The Official Status Thread

[Tsaukpaetra]

Status: Google Maps Go has had a booboo.

[Zerosquare]

Great. Now they're taking design lessons from Microsoft.

[Tsaukpaetra]

status: shit, I completely forgot about these guys...

[Cursorkeys]

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: A colleague remarked about getting an email from someone named <firstname> <lastname> III. That was not something I'd seen in real life before.

III as in "the Third", or as in "there are two other people with the same name in the organization"?

My high school had like 3 different username templates while I was there, and the last one was five characters from surname, three characters from given name, and then three digits that get incremented for each duplicate.

So I got lubarben000 because my name is perfect.

I don't remember what they did for people with surnames that aren't 5+ letters long.

My University solved the problem by using your student ID for all your usernames and your email address. Only problem is that, like a prision number, 01337418 is now permanently burnt into my brain.

[Rhywden]

@Tsaukpaetra My version of GoogleMaps randomly switched to English yesterday while navigating.

However, the speech engine itself remained German.

[Applied Mediocrity]

@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:

status: listening two people whose first language sounds to be Spanish attempt to communicate in English.

Halfway there to saying, "Pueden llamar en español, no preocupes."

Alternatively, you could try @Benjamin-Hall 's silence spell silencio por favor.

[Jaloopa]

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

@ben_lubar Got any that don't (that aren't free-to-play)?

I don't need to name any examples. My point is that it's entirely possible a game on Steam doesn't integrate with any of Steam's features, or that one does but also functions without access to them.

This is one of those things that would take many hours longer to research than to just test.

The game I've been playing recently is Skyrim. The latest steam update seems to have sorted that issue but I'm still at the mercy of endless steam updates that do nothing to change my experience playing games except delay me getting to play them

[topspin]

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

[Rhywden]

@topspin Yes, not understanding recursion is a bit weird. That's something which was covered in our very first semester in Analysis.

I mean, this is basic stuff like:

a₀ = 1
a_n+1 = a_n + 1

[Zerosquare]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

Probably sounding like an ass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gROO7xSTxfY
?

[Applied Mediocrity]

@Zerosquare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbCaptV509g

[dkf]

Status: Just got confirmation that our big system (the one that I write software to support) has booted in its full target configuration with (over) a million CPU cores. It's going to be mostly in testing until the formal switch-on day (which will be all politicians and speeches and stuff) but this is big milestone.

Which means that the courier really did deliver the missing cables yesterday afternoon.

[Zerosquare]

@dkf:

[dkf]

@Zerosquare That's planned for the formal event, yes. And visits to see the system itself (in groups of 15–20 because that's what's manageable in that space); it's really not very exciting to look at, looking not much different to any other group of 12 full height racks, except the arrangement of boards in there is far tighter than you get in any conventional system. I guess it will be interesting to people who like cable runs?

Unfortunately there's also going to be a whole bunch of speeches.

[izzion]

@dkf
Then I recommend something harder. Maybe a sampling from @Polygeekery’s liquor cabinet?

[dkf]

@izzion said in The Official Status Thread:

Then I recommend something harder. Maybe a sampling from @Polygeekery’s liquor cabinet?

I have a bottle of Highland Park sitting a few feet away from me… but it's for next week.

[Applied Mediocrity]

@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:

it's really not very exciting to look at

Perhaps there's still time to fix up some flashing LEDs?

"Flash-flash-flash, then wait for it, nothing for a while, here it comes... double flash."

[dkf]

@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:

Perhaps there's still time to fix up some flashing LEDs?

We've got some of those (and the firmware regularly flashes them in a sort of wave if we don't tell it to do anything else). We were thinking about making a fancier version… but it's still just a bunch of circuit boards in cabinets…

[Zerosquare]

Wire up a bunch of GPIOs to 0.1 inch headers. Then add a bullet point to the features: "World's first Arduino-compatible supercomputer."

[dkf]

@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:

Wire up a bunch of GPIOs to 0.1 inch headers.

No GPIOs available. They're used during manufacturing, but aren't routed out onto the boards. We could simulate them with the FPGAs I guess, but I guess we'll do something else. We've got a little robot hooked up for demo purposes, but that just turns round on the spot following whatever motion it sees (because we don't want it to fall off the desk).

