d-crane

The Ritman library is absolutely wonderful, and open to the public without appointment; if you find yourself in Amsterdam, it's absolutely worth it to go ring their doorbell and look around. It was the highlight of my post-high-school Europe trip.

Thank you for the historical info, and the video; as a big computing history buff, I really appreciate both the first-hand account and the media of the time!

As an undergraduate senior in the CS program at the University of Washington, I can definitely attest to memory management giving the majority of people a really hard time in our required C course. I've only talked to one other person in my cohort that likes programming in C, and unsurprisingly they don't have any trouble with the finer points of it at all.

Greg Egan's Diaspora starts with the details of what it's like for a new AI to be brought into existence in a society of advanced AIs, and jumps off from there. Definitely one of the more original hard sci-fi novels I've read.

That's interesting! As a former occult-type guy this was news to me. I can definitely see AC ribbing Waite over this endlessly.

I heard about SDF through telehack, and very much appreciate the similar vibe, to say nothing of the historical provenance of SDF!

My favorite telnet destination, and one of the few net destinations I still visit ~5 years later, is telehack.

telnet telehack.com

I've seen it mentioned a few times on HN, but only intermittently. I know they've recently added a system to exchange files (including BASIC programs, iirc!) with other users, which is pretty cool.

Well, our text for the course was Levitin's Design and Analysis of Algorithms, but I really can't speak to its quality at all - we just used the professor's own prepared information pretty much exclusively. From my brief look through the book, it looked okay, at least!

I just finished my undergrad CS algorithms course, and my professor mentioned this book, but we didn't use it. He essentially said that it contains so much material that it's rather all-encompassing as a reference book, but he definitely discouraged it as a textbook for learning as we would in a course. It sounds like you'd likely want to find something more geared towards teaching.

Alien: Isolation (for which I believe a short, non-publicly-available VR was made) would be an amazing and colossally scary VR experience. The immersion is already incredible just playing on the TV; I can't imagine the tension of trying to hide from the xenomorph only to have that barbed tail shoot through your chest unexpectedly.

Thank you, that seems like great advice. A few of his better known papers are definitely over my head currently, although I'm familiar with the basic concepts at least; but luckily he has some other work that is at least somewhat accessible for where I'm at. I'll keep working through his stuff and come armed with some questions, and as you point out, I can definitely use the practice in being able to read papers well and stay abreast of things.

Thanks! I'm definitely guilty of falling into that trap so far. I haven't wanted to show up and feel like I don't have anything interesting to say or like I can't make any kind of good impression, but your advice to just ask what I should do to go forward in the area I'm interested in totally makes sense.

Thanks for the reassurance that side projects and being the top of the class aren't particularly important. I definitely get a little worried when there I've got the 20-year-old classmates that have spent the last six months building some crazy thing, or have two internships and are launching a startup or whatever, so it's a relief to hear that being interested in the field and having ideas about it is enough.

Thanks, this is definitely helpful. I've got three or so weeks left in the quarter, so I can certainly go by during office hours between now and then. Very much appreciated.