PiSquared Blog
Blog about geeky stuff, computers, physics and life.
Getting back control of my digital life one bit at a time
Tags: English, technology, hacks, personalCreated on Thu, 29 Mar 2018
I have permanently deleted my Facebook account this week after the latest "scandals" around the "social" network. Of course I knew on some level what is happening with my data but I think it finally hit home. I've always hated Facebook, ever since I first made my account (post about it in Bulgarian) - and that hasn't changed for the 8 years that I used the service, it only got worse I think. It was not so much about the data that I have shared, it has been more about the mindset that it installed in me and in people around me. Being zombies, constantly scrolling useless content by people you barely know or not even know with pages you liked at some point, with no easy way to get out of it, a network hitting all weak spots in human psychology. So the latest revelations of which we were all well aware (in the hacker/techie community at least) got to me and crossed a threshold
...moreOn windows and software development
Tags: English, technology, opinionsCreated on Mon, 26 Mar 2018
There are worker guys now in the office just changing a window. And I am thinking... I so wish it was this way with software development - they have a task, there is a due time, it is clear and there are standard tools to do the job. And even if their clothing is dirty, because that's what their line of work is, they look oh so professional. They know what they do, how much time it is going to take them, what to use and the job is done perfectly and even integration tested it by opening closing the window and then stress tested it by hanging on it to see it holds.
If he was a software developer... You never know... They may have a very new incompatible window, so they will have to stick with duck tape where there are some holes, do a unit test of the handle and the glass and say it has 99% coverage but actually opening and closing it crashes the window next to it and the stability of the whole building is under question. Then they would explain that it worked when they tried it on t
...moreЗадача: Как да вдигнем заплатите на българите?
Tags: Български, политикаCreated on Mon, 23 Jan 2017
или "Системата ще си върви и ние ще си се оплакваме"
Уважаеми читатели,
Ако въобще мога да правя нещо в тоя живот, то може би, смея да твърдя, малко нескромно, че горе-долу съм се научил да мога да решавам технически проблеми. Колко още имам да уча, само аз си знам. Но ако трябва да избера нещо, в което съм окей, то може би е това - решаване, оптимизиране на задачи. Не винаги успявам и понякога много се затруднявам, но си има принципи и системи, които всеки като мен ползва. През годините се запознах със страхотни хора, които правят тези неща много по-добре от мен, превръщат това нещо в професия - решаване на проблеми, на задачи по физика, астрономия, химия, биология, медицина, на най-дълбоките проблеми, които човечеството е познавало. Много специфични проблеми, много учене трябва, за да се опиташ да ги решиш. И разбира се, политиката, икономиката, обществото са не по-малко сложни науки с не по-малко интересни проблеми и трябва голяма специализация, за да решиш основните пробле
...moreУдарен от живота
Tags: Български, есетаCreated on Wed, 04 Jan 2017
или Връщам се (да направим двойните заглавия пак хит през 2017 ;) и ASCII еможиконките)
Замисляли ли сте се как взимате решения? Как сте решили да учите в училището, което учите или как работите това, което работите? Имали сте мечти, планове и живота ви удря в някакъв момент и плановете не работят или се променят.
Едно време трудните решения в живота си ги взимах с монета - хвърляш, наименуваш си ги ези и тура и каквото се падне. Даже мисля, че някъде имам блог пост за Квант на решението - идеална монета хвърлена по рандъм начин. Теорията ми беше, че ако се замислям за повече от 10 минути върху нещо, значи че плюсовете и минусите на двете са почти еквивалентни като чувство и по-добре да действам, отколкото да си губя времето в решения.
Много хора ми казваха, че това е глупаво. Аз им казвах, че е най-добрата стратегия, която знам. Нещеш ли, както става в приказките, реших да решавам по друг начин. Пробвах другото -
...moreИ КОЙ КАЗА...
Tags: Български, мненияCreated on Sat, 17 Dec 2016
Драги бивши и настоящи възпитаници на бъдещата новооткрита Софийска ПМГ,
Не исках да си използвам тежката си дума, но иначе толкова чистата ми и подредена стена във фейса се петни от тъжни, печални и гневни писма от мои почитатели, които искат лично да коментирам ужасът на премахмането на буквичката. Всичко започва така...
“Възможно е моето училище наесен да не съществува”? Ъм... Защото ще му махнат буквичка от името?
