Hacker Remix

Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

185 points by nicosalm 2 days ago | 80 comments

nullhole 2 days ago

> It then set the name of a channel to the results (either 1-person-in-upl or X-people-in-upl), which others could check.

I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.

cptaj 1 day ago

I am, in fact, suggesting you do this.

alwayslikethis 1 day ago

> I'm not suggesting you don't do this

I hope this is intentional

nullhole 1 day ago

>> I'm not suggesting you don't do this

> I hope this is intentional

I mean, it's not unintentional..

eduction 1 day ago

I love this company. Yeah!

withinrafael 1 day ago

I saw "over-engineering" in the title and half expected to see Wi-Fi signals being abused to detect human bodies in the room.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250

alkh 2 days ago

I swear to God that all of these CS labs at different unis look the same. I am getting flashbacks of labs in Toronto that looked exactly like pictures in the post

analog31 18 hours ago

2nd law at work. Just like all cups filled with ice cubes look different, but all cups half-filled with liquid water look the same. ;-)

whimsicalism 2 days ago

even the physics labs i worked in looked like this

chaboud 2 days ago

The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere.

Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up and get my own hardware, as it was either going to be esoteric "workstation" hardware with a fifth of the horsepower of a Pentium 75 or it was going to be in a room like the UPL jammed with CRT's and the smell of warm Josta.

How do students operate these days? Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?

hansvm 1 day ago

It's been nearly a decade now, but we shared a machine with 128 newish physical cores, a terabyte of RAM, and a lot of fast disk. Anyone with a big job just coordinated with the 1-2 other people who might need it at that level and left 10% of the RAM and disk for everyone else (OS scheduling handled the CPU sharing, though we rarely had real conflicts).

It's firmly in "not a laptop" scale, and for anything that fit it was much faster than all the modern cloud garbage.

The other lab I was in around that time just collected machines indefinitely and allocated subsets of them for a few months at a time (the usual amount of time a heavily optimized program would take to finish in that field) to any Ph.D. with a reasonable project. They all used the same in-house software for job management and whatnot, with nice abstractions (as nice as you can get in C) for distributed half-sparse half-dense half-whatever linear algebra. You again only had to share between a few people, and a few hundred decent machines per person was solidly better than whatever you could do in the cloud for the same grant money.

whimsicalism 1 day ago

> Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?

In my recent physics experience, this is basically what it was unless you had to rely on some proprietary software only on the lab machines like shudders LabView

alkh 1 day ago

In my university you could technically use any computer but must ensure that your code would work/compile on lab PCs cause that's where TAs would check it. As a result, during labs most people would just use computers there(too much hassle otherwise)

amosesdev 2 days ago

I can only speak for the UPL, but, yeah, it was a hallmark of labs at the time that one of the benefits you were getting was the equipment. Nowadays, most people just come in with their laptops -- we have a kubernetes cluster for projects, but most of the actual computing equipment is brought in by students when they want to hang

kredd 1 day ago

That's exactly what I thought! "Is that UofT?"

zdw 1 day ago

Back in the 90's we used finger - IIRC it would tell you the last machine someone logged into, which could be in the lab

Someone wrote a script to finger everyone in the entire CS department and tell when the lab was busy, by counting people logged in.

This work fine, except for on intro courses where some labs had lots of non-CS majors in them.

bks 1 day ago

I had finger running on login to `finger stacy` I was at SDSU on a very large SunOS system and she was at a private school and I assume that computer was a bit more limited.

`Finger Stacy` would run every minute and typically be running for 15 minutes max... that is until I moved into the dorms and my machine was online all the time.

A few weeks go by and I get an email from the SDSU admin requesting that I stop fingering stacy as it was bothering the other Sysadmin. I remarked with a grin that all I was trying to do was in fact try to `name of the command` and they promptly deleted the script from the account.. It still makes me smile as I write this.

hotspot_one 1 day ago

fdisk or mount?

elcritch 1 day ago

Sincerely doubt he had permissions for either operation. ;)

vasco 1 day ago

Everyone knows the right order of commands is date, finger, mount.