[Zerosquare]

Awww. "World's most expensive toy robot" it is, then.

[dkf]

@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:

Awww. "World's most expensive toy robot" it is, then.

We keep trying to find a student willing to make it screech out “Exterminate!”

[M_Adams]

@dkf

[loopback0]

@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:

(which will be all politicians and speeches and stuff)

Any clapping?

[PleegWat]

@M_Adams said in The Official Status Thread:

@dkf

You can so easily see no German persons were anywhere near the crafting of that text.

[dkf]

@loopback0 said in The Official Status Thread:

Any clapping?

Of the boss, the boss's boss, and the boss's boss's boss? Sure.

[anotherusername]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

Recursion in math and recursion in programming are pretty different, actually. I can see the difference potentially causing some problems. They're the same concept but applied in completely different ways.

[Tsaukpaetra]

@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: A colleague remarked about getting an email from someone named <firstname> <lastname> III. That was not something I'd seen in real life before.

III as in "the Third", or as in "there are two other people with the same name in the organization"?

My high school had like 3 different username templates while I was there, and the last one was five characters from surname, three characters from given name, and then three digits that get incremented for each duplicate.

So I got lubarben000 because my name is perfect.

I don't remember what they did for people with surnames that aren't 5+ letters long.

My University solved the problem by using your student ID for all your usernames and your email address. Only problem is that, like a prision number, 01337418 is now permanently burnt into my brain.

And is 70 percent of my password, coincidentally!

[Tsaukpaetra]

@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:

@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:

status: listening two people whose first language sounds to be Spanish attempt to communicate in English.

Halfway there to saying, "Pueden llamar en español, no preocupes."

Alternatively, you could try @Benjamin-Hall 's silence spell silencio por favor.

They were offering food. I'm not sure that would have been any better...

[Tsaukpaetra]

@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:

people who like cable runs

INB4 you discover the cable porn addicts...

[anotherusername]

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

@M_Adams said in The Official Status Thread:

@dkf

You can so easily see no German persons were anywhere near the crafting of that text.

Yes.. it's much too funny to have been written by a German.

[topspin]

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

Recursion in math and recursion in programming are pretty different, actually. I can see the difference potentially causing some problems. They're the same concept but applied in completely different ways.

Care to elaborate?
I don't see a huge difference between

and

def fac(n):
    if n == 0: return 1
    return n * fac(n-1)

[anotherusername]

@topspin Your program will crash for all non-integer values of n, and most integer values as well.

[Tsaukpaetra]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

Recursion in math and recursion in programming are pretty different, actually. I can see the difference potentially causing some problems. They're the same concept but applied in completely different ways.

Care to elaborate?
I don't see a huge difference between

and

def fac(n):
    if n == 0: return 1
    return n * fac(n-1)

I can! One is readable!

[topspin]

@anotherusername That's nitpicking. Let's just say the definition on top applies for ℕ, so it does for the code too. And people having trouble understanding that code surely don't have trouble understanding it because it overflows the data type¹ or stack-overflows on inputs which aren't natural numbers.
The obvious problems with that code aren't what prevents understanding recursion in programming languages.

¹It actually doesn't.

>>> fac(255)
3350850684932979117652665123754814942022584063591740702576779884286208799035732771005626138126763314259280802118502282445926550135522251856727692533193070412811083330325659322041700029792166250734253390513754466045711240338462701034020262992581378423147276636643647155396305352541105541439434840109915068285430675068591638581980604162940383356586739198268782104924614076605793562865241982176207428620969776803149467431386807972438247689158656000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000L

[topspin]

@Tsaukpaetra

[anotherusername]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@anotherusername That's nitpicking. Let's just say the definition on top applies for ℕ, so it does for the code too.

"Natural numbers" isn't a data type in computing. But you're right, I'm nitpicking. The reason that I'm nitpicking is to show that programmers have to care about stuff that mathematicians don't. Mathematicians don't care how much recursion is required, because they don't actually do the recursion -- they mathematically simplify out the recursion in order to find a non-recursive result.

