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It’s a Unix system I know this

elaine-cao-93.medium.com

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Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#41

Post by jicksaw »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #40
Karupan wrote: post #32

> Surely, “just whip up a solution in an hour” doesn’t ever happen in reality. > > Right? Err, maybe the author hadn't experienced that before, but IMO that happens pretty frequently, even for projects that have been in production for years.

Exactly! An unfortunate truth about running live and complex services is that they break frequently in strange and weird ways and we need to write a fix as quickly as possible, get it reviewed quickly and then roll it out asap. The term "hotfix" literally comes from that. The time range to develop and apply hotfix can be 30 mins to 48 hours--depends on nature of issue.

But how often can you say with confidence it will take 30 minutes? If the author was wrong about being able to do it in time, the players would waste their time waiting for a solution and eventually leave. It might be better to just tell the players to go home.

IME with a hotfix you have no choice but to fix it, no matter how long it takes.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#43

Post by Quequau »

Tor3 wrote: post #27
erlkonig wrote: post #15

Amusingly, that UI in the film is a real piece of Unix software named FSN on IRIX; I used it some around 1994 on Silicon Graphics hosts at Origin Games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

Yes, I remember that it became available after the movie.. and I tried it and found it completely useless in practice. I don't think a single programmer at our company liked it and it was soon forgotten. Did anyone here get some use out of it? I seem to remember that part of the problem was that it didn't seem to work as well or efficiently as the movie showed it.

I did exactly the same thing and had a similar experience.

I think this is broadly applicable to most, probably all stylized movie user interfaces. Minority Report, Tron and Star Trek come to mind. They look really cool on the big screen and are inspiring but once you get home and try to actually use something like it in real life for something productive and it's an impediment more than an inspiration.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#44

Post by pseudonymcoward »

thyrsus wrote: post #42

What is a blue card (in brief bio)? Urban dictionary was not enlightening.

In Magic, cards come in one of 5 colours* - white, blue, black, red, and green. Each colour has specific mechanics associated with it as well as a general play style. Magic players often have a preference for specific colours as a result.

The colours are analogous to factions in strategy games, or to the different heroes in Hearthstone, but with more flexibility to mix colours in a single deck.

* or colourless, or multicoloured combinations

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#45

Post by pastage »

ncmncm wrote: post #24

I kept being distracted by the "why would anyone allow themselves to get so invested in a walled garden, especially one where the garden owner is so obviously hostile and non-responsive?" I understand that literally millions get invested in various walled Microsoft, Apple, Google, and even Facebook gardens, not to mention McDonalds, Nintendo, etc. But that doesn't make the answer any clearer.

Ads, group think and social belonging/inclusion. That is just stating the obvious, but yes the problems of this event came from the issues you list.

On a side I wonder why it is so hard to make event software like this. I looked at reimplementing a race manager used to track times for cars in Pinewood Derby rally for something akin to this, it take a lot of work to make it "usefull". Especially considering the index card solution mentioned for Swiss pairing seems to be such an easy concept when done manually.

The racing manager software was called DerbyNet, and works great for its purpose.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#46

Post by rurban »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #30
rurban wrote: post #21

There are some good swiss pairing systems on GitHub, I had to use recently. Written in C, but it works as nice as the system she wrote. Would have saved her some sweat. There's also one in typescript with very nice UI, but not completely Swiss, just some random swiss with extended constraints (girls prefering to play against girls, and such).

Fair point, but sometimes, especially with a deadline and a rough idea of how you're going to implement something, it's faster to code something yourself, warts and all, rather than sifting through Github to find ones that look good, cloning, installing dependencies, and checking that they have all the features you need, they work correctly, and that you won't need to familiarise yourself with someone else's codebase…

Well, when I faced a similar problem (organizing large table tennis tournaments) which exceeded the limit of the usual free android apps (max 10 players), I prepared beforehand these two apps.

And in one cases I even needed it then, because too many players showed up. Using a lame closed-source app causes always sweat, so I'm better well prepared.

https://github.com/search?q=swiss+tournament&type=repositori... => 667 results

https://github.com/JeffHoogland/pypair/blob/master/pypair.py uses the exact same format she needed.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#47

Post by oritart »

kleiba wrote: post #28
faitswulff wrote: post #11

The level of pressure and requirements are so similar to coding interview challenges (if not more grueling - 14 hours?!) that not only should Elaine be certified as a level 3 judge, but she should also get a pass on the technical round of any future coding interview!

I agree. Initially I though the task was not _that_ hard but you've got to take the circumstances into account. This was not a homework task she was to solve in the serenity of her own home. Not was it pre-specified for her by a teacher trying to address the correct level of learning advancement. This was the real thing, on the fly. She points out how she had to put on headphones just to cancel out some of the noise,…

Right. I mean, in the original example I referenced in the title, the main character is just trying to find a particular file, which isn't that hard, but its pretty stressful if there's a dinosaur trying to kill you banging on the door.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#48

Post by oritart »

Karupan wrote: post #32

> Surely, “just whip up a solution in an hour” doesn’t ever happen in reality. > > Right? Err, maybe the author hadn't experienced that before, but IMO that happens pretty frequently, even for projects that have been in production for years.

I've definitely experienced this before! But, like, its dramatically different if you're physically in the space and there's visible pressure. Its not like I was at home dealing with a crisis where I could more easily block out everything. And coding from scratch is significantly more stressful, imo, than bug fixing.

In addition to my (former) day job, one of my side projects is a live service with ~60k monthly users, and it has broken in prod multiple times.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#49

Post by oritart »

ajross wrote: post #2

I had to jump in here, not to argue with the substance of the article[1] but to pull out this one quote that I just can't get behind: > In popular media, a genius hacker codes some solution from scratch in the space of an hour or two, solving a problem that would otherwise doom the other protagonists. But in reality, programming is slow. I mean, sure, it's not like The Movies. But hacking is fast ! In no other profes…

No for sure its definitely more common than I made it out to be, but I took some artistic license with this for the sake of entertainment. ;)

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#50

Post by themoonisachees »

ncmncm wrote: post #24

I kept being distracted by the "why would anyone allow themselves to get so invested in a walled garden, especially one where the garden owner is so obviously hostile and non-responsive?" I understand that literally millions get invested in various walled Microsoft, Apple, Google, and even Facebook gardens, not to mention McDonalds, Nintendo, etc. But that doesn't make the answer any clearer.

The short answer is that Wizards Of The Coast has an extremely tight grip on all Magic The Gathering events.

To organize an mtg event, you must use their shitty app, otherwise you cannot be an official tournament, and AFAIK are actually forbidden from calling it an MTG event alltogether. Supposedly this is the nintendo way of doing things where under cover of "quality assurance" and under threat of trademark litigation, you can enforce a very tight grip on your product ecosystem.

The longer answer is that as a judge, OOP has no control over the solution " chosen "by tournament organisers and the org has no control over the solution imposed on them by wotc. Wotc in turn has no incentive to improve their product for a lack of viable competition and here you are.

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