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/ ]
Xkcd - story of our lives
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#22Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job? I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings ("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world"). So we can understand computers. Guess what, it isn't rocket science. OK, maybe it is kind of rocket science - but the reason other people don't understand it is simply be…
Guess what, rocket science isn't that hard either.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#23In 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/ ]
Apparently its attributed to Greg Walsh who got the idea working on the Titan graphics computer at Ardent Computers with Cleve Moler, the author of matlab.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#24My 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…
Yes, I was actually expecting the cartoon to go in that direction. Academia: "You're going to be modestly famous in mathematics textbooks!" Business: "OMG your brilliant code [1] has saved me three hours of work per day and generated an additional $1M in revenue. Here, have a raise."
But this is a cartoon specificially about deep magic: About the bittersweet joy of discovering something great that only the well-trained can understand. It's not about the money, and it isn't even about happiness in general: It's about a specific sort of happiness and how delimited it is.
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[1] i.e. "the CRUD app that you copied from the framework documentation in one afternoon". But a well-placed simple CRUD app is a godsend. Businesspeople don't care about methods, they only care about results, but by god are they happy with results.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#25I don't know where the idea comes from that academics value elegance in programming type problems more than businesspeople anyway. In my experience, academics are the ones who only care that it works. It might be an abstract thing that works rather than a practical thing, but it has to work and no further. In business (businesses I've worked with), you have a motivation to make something that is GOOD, and "it works" is never good enough, and only making things that work is a good way to get managed out or fired.
I've never seen code in the business world that even approached being as horrid as the stuff I saw in academia.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think "posting all xkcd cartoons" is near happening in HN at all. This one it's pretty close to the HN main interests (academy research and/or entrepreneurism)
Actually we've been through that. Not sure why it (thankfully) stopped.
My guess is that it stopped because there are no longer any HN readers who both like xkcd and don't check it anyway. We reached xkcd-awareness saturation a couple of years ago.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually we've been through that. Not sure why it (thankfully) stopped.
My guess is that it stopped because there are no longer any HN readers who both like xkcd and don't check it anyway. We reached xkcd-awareness saturation a couple of years ago.
I think there's a reason to post this one in particular - to set up a comments thread on HN about it.
I kind of thought it had harsher implications for Academia - for every self-congratulatory paper of something new, it's already been done a hundred times in the "Real World" in an unheralded source control repository.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#28Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job? I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings ("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world"). So we can understand computers. Guess what, it isn't rocket science. OK, maybe it is kind of rocket science - but the reason other people don't understand it is simply be…
Guess what, rocket science isn't that hard either.
Carmack was able to grasp it with enough studying.
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#29Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job? I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings ("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world"). So we can understand computers. Guess what, it isn't rocket science. OK, maybe it is kind of rocket science - but the reason other people don't understand it is simply be…
Guess what, rocket science isn't that hard either.
Yet, do you know it?
Re: Xkcd - story of our lives
#30Okay, raise your hand if you actually are working on phone-to-Exchange sync software...
raises hand