Factorial is actually a great example; it shows this perfectly. The formula is perfectly straightforward, and yet, unless you were teaching beginners how to write recursive functions, you wouldn't write a program to calculate factorials recursively using that formula. If you actually need a factorial function, you just wouldn't write it like that. Instead, you would use mathematics to simplify that recursive formula into something non-recursive that a computer can more efficiently calculate. Then you would implement that formula in your program. At the very least, you'd write code that calculates the factorial iteratively instead of recursively, because the recursive algorithm requires stack space of a multiple of n, while the iterative method doesn't require any additional space at all -- just the counter, n, and a variable to hold the result.

Instead, recursion tends to be used for stuff like recursive data structures (where a data element can contain one or more data elements of the same type as itself -- lists, trees) or for code which processes every node in a recursive data structure. And even then, the data structure usually isn't infinite (unless it contains loops, which your code will then have to detect and break to avoid looping infintely) and you generally learn to write code that uses a loop so that it avoids true recursion whenever possible.

Basically, as soon as programmers learn what recursion is, they learn to avoid it whenever possible. Mathematicians don't have to care, because they have methods for dealing with recursion, but computers will go right into that infinite loop if the programmer isn't smart enough to write code that doesn't do that.

[topspin]

@anotherusername But knowing when to avoid recursion because of these intricacies comes after broadly knowing how it works in general. Since the original topic was about not understanding something where you do use recursion, I don't think these details should prevent a mathematician from understanding recursion in programming.

Another problematic example would be Fibonacci numbers. The naive recursive implementation is horrendously slow, but it does work exactly like the mathematical definition. If your task is to write the naive implementation, there being more efficient ways to do it shouldn't hinder your understanding of doing it the simple way.

[anotherusername]

@topspin Additional reading, if you're interested.

The Old New Thing

And if you're more concerned about quickly getting a close estimate of a large factorial than you are about getting an exact but slow result, you can further simplify it by using something like Stirling's approximation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling's_approximation

Or take the best of both worlds, and use a lookup table for exact results of low factorials and an approximation function for higher ones.

[anotherusername]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@anotherusername But knowing when to avoid recursion because of these intricacies comes after broadly knowing how it works in general. Since the original topic was about not understanding something where you do use recursion, I don't think these details should prevent a mathematician from understanding recursion in programming.

Another problematic example would be Fibonacci numbers. The naive recursive implementation is horrendously slow, but it does work exactly like the mathematical definition. If your task is to write the naive implementation, there being more efficient ways to do it shouldn't hinder your understanding of doing it the simple way.

The more common place where you actually find recursion in computing is for data structures, and that's pretty different from the sort of recursion you'd find in math. Programmers run into structures made up of nested vectors or matrices (arrays, structs, classes, etc) all the time -- mathematicians don't tend to have to handle those sorts of structures as often, until they start getting into applied math and running real-world kinds of data through a program like Matlab.

[topspin]

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

data structures, and that's pretty different from the sort of recursion you'd find in math.

See, that's an argument I can get behind. (Although I think a mathematician should have no problems grasping that abstraction, but some might)
The computation one I remain unconvinced, since the pitfalls that arise are nothing you are worried about in an exercise, and should not impede your understanding.

[anotherusername]

@topspin It's actually closer what he was originally talking about, though.

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing

is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it

You can have a basic grasp of what mathematical recursion is, but still struggle with figuring out when and how to use it in computing (and when and how not to use it). It's very easy to accidentally write recursive code that crashes or loops infinitely instead of terminating cleanly when it's supposed to.

[topspin]

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

but still struggle with figuring out when and how to use it in computing (and when and how not to use it).

The "when" was given, only the "how" is relevant.

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

It's very easy to accidentally write recursive code that crashes or loops infinitely instead of terminating cleanly when it's supposed to.

Getting your base cases correct is something a mathematician needs to do too, by the way. You can't leave out the "0! := 1" part in the definition, and just like in the code your recursion also doesn't work for 1.5. The gamma function can be extended to it, but the original definition does not cover that.

[hungrier]

@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:

@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: A colleague remarked about getting an email from someone named <firstname> <lastname> III. That was not something I'd seen in real life before.