НЕ, ДАНИЕЛЕ, БУКВИЧКАТА ЗНАЧИ МНОГО, ТЯ Е СИМВОЛ НА ИЗРАЖЕНИЕТО НА ЛИРИЧНИЯ ГЕРОЙ И НЕГОВИЯ КАТАРЗИС В СИНЕТОХАТА НА ...
к, chill. Знам, знам, и аз съм бил в час по БЕЛ и държал матура (отуична пуи това). Знам, името е важно, кей?
Обаче... Не викахме, когато направиха 8ми клас подготве да учим чужд език. Мех. Не викахме, когато сложиха резултатите от изпита по БЕЛ като изискване за влизане. Че аз само заради това успях в Н/СПМГ - математика и физика FOREVA. Не викахме когато махнаха системата "15% отсъствия и си вън". Падна ни стандартчето, на олимпиади се
...moreКоя мафия си избирате?
Tags: Български, политика, мненияCreated on Mon, 07 Nov 2016
Изборите са идиотско нещо. Моят свят е свят на избор в момента - дали защото съм в такава възраст или пък светът полудява, или съм в “мехурчето“ от новини и социални коментари - не знам. Брекзит, Тръмп, Радев. Но ето, че гласувам за шести път извън страната - шест от шест пъти навън.
Този път, както и първият ми път, е за президент. Но картинката е различна. В САЩ имаме Тръмп срещу Хилари, в България - Цачева срещу Радев. И в двете държави се гласува за президент, и в двете са мъж срещу жена, и в двете хората се опитват да изберат между по-малкото зло.
Уважаеми сънародници: Коя мафия си избирате? Изборът винаги е между по-малкото зло. Искаме мафията на човека, който еднолично държи държавата под шах, ако загуби на които и да е избори. Или искаме мафията, която от опит знаем, че ще разграби държавата. Това е изборът пред който стоим.
След като сегашният ни мафиот обяви, че ако загуби на “Не се сърди човече“, ще подаде оставка, тъй като неговите лични късметлийски качества очеви
...moreThis post starts normally talking about interviews and transitions into a life crisis
Tags: English, essays, personal, lifeCreated on Wed, 05 Oct 2016
Job Interviews
I will be having interviews these days. I guess I am giving up my dream of starting a startup, maybe few years down the road when I get more experience. Don’t judge me. It’s hard. So let’s do some standardized interviews, that is good and stable. Get a job that you will be happy.
Algorithms and data structures. Binary search trees, DFS, BFS, Heaps - the regular stuff. You know, the stuff that you do every day as a programmer. Not debugging or refactoring, not testing or googling. A hackerrank ™ online test which shows your capabilities best, implementing things you haven’t done in years but hey - ADS must be important. I can’t possibly have 3 good programmers around me at the time of the interview that google like crazy and help me to pass it.
If I was the only one complaining, I would consider myself just plain uncapable of my profession. And maybe I am. Maybe the actual coding stars out there don’t complain on HN and can just breeze the interviews about AD
...moreThe Third World War is coming. What to do about it?
Tags: English, opinionsCreated on Thu, 28 Jul 2016
The Third World War is coming. Everything is set in place for the war to unlock at any moment now. ISIS are the most powerful and cunning terrorist organisation the world has ever seen. There is nothing that can stop it. The Islam religion is so powerful, they want to kill people and they will do it over and over, more and more often. Because they are promised salvation. It is always the Islam. It is the wrong religion. 9/11. And we now let them in our own lands because they want asylum? Ontario, France, Belgium and Germany. But they are different. They are not like us. We let them kill our children. How long? Who do you fight with? There are the lone wolves that are impossible to track. Or so they tell us. Maybe they know. The more powerful, the people at the top, they know. Putin has been the worst dictator humanity has known yet his country is not attacked by ISIS. Why? Because he is part of the plan. He will be more manipulative and hungry for more power until the war breaks out.
...moreБурките
Tags: Български, политика, мненияCreated on Fri, 17 Jun 2016
След като установихме, че лицето е неизменна част от съществуването на здравословно общество и искаме да се забранят бурките, предлагам да се забранят също:
- Каските на мотопедистите
- Каските на велосипедистите
- Противогазовите маски
- Шаловете
- Забрадките
- Тези неща дето лекарите си ги слагат на устите, защото сте гаден заразен тип
- Японците с гореспоменатите неща
- Зимните шапки
- Шапките на пчеларите
- Шапките сомбреро
- Шапките федора
- Индианските шапки
- Ескимоските шапки
- Чорапогащниците на главите (освен ако не сте бандит, тогава се позволява Вашето работно облекло)
- Търтълнековете
- Дъждобраните
- Чадърите
- Тъмните очила (още познати като обратна бурка)
- Светлите очила
- Очилата, които се правят на очила, но всъщност са банани
- Хипстърските очила
- Контактните лещи
- Безконтактните лещи
- Дългите коси
- Косите, които са къси отзад, но дълги отпред
- Косите, които са къси от едната страна, но дълги от другата
- Косите, които са къси на 45
Животът е нечестен
Tags: Български, политика, есета, личниCreated on Thu, 16 Jun 2016
- Бай Василе! Когато се освободи България, кого ще си турим цар?
- Ако се бием с турците само за цар, то сме глупци. И сега си имаме султан. Нам трябва не господар, а свобода и човешко равенство - отговори Левски навъсено.
- Ами ти каква служба ще вземеш тогава?... Зер, пада ти се най-първа служба.
- Никаква. Ще ида у други поробени народи, да правя това, което правя тук сега.
из “Немили-недраги”
Добър вечер. Тази вечер ще представя няколко идеи. Ако тези идеи се асоцират лично с мен, губим всички. Затова няма да ви се представям. Можете да ме наричате господин Никой.
Ако някой ме пита дали искам да живея в България - разбира се, че искам! Харесвам времето и природата, детството ми е свързано с България, моите приятели и близки. Разбирам културата донякъде и свързвам България с хубави спомени и интелигентни хора. Не харесвам негативизма и безпомощността. И искам това да се промени. За това сме тук тази вечер. Искам всеки да се оплаче, да си изкаже пр
...moreThe meaning of life
Tags: English, essays, lifeCreated on Thu, 12 May 2016
This is the stupidest question one can ask. Why?
Imagine you are given your first computer. You are told that you could pretty much do anything with it. You can play games, program, learn anything there is to be learnt about the Universe, you can watch videos or explore the filesystem. You can build stuff or entertain yourself. Or you could not turn it on at all. What do you do?
I know what I did when I got my first computer. Before I got it, I was excited - I thought I could do anything - animations or tell it to bake me a pie. All information I got was from watching "Dexter's laboratory" and imagining things. Alas, I still can't do many of these things, but I am getting better.
When I actually got it, on the 8th of February 2000, I was jumping like crazy. I was 8 then. We got it as a second hand from my father's colleague. Two guys came in to bring a bulky 15" CRT monitor, keyboard, something small like a joystick (a ball mouse), half-broken speakers, a mystery box and a bun
...more"Catching" Panic Attacks
Tags: English, personalCreated on Thu, 26 Nov 2015
I am experiencing a panic attack right now. It's a second day in a row and I've promised to myself I will be observing closely as I know getting one is never the whole story. They come in bunches. It's a very irrational thing - my heart rate is elevated from seemingly unknown reason, you can actually hear it in your ears, I want to hide, isolate or run away somewhere. Fortunately I've experienced enough of those that I can deny the urge and explore...
Debugging
People don't come with debuggers. That would be a highly useful thing. Why?
When writing a computer program sometimes things go wrong. You have introduced a bug. Depending on the programming language and type of bug, the program might "throw an exception", i.e. understand that the program has run into an exceptional condition which is not the "normal flow". For example, when you see an error like this
it means that your Operating system enc
...moreAFTER ENTER - Episode 2 - Pressing!
Tags: English, technology, projects, learningCreated on Fri, 20 Nov 2015
The story so far:
Hi again. Last time we spoke about what happens before a search engine like Google has to accomplish before doing a search through billions of documents that make the Internet. Today we are starting our journey by doing a real search.
Our particular search will be the age old question that every child asks and every adult is ashamed to not know the answer:
Why is the sky blue?
How many ways can you think of doing that search? If you are on a phone or have a smartwatch you can say “OK Google, (hear a small bleep) why is the sky blue?”. Or you can tap on your home screen box and type with the keyboard that appears on the screen. If you are at home and have a laptop on your… well, lap… you could type on your keyboard.
So which one was it for you? This interaction is called interfacing. The word interface is used frequently and interchangeab
...moreРазмисли за референдума, астрономията и всичко останало
Tags: Български, политика, мненияCreated on Mon, 26 Oct 2015
Първият ми блог пост на български от известно време насам. Всъщност дори няма да е блог пост, 'щото ще си е директно видео, което направих тая сутрин.
