Cheap GPUs render strong passwords useless

[Asher]

Kuci graduated a year ago. Why don't you give him a little time?

A year out of university I was a Team Lead at Lehman with 5 people under me...

My dad's an actuary and after 10 years or so led a group at an actuarial firm. He started doing law 10 years ago and now he's a practice group leader at a law firm. He understands what he's doing. He doesn't apply tools, he creates them.

I won't deny you have a lot of understanding about what you do, but in different respects. I'm sure you know C++ backwards and forwards. I'm guessing Kuci is, compared to you, a C++ padawan. I'm not even that much. But knowing the theory of computer science is just as important as experience.

You know what? I'm not even a syntax guru. I don't know C++ backwards and forwards. I know way too many languages to bother with that. Google exists for a reason.

The value isn't knowing in how to use programming languages. That is the equivalent of a carpenter.

The value is in the aspect of Computer Science you are ignoring: understanding how the hardware & software interact and understanding good system design. My CS degree is far less math heavy than Kuci's was -- my concentration was in Software Engineering, which meant I spent classes in systems design theory when he spent it with math theory and monte carlo method nonsense. One of those is far more useful in the real world.

[Kuciwalker]

Asher's pretty clearly made the "deal with the outsourced programmers so it will take my firm longer to figure out I'm incompetent" choice.

[loinburger]

Dude, math and math theory IS computer science. And it isn't some sort of ivory tower, don't-get-your-hands-dirty academic interpretation of computer science, it's genuinely useful in the real world. Remember the RNG thread, where you were reseeding and didn't believe KH or Kuci until you actually coded it yourself and discovered that you actually didn't understand RNGs after all? And that your first piece of advice to someone writing an RNG was actually a huge mistake?

Understanding how these things work is important. It's also important to be able to keep up with new technologies but it's a totally different set of skills to be able to pick up a new programming language in a day, learn a new operating system within a week, and generally stay with the times. Both are very important if you want to be a software developer.

A bare fraction of computer science is related to math, even in academia - the phd qualifying exam I took was approximately 10% math (and that was along the lines of "define an uncomputable function and prove that it is uncomputable" as opposed to what a non-CS person would recognize as math - the only non-CS-recognizable math I encountered was in numerical analysis). I don't recall reading the RNG thread, but there is rarely any reason for a programmer to write their own RNG - that's like writing your own memory manager or writing your own balanced binary tree.

[Asher]

Salaries aren't the be-all and end-all of what career you should pick, but in the career you DO pick, you have some choices you can make that will determine how far up the ladder you can go. If you limit yourself to applying tools, then you can only go up so far. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Depending on what tools you're talking about, that can be quite high.

This is what I'm talking about when I say you don't understand -- I don't even program anymore, really. They don't pay me for my ability to use tools. The tool I use is my brain, and usually electronic whiteboards to diagram and explain things.

I design features, I architect systems, I remove technical roadblocks for my underlings, and I perform code reviews. I don't apply "tools". In your architect vs carpenter example, I am quite literally the architect.

[Hauldren Collider]

The value is in the aspect of Computer Science you are ignoring: understanding how the hardware & software interact and understanding good system design. My CS degree is far less math heavy than Kuci's was -- my concentration was in Software Engineering, which meant I spent classes in systems design theory when he spent it with math theory and monte carlo method nonsense. One of those is far more useful in the real world.

Monte carlo nonsense? Dude, I could probably put together a monte carlo simulator in 20 minutes if I'm slow. Monte carlo's really basic. If that's what you consider to be academic nonsense, where do you start thinking things are practical? Quicksort?

The trait you are talking about sounds to me like leadership. That's extremely valuable. Incredibly so. I find people who have it to be quite impressive. But it isn't CS.

EDIT: Kuci has corrected me. Monte Carlo is not basic. I wrote something with a friend that used monte carlo to play othello a while back, and thought I understood it.

[Asher]

Asher, by personal experience you don't want to try comparing actuary and programmer salaries on any kind of reasonable basis (e.g. lifetime earnings).

I'm not a programmer.

[Kuciwalker]

A bare fraction of computer science is related to math, even in academia - the phd qualifying exam I took was approximately 10% math (and that was along the lines of "define an uncomputable function and prove that it is uncomputable" as opposed to what a non-CS person would recognize as math - the only non-CS-recognizable math I encountered was in numerical analysis). I don't recall reading the RNG thread, but there is rarely any reason for a programmer to write their own RNG - that's like writing your own memory manager or writing your own balanced binary tree.

The point of the RNG thread is that Asher just doesn't have any intuition for theory, but usually thinks that he does. Thus this ridiculousness about how all our passwords are "useless".

And writing your own memory manager or your own balanced binary tree is something that first-year undergraduates are supposed to be able to do based on a few lectures. They aren't hard enough for "ahhhh but I don't actually do that in the real world" to be an excuse.