III as in "the Third", or as in "there are two other people with the same name in the organization"?

My high school had like 3 different username templates while I was there, and the last one was five characters from surname, three characters from given name, and then three digits that get incremented for each duplicate.

So I got lubarben000 because my name is perfect.

I don't remember what they did for people with surnames that aren't 5+ letters long.

My University solved the problem by using your student ID for all your usernames and your email address. Only problem is that, like a prision number, 01337418 is now permanently burnt into my brain.

And is 70 percent of my password, coincidentally!

Your password is 01910597?

[Tsaukpaetra]

Status: Fucking hell with the arguing in the Status Thread! :fliptable.png:

[Tsaukpaetra]

@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:

@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:

@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: A colleague remarked about getting an email from someone named <firstname> <lastname> III. That was not something I'd seen in real life before.

III as in "the Third", or as in "there are two other people with the same name in the organization"?

My high school had like 3 different username templates while I was there, and the last one was five characters from surname, three characters from given name, and then three digits that get incremented for each duplicate.

So I got lubarben000 because my name is perfect.

I don't remember what they did for people with surnames that aren't 5+ letters long.

My University solved the problem by using your student ID for all your usernames and your email address. Only problem is that, like a prision number, 01337418 is now permanently burnt into my brain.

And is 70 percent of my password, coincidentally!

Your password is 01910597?

Very close! Two numbers are switched and two are off by two, and you're missing the other 30%, but that's an astonishingly close guess....

[pie_flavor]

@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:

@ben_lubar said in The Official Status Thread:

@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:

@PleegWat said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: A colleague remarked about getting an email from someone named <firstname> <lastname> III. That was not something I'd seen in real life before.

III as in "the Third", or as in "there are two other people with the same name in the organization"?

My high school had like 3 different username templates while I was there, and the last one was five characters from surname, three characters from given name, and then three digits that get incremented for each duplicate.

So I got lubarben000 because my name is perfect.

I don't remember what they did for people with surnames that aren't 5+ letters long.

My University solved the problem by using your student ID for all your usernames and your email address. Only problem is that, like a prision number, 01337418 is now permanently burnt into my brain.

My high school was great. The student ID number was your primary mode of identification, and you should never tell it to anyone because if you lose your ID card you can give your number instead. And it's also the email address.
Did they mitigate that sort of problem at your university?

[pie_flavor]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

Oh, if I knew what I was talking about with a formula like that, I might have been able to help. But remember when I said she doesn't really understand any of the structure of a program? Even if she knew what a recursive formula was, there's no way she'd be able to translate it to code.

[pie_flavor]

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:

@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:

@pie_flavor said in The Official Status Thread:

Status: I really, really, really hate CS lab. Because I get to helplessly watch as my lab partner struggles through understanding what a recursive formula is and how to apply it to things like file tree listing, when she doesn't really understand methods, or classes, or what . does, or what the difference between if and for is. I swear they're making the class overly fast on purpose to weed out as many potential major applicants as possible.

It doesn't help that she took Intro to Programming seven years ago and is only taking Intro to Data Structures because her math major requires it. She's going to fail the class, hard, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

Probably sounding like an ass, but I have little sympathy for a math major who doesn't understand recursion. Unless, of course, she's first semester or something, than her major doesn't matter.

Recursion in math and recursion in programming are pretty different, actually. I can see the difference potentially causing some problems. They're the same concept but applied in completely different ways.

Care to elaborate?
I don't see a huge difference between

and

def fac(n):
    if n == 0: return 1
    return n * fac(n-1)

def, :, if, return, (). That's the difference. Not to mention we're doing Java, which is five times worse. I wish they'd teach in Python, but they've got it in their heads that the industry uses Java so they should teach Java in the intro classes so people will have industry skills.

[dkf]

@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:

INB4 you discover the cable porn addicts...

Too late. I know about those people.

OTOH, our cabling patterns don't fit well with what those guys like; the cabling is forming the chips into a single gigantic toroid, and not (mostly) routing ethernet to routers. We've got those bits too, but they're the trivial cabling; the toroidal interconnect is a very different beast.