I think it's funny that some people could easily do in college what I wouldn't be able to do now despite working a high paying job in the industry.
Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
141–150 of 224 posts
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#142In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…
> People's natural mental sorting algorithm is most often insertion sort. That's what you use when you hold a hand of playing cards, [...]
I agree about the playing cards. But bubble sort was the natural sorting algorithm for me to come up with, too, when I was dealing with qbasic back in the 1990s.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#143In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…
Bubble sort was perfectly natural to me before I learned about algorithms. I think your “fairly strong collection of evidence” is weak. We teach it because it’s a study in how not to sort, most of the time.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anger and poor impulse control led me to rage quit a job. And I wasn't the best developer. I don't think any job was ever sorry to see me go.
How do you deal with idiot drivers though?
I put my finger on the protective cover over the laser turret switch, and usually that's enough. I've never actually lifted the cover.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#145I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
My current (government) employer blocks installation of Firefox and Chrome setup exes, but it's still just a hardcoded block on Chromesetup.exe and can be bypassed by calling it literally anything else.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#146In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…
> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail.
> People's natural mental sorting algorithm is most often insertion sort.
[embarrassed panic]
[trip down wikipedia lane]
No, it was bubble sort. Data and loop management for insertion sort wouldn't have been something I would have thought of back then.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web is broken. Someone's website wouldn't scroll (I don't remember the details, and I don't think I wanted to find out --- maybe it was overflow: hidden, but it could've been something else), and the only way I could figure out to deal with it was to open up the devtools responsive design mode and pretend the screen was bigger than it was so that the full page could show, and then use the browser's scrollbar from…
The web is broken. When an app on your computer or phone doesn't work well do you say Windows or iOS is broken, or do you say the app is broken? A broken website doesn't mean the web is broken.
The grain of the web is so that it's much easier to write something broken than something that works.
That's true of all development, granted, but doubly so the web, so yep... the web is broken.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I graduated last year, and I worked for my colleges IT department. We used to have to come knocking at the door if a student even had their own printers set up. It definitely would not go well. That being said, I did know people who clogged the cs department's machines with batch jobs to train really expensive ML models that did God knows what. Its not the same as bypassing a security system, but it is an instance of…
I couldn't imagine a situation where if someone knocked on my dorm room door asking if I had a printer in there, I would not have told them off with very unflattering language and telling them to perform fellatio upon themselves. How many students are just rolling over and saying sorry? I would imagine most would give you a very hard time.
Replying all gets you booted off the school network for a certain amount of time, it's in the TOS so they can do it. I imagine people value network access over having their own printer.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#149In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…
> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that.
FWIW, my first sort was selection sort. "Find the smallest element, place it at the start, repeat" seems like the obvious way to do it, without the fussing about with shuffling already sorted elements out of the way that insertion sort requires.
Perhaps it's a thinking top-down vs bottom-up kind of thing? People who think bottom-up stumble on bubble sort, people who think top-down stumble on selection or insertion.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…
> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. > People's natural mental sorting algorithm is most often insertion sort. [embarrassed panic] [trip down wikipedia lane] No, it was bubble sort. Data and loop management for insertion sort wouldn't have been something I would have thought of back then.
What confuses me is that isn't the data and loop management for bubble sort even more complicated?
Insertion sort is literally just "keep track of the index beyond the last sorted element, then scan for the next smallest element and swap it in, repeat until you have gone through the entire array." This is about as simple as a comparison sort gets. (And it's what literally everyone I've watched does when they get dealt a few playing cards.)
Bubble sort, on the other hand, requires you to reason about consecutive adjacent swaps, keep track of whether the current iteration dirtied the array, and so on. (Just the idea of bubble sorting playing cards gets me sweaty. It would take long, be cumbersome, and hard to keep track of.)
Edit: who is embarrassed now? What I'm describing is apparently not insertion sort but selection sort.