За електрическото гласуване, кои хора успяват и как да си живеете живота щастливо, вижте единственото правилно мнение само тук :)
...moreBig Game - score 10 of a Murica movie
Tags: English, opinionsCreated on Fri, 08 May 2015
I fell victim to another brainwash called Big Game, an american movie featuring Samuel Jackson's face and the Bratislava Radio Orchestra (epic music guys, worth it!). At the time of writing the movie had 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Spoiler alert obviously, although I advise you to save your precious hours on this planet and skip the movie. Unless you have murican flag on your wall, murican pants and tatooed one or more presidents on any parts of your body. Then you will probably like it but just please, stay in your southern state.
The movie starts okay - a boy in some far away, wild country, is to become a man by proving he can hunt on his 13 birthday. The country we later understand is Finland - a country with un
...moreLearning through participation as the rule rather than the exception
Tags: English, opinions, essays, university, learningCreated on Wed, 18 Feb 2015
School has never been only about learning stuff.
For few years I believed it’s the things happening in the breaks that matter. Relationships, doing stupid things and talking about crazy ideas. But that’s not completely true. I believed that because just my last memories from school are that things in the break matter. But it didn’t use to be the case. I loved learning things when I was younger.
Oh my, I would read like crazy - Encyclopedias, science books, I would draw the planets of the cosmos and remember the map of Europe. For 16 years of education, school and later University were trying really, really hard to kill this in me. My love and passions, my curiosities. I (almost completely) stopped going to school in the last couple of years. I was having my own projects and I didn’t care about the things in the breaks so nothing could keep me there. There were a few subjects like Physics that were interesting to me but by the last couple of years I started slowly falling out of
...moreThinking inside of a box
Tags: English, personalCreated on Sat, 14 Feb 2015
Yesterday I experienced what is it to be thinking inside of a box. I did that so that you never have to. I also spun a bit around which was okay for a while, but it gets tedious, boring and very hot, very soon. The real world is much cooler once you get out of it with a fresh mind.
KIDS (and adults), NEVER THINK INSIDE OF A BOX!
...moreDiscuss the argument that hackers do public service by finding and publicising computer security weaknesses
Tags: English, opinions, essays, universityCreated on Tue, 10 Feb 2015
context: We have to write an essay for a course at University. But first, we have to submit a draft, then be assigned to read drafts of other people and mark them. Which in the end doesn't matter at all.
BTW, Честит рожден ден, тати!
Number 1. Oh my Random, not another essay!
Of course they do. Is there really an argument for the other side?
Let's first define hacker – a highly controversial term for the regular dumb man/woman/unidentified (henceforth referred to as a “cuggle” – a computer muggle. Muggle, in the Harry Potter universe, is someone who lacks any magical abilities and was not born in the magical world, often denying the existence of magic itself [1]). Now, cuggles believe that a hacker is bad word. They see it as someone who does bad things with the aid of computers like stealing money, blackmailing or lunching rockets by getting hold of NASA computers. While this is not unseen in real life [2] (IRL [3]), it is rarely the case when the term is u
...moreWhat are ads (potentially) good for?
Tags: English, technology, opinionsCreated on Wed, 26 Nov 2014
When I was small, I've always hated the ads on TV that would interrupt my favorite movie or show. And they would do this 5 times in an hour, sometimes for so long that I would forget what I was watching. I didn't see the point of them at all. Well, unless I wanted to go pee - and I actually thought for quite a while that this is the reason for ads.
Then someone told me that this is how the channels are supporting themselves and that without the ads, TV would not exist. I thought this is stupid.
But as I grew up, I accepted the fact. I still hated them though and me and my family would have the desperate "Argh!" whenever we heard the famous jingle of the ad block beginning. And they would of course do it in the most interesting part of the movie. This is supposed to be entertaining?!
Are all ads evil though? Isn't there some value in them? I would like to spend some time to rethink the advertisement model in the world.
To start of, I believe the model is currently very corru
...moreChallenge accepted!
Tags: English, лични, животCreated on Mon, 13 Oct 2014
Inspired by the Barney Stinson character from “How I met your mother” TV series, I decided to run a marathon today. This story came about during this weekend and, similarly to the show, I was bet against being able to run (thanks to the person for the bet). And as I said previously, I love the short plans thing, so I just followed the advice:
Step 1. - Start running.... there is no step 2.
And it worked! 42.195 km in 5 hours 5 minites.
Now, on another topic, I slightly derailed from my “deactivate my facebook for two weeks” experiment because of the hackathon that we were organizing this weekend. But I am not going to allow the broken window theory to complete
...more