Are you satisfied with your job? Are you satisfied with where your career path is taking you? These are important questions, and I try to take time to think about this every 6 months or so. Its usually trivial to make a general statement rating job satisfaction: “Yeah I like my job.” or “My career is going nowhere.” But what factors influence programmer job satisfaction? How can hackers become more satisfied with what they do? Read the rest of this entry »

The Eternity 2 (E2) puzzle has attracted the attention of puzzle fanatics, computer programmers, and mathematicians for many reasons, not the least of which is the $2 million prize for being the first to solve it. E2 is an edge-matching puzzle with 256 pieces. The general class of edge-matching puzzles is known to be NP-Complete, but it is unknown if there are aspects of E2 that can be exploited to make it tractable. In the spirit of cooperation, a few people have made their automated solvers available online, and I have provided an overview and back-of-the-napkin analysis of two of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Every hacker should have a good solid dead tree library to draw ideas from and use as reference material. This list has a bit of everything - textbooks you will encounter at top tier computer science universities, books giving insight into the industry, and references you shouldn’t be caught without. It is a list of hackers’ classics. Read the rest of this entry »

A sweet hack can be a clever piece of code, an innovative way of solving a technical problem, or just a cool use of technology. I put together a list of 5 hacks that I think are really sweet.

I am making Sweet Hacks a regular series here at GrokCode, turning it into a blog carnival that runs every three months. If you would like to nominate your own sweet hack for the next issue, send an email to jess [AT] grok-code.com with a short description of the hack and a link. Or if you are a del.icio.us user, tag the page “for:grokcode” to put it into my “links for you section.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is a Common Lisp code walkthrough for generating original jokes. You seed the generator with the knowledge about different objects, and it uses that vocabulary to generate unique jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was originally written for my CS288: An AI Approach to Natural Language Processing class at UC Berkeley in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »