job in a circus, among self-obsessed, cosplaying sophisticated individualty, bearded and tattooed clowns.

But there are many niches for those who can't stand narcissistic cosplaying mediocrity in charge - craftsmanship of any kind, not necessarily digital. Making good sandwiches will do.

One could be a self-employed, paid open source contributor, a freelancer, a subcontractor, etc. Yes, one probably will never "succeed" in one of valleys sweatshops, but there are always other, less traveled pathways..

Again, Igor Sysoev, who have bootstrapped the project alone, according to his tastes and preferences, and then went back into shadow, leaving all the singing and dancing to those who liked it, is a classic example.

There is also Pirsig's book, Atlas, and a few other good ones.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#138

Post by klipt »

bjourne wrote: post #24

With all the discrimination and bullying going around, I think it is good that someone has something nice to say about autistic programmers. Like Ian Murdock who founded Debian and recently committed suicide had Asperger's Syndrome. Despite obvious impressive technical skills, life probably wasn't easy for him. Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amaz…

> I can say that almost all rapists are men.

Obviously a tangent, but this strongly depends on how you define rape. Recent CDC studies find that a huge number of men report being "made to penetrate" women against their will. Most normal people would classify this (sex against your will) as rape, but the CDC only classified it as "sexual assault". Unsurprisingly, if you define men being forced to have sex with women as "not rape", then tautologically almost all rapists are men.

I have the feeling that as society moves towards true gender equality, we'll realise this problem is much less gendered than people currently assume.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#139

Post by ArkyBeagle »

dschiptsov wrote: post #135
sotojuan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver > actually good to have Something doesn't add up.

Even being a fictional character Holder Caulfield seems to be way smarter and remarkably clear thinking fellow compared to modern cosplaying hipsters.

Holden Caulfield is principally a narcissist.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#140

Post by ascotan »

mads wrote: post #22

I dont know if autistic people are better programmers, but what I feel that - from 20 years making software - is that people with these personality traits that fit into the spectrum of autism and who happen to end up in the software industry are extremely vulnerable to being exploited by people with certain other personality traits. Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopat…

I second this. Having employees that 'never engage in politics and work like a machine' sounds like a recipe for exploitation. I've seen FAR to may managers take advantage of people 1 rung down on the social ladder.
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