

Advice for Computer Science College Students - s-phi-nl
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html

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tokenadult
"Most colleges designate certain classes as "writing intensive," meaning, you
have to write an awful lot to pass them. Look for those classes and take them!
Seek out classes in any field that have weekly or daily written assignments."

Good advice here. Get in the habit of WRITING (in a form that keeps an
archive, that is email preferably over unarchived chat) to professors about
any issue that comes up in class.

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btilly
The title should be changed to say it is from 2005.

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driekken
2005 or not it's still valid :)

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brianto2010
He is not saying it's invalid, he is saying it's _old_ (and probably posted
here a couple times before).

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d0m
I've never been a fan of: while ( _s++ =_ t++); I think it pretty just make
the code harder to read. (Ok, maybe on some compilers it can be faster). I
mean, everytime I see a line like that, I always assume there's a nasty bug
hidden in it and I spend lots of time looking at it to be 100% sure there
isn't.

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InclinedPlane
There _is_ a nasty bug in it, a buffer overrun bug. If, for any reason, _t_ is
not properly null terminated, then you'll have a problem. If, for any reason,
_s_ is not at least as large of a buffer as _t_ , then you'll have a problem.

How bad of a problem? Well, quite potentially the worst kind: a serious buffer
overflow problem that could result in a remote execution vulnerability. This
is just the sort of thing that gets patched every Tuesday as engineers come to
the "oh shit!" realization that yet another bit of crusty code using some
ancient "clever" (actually lazy) idiom has been sitting around just waiting
for some ne'er do well to take advantage of it and create yet another 400,000
system botnet.

It's good to have a solid knowledge of C programming fundamentals, but
actually writing good, safe C code is non-trivial. Moreover, the mentality
that one can just slap together some "efficient" C code and ship it out the
door has resulted in more heartache and more sysiphean turd polishing than
almost any other single software engineering mistake.

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SamReidHughes
That's not a bug, that's strcpy. You are being hysterical.

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Osmose
In regards to summer internships:

I'm just about to intern for a second year Electronic Arts. If you saw a
resume with two consecutive internships at the same place (same position and
team, too), would you think better or worse of it as compared to someone who
did two different, fairly big-name companies?

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gte910h
Two consecutive internships looks no worse or better than two different
internships.

Now, two different internships might give you _completely different
experiences_ , or _depth as you return to the same project as before_ if you
go back to the same place. But those things are both valuable in and of their
own.

In short. Enjoy EA. Don't worry.

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WarDekar
Ha, I almost posted this about the same time you did- I got to this page
earlier today when I was led on a hunt started from a post on HN about hiring-
I wanted to know about hiring CS students as they were undergrads and this
post was in google search results.

I thought his shot at Facebook in one of the opening paragraphs was funny-
just in general it's interesting to see how so much has changed in just a few
short years to where a leading blogger could be so wrong about what was to
come (nothing again Joel).

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avk
I'd like to see a list of recommendations like this for entrepreneurs or
would-be entrepreneurs in college (something like
<http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html>).

I wonder what Caterina Fake would say about Joel's list
(<http://www.caterina.net/archive/001234.html>), assuming the hackers he's
speaking to are also entrepreneurs?

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alanh
I am in a logic class that sounds just like the Dynamic Logic one Spolsky
describes.

I hate it.

The homework two weeks ago? Prove that p = !!p. I gave up.

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warwick
Just claim to be an intuitionist. Depending on your profs sense of humour,
it's a valid answer.

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whimsy
Er... could you explain this?

I don't get it, I'm afraid =\

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warwick
It's a reference to intuitionism, a constructivist approach to math and logic.
Because the law of the excluded middle is disallowed in intuitionist proofs,
you can't show what the parent comment was annoyed about.

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thefahim
I'm screwed.

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wuputah
Where is the downrate button? Sigh.

