Xkcd - story of our lives • Hacker News Board

Xkcd - story of our lives

#1

Post by andrewbadera » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 5:17 AM UTC

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#2

Post by cperciva » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 5:49 AM UTC

In case anyone doesn't recognize it, the hexadecimal value in the title text is the "magic" number used in the famous approximate inverse square root routine.

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#3

Post by SapphireSun » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:10 AM UTC

Heh, only if the buisness guy is dumb. If he solved a problem that really was of that magnitude, he could probably license the technology for $$$.

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#4

Post by ajaimk » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:17 AM UTC

Story of my life indeed. The funny part is the fact that we are all reading this and voting on it (it was posted after midnight)

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#5

Post by cubicle67 » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:39 AM UTC

ajaimk wrote: post #4

Story of my life indeed. The funny part is the fact that we are all reading this and voting on it (it was posted after midnight)

depends on where you are. for me, it was just after lunch

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#6

Post by ramidarigaz » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:42 AM UTC

cubicle67 wrote: post #5

ajaimk wrote: post #4

Story of my life indeed. The funny part is the fact that we are all reading this and voting on it (it was posted after midnight)

depends on where you are. for me, it was just after lunch

Yay for Asia.

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#7

Post by cubicle67 » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:44 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #2

In case anyone doesn't recognize it, the hexadecimal value in the title text is the "magic" number used in the famous approximate inverse square root routine.

attributed to John Carmack and first observed (by non-id people) in the source of Quake III

here's a good read http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/9

[Edit: I've always thought this was Carmack's code, but it looks like I was wrong. see email from Carmack in here http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ ]

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#8

Post by Manfred » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 8:47 AM UTC

ajaimk wrote: post #4

Story of my life indeed. The funny part is the fact that we are all reading this and voting on it (it was posted after midnight)

It's actually morning on this side of the earth.

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#9

Post by patio11 » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 9:48 AM UTC

My experience with working in academia was that I created some software with big ideas, almost laughably poor quality of implementation, and which (mostly) ended up filed away with a grant application which has been forgotten by probably eight of the ten people who know it exists.

My experience with creating software in the Real World has been that I do mostly boring things with periodic flashes of insight, that in a period of five years I went from being useless grunt labor to actually making meaningful decisions (almost enough time to be allowed to tie your own shoes in academia without a PhD supervising you, as long as you give all the credit for the shoe-tying to the PhD who isn't supervising you), and I can point to actual people whose lives are measurably better for me having done the work.

(Among them myself, since I no longer make $12 an hour. Not that us Japanese salarymen are rolling in it, but it is a pleasant change to not worry about how I am getting home for Christmas.)

Sadly, my ability to express this comment in the form of a witty stick figure sketch leaves much to be desired.

Re: Xkcd - story of our lives

#10

Post by anateus » Wed, Nov 18, 2009, 10:08 AM UTC

In my opinion, both outcomes are sad and unfortunate. Who has benefited from the engineer's genius? Well, a bunch of journal articles got written and perhaps someone wrote a dissertation or five, alternatively a few thousands of dollars got written off the bottom line of some mega-corp.

That's when the entrepreneur steps in. Either the dinky program fix, or the obscure (or not so much) journal article can be turned into something that is brought out to people, for the entrepreneur's profit, which is wholly contingent on convincing people that they have benefited!

It's sad to me that there really are large quantities of brilliant people who could be the guy in the first two panels who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities.