Hiking near Seattle

I’ve always meant to share with you all the interesting things I read around the internet and here it is (even pictures I’ve taken before!). They mostly come from browsing Hacker New‘s RSS feed.

Featured Articles

A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students – Awesome advice for those seeking tech internships. My advice? Start as early as you know you are interested in the tech industry as positions are available for people of all levels of skill. Don’t be afraid of failing interviews as every experience makes you stronger. Also, prepare early!

Why Every Professional Should Consider Blogging – For those wanting a little bit of encouragement (it helped me) to share their findings with your fellow peers of the interwebs, this is a good read. Talk Binary generates enough income to support itself and keep my hobby going.

For Facebook ‘Hacker Way’ is Way of Life – For those working on projects, learn to hack. Build products quickly and always have a working demo every step of the way no matter what. It’ll help you test and ask other people for input.

Other Noteworthy Mentions

Microsoft, Apple, and Google: where does the money come from? – Are you surprised?

Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success – My take? Don’t wait and take action. Follow your passion.

Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else – Don’t like the unified experience Google is bringing? Well, you aren’t alone.

Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off ‘Tiny Tower’ With Canadian Release of ‘Dream Heights’ – Using ideas from one game to create another is nothing new in the gaming industry, but blatantly making an exact copy is a little shocking.

Why crimes on Skype leave witnesses but no evidence – How would you allow for Skype to gather evidence? It would be too much data and too much of a legal fuss for Skype to handle. What about on the client side? You’d have similar problems.

Cars kill cities – It’s interesting to see how people rely so much on transportation. I’m shocked at how much space a city dedicates to parking as well. If only LA could have a better transportation system…the 405 wouldn’t be hell.

Bill Gates on his last visit with Steve Jobs – Are we ever going to have another duo of tech titans battling against each other across many years?

Find anything interesting? I’d love to know what you think!

* This is not intended to portray all the interesting articles that I read on HN that I feel are most important. They are just a small collection of articles I thought I should share with everyone. If I missed something, please let us know below!

I was meaning to switch to an even cleaner layout for Talk Binary and recently (just today!) came across to doing so.

I haven’t completed added all the functionality I wanted to yet to the site, so sit tight! For example, I need to fix up the navigation and determine what should go on the sidebar. Do you have any suggestions? Anything you might find helpful? Our previous layout had the featured posts dead center and I’m thinking of placing simply links in the navigation this time around.

I also am reducing the amount of advertisements. I figured a cleaner layout with less distraction should make the user more welcome. I would get rid of advertisements all together, but they have been paying the server bills at GoDaddy, which hasn’t made me happy since they back up SOPA.

I know I wasn’t that great at updating the site much this later part of the year. To be honest, I was wrapping up my Masters at UCLA. Since I finished with courses this past Fall, I just have to finish my Masters project which should allow me to also focus on other things before I officially graduate this Winter quarter.

I plan on sharing more of my iOS project I’ve been coding using Cocos2d and several other awesome tools. If you want to be updated with how far along I’m doing with my game, subscribe!

Also, I watched Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol and I recommend everyone to go see it! It’s fun!

Happy Holidays!!

Organically, Google and other services removed my site from their blacklist, so everything is good now! How did it happen? I have no idea. This just showed me that this can happen to anyone (since it happened to me)!

Since a few friends of mine and I have been interviewing in the past, I’ve also decided to start including a few interview type questions followed with optimal solutions. That way, it would be an awesome way to stay sharp for when the time comes. If you have any questions you’d like to share, feel free to share it through our Contact page.

I’ll post one soon so stay tuned. I’m also very active on Twitter so feel free to follow me.

For all of those that are graduating, congratulations! What lies ahead of you is just the beginning. If you thought college was a difficult part of your life, think about what is ahead of you now. You have the world ahead of you and nothing can stop you. Just make sure you aspire to who you really want to be.

I had a friend who went from being a Materials Science Engineer with a full time position, to drop it all away to become an actor in Hollywood. He’s already taking classes and has made an extra in Californication. What he told me was to make sure that my job isn’t simply something I wanted to do, but that its my passion because once something is your passion, it’s never a job.

So if you have always wanted to do something you haven’t done anything about, maybe its time to start listening to your heart and not to your head. That way, you don’t beat yourself upside the head once you turn the age where you can’t do it anymore.

The picture above is from the ceremony I attended to in the University of California, Riverside. I went to visit a friend who finished his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. What a way to set the bar high! Shout outs to Dr. Jesse Lozano!

Anyways, I’ll be on the road for the next couple of days. I’m about to head to Seattle, where I’m about to start my internship with Microsoft. I’ll update some pictures of my trip in the next few days. Until then, take it easy. If you just graduated, make sure you relax with friends and family because the challenge has yet to come.

I received a similar math question in a Google Interview. At the time being, I had no idea how to solve it and struggled to come up with an answer. If I had practiced a few math questions before, then it would’ve been quite easy actually. This is why I definitely encourage everyone to try it out if you want to practice your programming and problem solving skills.

You can complete the problems in the language of your choice. To show you my dedication, I have my badge on the footer of this website and its included above. I’m currently at Level 1 because I’ve solved 25 questions so far. If you want a word of advice, try writing all the solutions in one file if you are doing it in a language like Java or C++. I have done so, and I find myself reusing code in order to solve more difficult problems. I’ve even used a combination of functions from previous problems to solve tougher later problems.

Complete the problems one at a time

If you feel like you can’t solve any of them, start with the first one. These problems are made so you can start with the first problem and learn the skills to solve the following problems. Remember, try using Google when you have a question relating on how to solve the problem mathematically. They will give you hints on how to solve the math problems in a reasonable amount of time. Also, recursion is easy and fun to use, but they won’t help you solve many of these problems. So try coming up with a fast iterative solution. As always, try coming up with the best solution because those are the solutions that matter in the end to the recruiters! When you solve each problem you can view other peoples comments on how they solved them so read and learn.

Good luck!

Project Euler

The topic was on The Evils of Simulation: Diablo 3 Cloth and the abstract of the presentation was the following:

Cloth simulation has helped to breathe life into Diablo 3. Flags, kilts, dresses, and banners respond to movement, wind, and explosions. Erin Catto will cover the basics of cloth physics, dig into some of the thorny problems that arise when implementing cloth simulation in a game environment and discuss how cloth is integrated into the Diablo 3 tools and engine.

Digging more into his bio, I found out that the speaker is actually someone very known in the industry as well as in the open source community:

Erin got his start in the game industry at Crystal Dynamics where he wrote the physics engine for Tomb Raider: Legend. He is currently at Blizzard Entertainment working on the Domino physics engine used by Diablo 3 and other projects. He is the author of the Box2D open source physics engine, used to create Crayon Physics, Limbo, Angry Birds and other iPhone games. Erin holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University. – UCLA Seminar

He started the talk by showing us a video clip of the barbarian performing his stomp attack which showed his kilt flapping around after the attack. And how was this done? Ideally, since the game is required to run on low end machines the cloth simulation had to work on very basic principles to use a small amount of resources when run real time in game. This was done with the use of a Particle System since trying to simulate a cloth that is composed of thousands of thin strings would be a challenge by itself. A particle system is composed of basic particles such as a point in space and a velocity. By using Newton’s laws of physics along with some intricate math formulas, its possible to simulate fireworks, fur, grass, explosions and in this case the movement of cloth.

Erin spent most of his time talking about the challenges in creating such a system such as:

• How do we attach the particles, vertices joined by edges, onto a 3D mesh?
• How do we simulate stretching and contraction?
• How do we incorporate gravity and velocity into the movement of these particles that simulated the cloth?

Given his experience with the Box2D physics engine I can only imagine that creating the cloth simulation was something he enjoyed doing as he probably used previous knowledge to incorporate into Diablo 3. He even mentioned how he cringed whenever he saw other video games that had low quality cloth physics or simulation. Once you get to that level of detail and can complain about it because you can, props to you my friend.

And guess what was one of the questions asked by the audience? “When is Diablo 3 coming out?”

“We hope to release it sometime this year”

Box2D
Erin Catto Google Profile

I plan on adding the following items.

• Books on topics in Computer Science
• Books for programming iOS and potentially Android in the future
• Computer parts and accessories
• and more!

For now, just know its in the early stages. I looked through my history on Amazon and I added the things I would recommend to my friends. If you have any suggestions on what type of things I should have let me know. I’ll be glad to put them in the store if I feel like everyone would benefit from it. Feel free to drop suggestions below or e-mail me as well. I’d love to hear from you.

I made a question using the Facebook Questions platform and got some responses, so I’ll be compiling people’s answers soon. Feel free to post your response in the original thread or in the comments below.

Are there any things you wished you knew before you started your computer science career?

Go Bruins!

This following week is known to many college students as dead week. Why is that so? Well, that’s because all days of instruction have finished and the days for the final examination begin. So if you don’t know yet, it’s called dead week for various reasons.

• Nearly all social activities stop during this time since students want to focus on studying for their finals
• It’s also dead week because of the way students sleep when they stop sleeping accordingly to pull all nighters
• It’s the time when people refuse to log on to Facebook, Skype, or IM in order to try and focus on their studies (and it rarely happens)
• Hardly anyone goes to the gym and the library is packed
• And the list goes on…

But does it really have to be this way? It doesn’t. If one prepares adequately during the quarter then this time you should be relaxing and slowly refreshing your mind on the material. If not, good luck trying to cram in ten weeks of material in a few nights before a long exam (~3 hours)!

I’d personally advise against cramming but sometime its the only way so learning how to focus and get things done is crucial. So stop slacking and hit the books because I know I am.

Good luck!

xkcd

Fortunately for us, FOB wrote an article titled Things I see in student code. A lot of these tips will help you avoid writing bad code so I would encourage everyone to check it out. Sure, you might be able to write code that works, but having more efficient and elegant code goes a longer way. For example, when you are working with colleagues, interviewing for a job, or going back to work on a project days later you’ll thank yourself in the end.

Getting into the habit into writing neat code is essential especially when you are interviewing for a job. Most of the time employers ask a simple coding question and they won’t appreciate your coding style if its one of a kind.

So why don’t you go ahead and tell us about your experiences with bad code? Whether it has been your own or someone elses you might have seen let us know. I’ll come up with my own set of bad coding habits I’ve seen and I’ll post them up soon along with any you may submit.

Thanks to Nick Lee for submitting this article! FOB – Things I see in student code