CSE 40175 Ethics Blog

From my experience hackers have always been the ones that do work such as finding exploits and breaking into systems (can be done for good or bad) or creating malicious code that can take your computer hostage (always bad). For the longest time those were the types of people that I associated with the label "hacker." And though that is still a correct label for those people, the article  Hackers and Painters  made me realize that the word "hacker" can belong to a much larger group of people than just the two which I listed before. Through the reading I started to think more about the way in which I code, which is to throw some code in the editor and then debug and work on it until it does what I want it to do. I use my own knowledge of how to program along with online code examples and source code from open-source repositories to create or “hack” together some type of final product. In this way the Hackers and Painters reading compares hacking to painters and arc...

Is programming a super-power? Why or why not? What are the implications if it is?     I believe that programming could be considered a super power in this day in age. The Software is Eating the World article described how many services and products such as telecommunication, TV, and even car manufacturing is switching to software solutions. With the switch to software solutions such as Netflix from Blockbuster and human delivery men/women to amazon drones, we will see software and technology in general replacing a lot of the jobs that exist for unskilled and even some skilled workers. With the ability to code you make yourself somewhat safe from becoming obsolete because instead of having your job replaced by code, you can be the one writing code to replace someone else (cynical, eh?). As people in the technology field pick up large paying jobs, the non-computer educated will be left behind and that is a problem that can only be solved with education of the mass...

    My name is Alex Mukasyan. I am a first generation Russian-American that lives with his parents and has a older brother that is 40, married, and has two kids. The reason to mention my brother is that he is the reason that I am studying computer science at ND. He is a CEO of a tech company in Russia but before any of that he was a programmer. As I grew up he would always show me the newest tech in computers, phones, toys, etc.. He always made sure that I had the newest technology too and that really sparked my interest in building computers and eventually coding. Over the past two summers I have taken on internships which gave me work in data analytics as well as data engineering. Through these internships I learned SQL as well as helpful Python packages for data manipulation such as Pandas. Due to a dying love for writing software and a deep-ish dive into big data and data engineering, I want to pursue being a big data engineer when I graduate in the Spring.    ...