[Kuciwalker]

I'm not a programmer.

Now who's being pedantic?

[Asher]

Asher's pretty clearly made the "deal with the outsourced programmers so it will take my firm longer to figure out I'm incompetent" choice.

I don't make those decisions, and I'm actually in favour of terminating the relationship and hiring more locals. I don't find them productive or that useful.

As for people figuring out I'm incompetent...10 months ago when I started, I was a software developer. On my first day, I fixed one bug (where usually people take weeks to understand the system enough to fix bugs). That impressed them enough that when they assembled their "dream team" to crank out a very important product in a very short period of time, they put me on the team to "fix bugs". After a month of "fixing bugs" on it, they decided my time was bring wasted fixing bugs and they started giving me new features to implement. By the end of the 6 month dev cycle, I was the last man on the project tasked with thoroughly reviewing all code being checked in, evaluating the risk factor for bug fixes, coordinating testing (with 30 testers(!)). I applied for a patent for one of my features, which is unheard of for "newbies". Then at the end of that, they asked if I wanted to be Technical Lead for the flagship product's next major version, due out in a year and a half. I accepted (see the thread on that). At the end of the fiscal year awards last month, I was awarded two awards: one of them was for Rookie of the Year trophy (out of 50 new hires that fiscal year in our office).

In 10 months I went from the youngest person on the team as a regular developer doing bugfixes to being the technical lead of a project with a $25M budget, 30 developers (going up to 50 in the fall) on a product with over 5 million active installations.

I know it sounds like I'm bragging (and okay, I am a little -- I'm proud of it, for sure), but they aren't figuring out I'm incompetent. It's the opposite. I'm literally the youngest and technically least experienced person on the team, yet I'm the one that does the high-level design, rubber stamps other designs, reviews all code before it is committed, and am the person developers come to when they're stuck on something. Incompetent? Kiss my ass.

[Asher]

Monte carlo nonsense? Dude, I could probably put together a monte carlo simulator in 20 minutes if I'm slow. Monte carlo's really basic. If that's what you consider to be academic nonsense, where do you start thinking things are practical? Quicksort?

The trait you are talking about sounds to me like leadership. That's extremely valuable. Incredibly so. I find people who have it to be quite impressive. But it isn't CS.

No, it's not JUST leadership. You do not seem to comprehend how complex large software development is. Knowing how monte carlo works and knowing the ins and out of theoretical computer science means **** all in the real world. It is incredibly difficult to design large systems with large teams working on it. It's not just the leadership, it's the design aspects of the system. And I'm not just talking about knowing when to use private and public variables, I'm talking about knowing when to use inversion of control, dependency injections, practical use of design patterns, even source code management best practices, etc. It's quite literally being the architect of the system. The level of knowledge you're referring to would be the level of materials science, not architect -- someone who knows the exact chemical composition of every brick used in a building. That's ****ing useless in the real world.

And make no mistake -- people who do THAT well are rare and are WELL compensated. I'm not even going to tell you how much my raise was when I shifted from being a SoftDev to TechLead. It's huge.

[Asher]

Now who's being pedantic?

I'm not. There's a massive distinction. One codes, one doesn't. I don't code anymore. I write the odd script, make the odd code correction in a review, etc. But it's not pedantic to say I'm not a programmer.

[loinburger]

And writing your own memory manager or your own balanced binary tree is something that first-year undergraduates are supposed to be able to do based on a few lectures. They aren't hard enough for "ahhhh but I don't actually do that in the real world" to be an excuse.

Maybe an undergraduate could write a ****ty red-black tree or memory manager, but writing a good one is hardly trivial. For example, the BDW memory manager contains tens of thousands of lines of code - 99.99% of programmers would be fools if they tried to replicate that work rather than simply using it as is (+- a few config values).

[Asher]

loinburger

[Kuciwalker]

I'm not. There's a massive distinction. One codes, one doesn't. I don't code anymore. I write the odd script, make the odd code correction in a review, etc. But it's not pedantic to say I'm not a programmer.

Someone with social intelligence would have been able to recognize the meaning.

Maybe an undergraduate could write a ****ty red-black tree or memory manager, but writing a good one is hardly trivial. For example, the BDW memory manager contains tens of thousands of lines of code - 99.99% of programmers would be fools if they tried to replicate that work rather than simply using it as is (+- a few config values).

Of course. The problem is that Asher's shown himself to suck even at the first part.

Even worse, in the RNG thread the issue wasn't his inability to write an RNG, but to use one correctly! He made the sort of mistake that any developer would have the opportunity to make, and that makes the system insecure.

[Asher]

Someone with social intelligence would have been able to recognize the meaning.

Someone with social intelligence wouldn't have tried to make this joke.

Yeah, I was wrong in the RNG thread. I admitted to it and even wrote test apps to play with it.

Get over it, stop obsessing over it. It's pathetic and a bit Ben-like.