Amusingly, that UI in the film is a real piece of Unix software named FSN on IRIX; I used it some around 1994 on Silicon Graphics hosts at Origin Games.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)</a>
The level of pressure and requirements are so similar to coding interview challenges (if not more grueling - 14 hours?!) that not only should Elaine be certified as a level 3 judge, but she should also get a pass on the technical round of any future coding interview!
I kept being distracted by the "why would anyone allow themselves to get so invested in a walled garden, especially one where the garden owner is so obviously hostile and non-responsive?"<p>I understand that literally millions get invested in various walled Microsoft, Apple, Google, and even Facebook gardens, not to mention McDonalds, Nintendo, etc. But that doesn't make the answer any clearer.
The standard way to pair Swiss tournaments in chess used to be index cards. One card per player. Each round, you write their opponent and their cumulative score, then you keep them sorted by score bucket and put them in pairs by trial and error trying to alternate colours and avoid successive upfloats.<p>Some arbiters, particularly in the UK, still did this at least as of ten years ago. Either they don't want to learn the computerised tools or they think humans give "better" pairings - not impossible, as humans can look ahead to reserve some combinations for future rounds.<p>135 players is a lot to handle manually, though, and this would make the last round pairing system almost impossible. (Calculating tiebreaks for a handful of players in the prizes is OK).
I had to jump in here, not to argue with the substance of the article[1] but to pull out this one quote that I just can't get behind:<p>> In popular media, a genius hacker codes some solution from scratch in the space of an hour or two, solving a problem that would otherwise doom the other protagonists. But in reality, programming is slow.<p>I mean, sure, it's not like The Movies. But hacking is <i>fast</i>! In no other profession can you wake up, sit down at your keyboard, be presented with a new problem no one else has addressed before, and <i>build a machine to solve it</i>. All before dinner. That's just magic. Who else gets to do that? No other engineering profession for sure. Maybe some artists can work that fast, but they're shackled to ideas about the subjective value of their work to others whereas we can watch our creations do their magic with our own eyes.<p>It's the best job there is.<p>[1] Which is broadly the same point I just made here, but expressed as one anecdote. I'm saying that this is something we can all share.
For anyone who didn't get the reference in the post title: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U</a>
> Surely, “just whip up a solution in an hour” doesn’t ever happen in reality.
>
> Right?<p>Err, maybe the author hadn't experienced that before, but IMO that happens pretty frequently, even for projects that have been in production for years.
Oh, the many faces of "DCI Reporter" not working well. Can't believe it's gotten worse since I was playing competitively, but then again, it's Bill Stark and Wizards of the Coast. I should have no problem believing it.<p>Great article, though!
Big own goal by MTGMelee that they couldn't absorb the traffic when Eventlink croaked.<p>I need to remember that for the future: if you have a competitor, make sure you can absorb the traffic if they go completely AWOL.
There are some good swiss pairing systems on GitHub, I had to use recently. Written in C, but it works as nice as the system she wrote. Would have saved her some sweat.
There's also one in typescript with very nice UI, but not completely Swiss, just some random swiss with extended constraints (girls prefering to play against girls, and such).
Cool story! For anyone who has been in the competitive speech and debate community for a while (or has ever encountered tech trouble), this a similar thrill/challenge as hand-pairing rounds, keeping side constraints, pull-ups, etc. in mind.