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Episode: 349
Title: HPR0349: The Hacker Within
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0349/hpr0349.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 17:00:59
---
music
Welcome to another edition of Taxi Public Radio.
Today I will be hosting the host DSEC, I'm not in the corner.
And today we're going to do an interview with two local hackers, Melod and Kyle.
Kyle Alder and Melod set a new job.
Is that how you say that thing?
What?
That's close to us.
That's close to us.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
They are the founders and meeting members, one of the couple of other guys,
a group called The Hacker Within at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And according to the website, they meet every week or two
and discuss interesting programming and computational topics where they ask questions to ideas
and the others who use their computation and think of the research.
So, I want you to say more about what the purpose of The Hacker Within is and what your goals are with the group.
Okay, no problem.
So I'll kind of give you a little longer explanation of what The Hacker Within is.
So basically, we're at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
which is one of the biggest universities in the country.
And we have a lot of departments that do a lot of science here.
And one thing that maybe our listeners here might know,
but the public, I really hope doesn't know,
is that if you go into any science department on this campus,
the chances are that you're likely to find one or more people
that spend some or all of their time doing programming.
And I'm talking about disciplines other than like computer science or computer engineering.
So if you pick any science major like atmospheric and oceanic sciences,
you know, they're doing computational work to set up models to computer programs to model global warming.
And if you go into medical physics or you know,
you might find people there who are writing computer programs to model radiation treatments.
But the point is that no matter which of these science departments you're going to,
there's going to be one or more people who spend some or all of their time doing programming.
Basically, The Hacker Within is a group that we set up so that
these people can come and learn the skills they need to do that computation.
And what you're listening to a programmer is you know that,
you know, to write computer programs, you need to have a certain set of skills.
And the basic ideal is to set up a group where these scientists and all of these other disciplines
can come and learn the skills they need.
And if they pass something interesting, come and share it with other people.
And that's the basic idea I would say or the motivation behind starting a group.
Excellent, excellent.
Kyle, when I was looking at refitching this group,
we set up the phone and website that came across blogs.
I think you've shown it up.
And we talked about The Hacker Within.
But it wasn't talking about the group that was talking about an idea or a mantra or something that you dealt with
from doing research, something that was suggested by an advisor is that structure.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that, you know, those posts that were tagged with The Hacker Within
and that mostly happened before we had started the group.
And I think that sort of gives a hint at how we came up with the names.
Basically, my advisor, Paul Wilson, in the engineering field of departments here,
you know, he's been in computation for a long time and he was talking to one of his colleagues.
And this guy made the point that the students just don't have the same kind of computer skill set
that they used to when most students don't.
Students are coming into, you know, the field of scientific computing now.
And, you know, maybe that's because computers are, you know, so much computer to use now that it's possible to, you know,
to sort of get to a certain stage without ever having to have, you know,
done a lot of, like, command line works.
And so, you know, our advisor in this little buddy who has sort of worked kind of
kind of, kind of, well, mentioning this and talking about how there's just, like, a need for, for some sort of form for people to, you know,
to sort of get those skills because they're not, and I'm getting them in the same places that they used to, apparently.
And so the phrase The Hacker Within sort of came about, you know, as my advisor, you know, saying things like,
you know, you need to just, you need to get in touch with The Hacker Within and go learn about such and such.
And so, as we were, you know, as our research group was working through trying to help people learn a lot of this stuff,
this phrase The Hacker Within just came to sort of symbolize that need that he identified for people to sort of embrace, you know,
a kind of mentality that a lot of folks coming up in computation nowadays, apparently, you know, apparently don't have.
And so that was thing that suggested the name for the group.
Oh, it's great. It's great to show you a great resume for people in a year and a half.
They come to the meetings and feel successful. You guys have been going for a year or two now.
It looks like there's a lot of people involved and it's very active.
You found a lot of things. You had these recently meetings and going over some of your prior meetings.
They've been on auto tools, scripting, and version control, and visualization, debugging,
PlayStation 3 computing, latex, show and tell library design,
Unix, parallel processing.
We had the anybody have high performance computing.
We're probably not doing any of those.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear you with the question.
On high performance computing?
A clustering?
I mean, well, I'll answer that by saying that, you know, we'll have a meeting on whatever people are kind of asked for.
We've definitely been talking about doing kind of a high performance computing one,
which would involve a little field trip to go with one of our advisors, clusters, and stuff like that.
In the new program, there's not a lot of things you can go on, so trips to see better.
That sounds like a reasonable topic.
If you'd like to talk about it, you're welcome to come and give a presentation.
Yes, I don't know how much more there is.
Okay.
Two-second sit-in model.
There's a new here and there.
A lot of the people who come are graduate students, to your organization.
Do you have any undergrad or faculty that come?
It's mostly graduate students.
Well, say that at our meetings, we do have one or two undergrad that comes sometimes,
and it is mostly graduate students, but we do have one or two undergrad that comes.
And Paul, our advisor, kind of regularly comes, and there are a few other scientists in our department that come sometimes.
But one event we had recently was we had the C++ bootcamp, where we had like a eight hour long kind of mini-course
where we taught people who needed to know something about C++, some of the things they might need to know.
And at that event, we had people arranging all education levels.
So we had undergrad, grad students, postdocs, and faculty as students in that bootcamp.
Actually, my advisor was a student in that bootcamp.
This was kind of interesting.
But you know, we like to think of ourselves kind of being open to all of these different education levels.
Next thing, and I think in some ways, the people who have managed to reach out to, and so to reach,
I think some of this is the function of the different mechanisms we've figured out so far,
so how to find people who, for whom this group will be useful.
You know, one of our main ways of doing that has been sort of networking through various advisors
of the big computational research groups on campus.
And so I think one of the reasons we successful in reaching graduate students
and maybe not so much others that have done a graphic,
that's been the main way that we've sort of been, I guess, recruiting.
So sort of figuring out how to find the other people who are doing programming on campus,
whether that's undergrad or a staff scientist or, you know, just obvious from the area or whatever.
I think that's one of the things we've got to, we have to figure out.
I think you're doing great jobs so far.
You get a lot of people in different areas of campus.
I know some people on my side of campus in medical physics and medical imaging have been interested
and you guys do physics.
What exactly do you do for your research?
I'll have one first.
Okay, yeah, well, first of all, we're both in the engineering physics department
and we do a nuclear engineering related research.
So I do, my research is in fusion energy.
And basically what I do all day is I write codes that simulate kind of what happens in fusion experiments.
I write codes that kind of model what goes on in those fusion experiments.
And that's basically kind of a nutshell what I do.
But that involves obviously a lot of programming, but it is a lot of high-performance computing with big clusters and stuff like that.
So yeah, that's kind of a nutshell what I do.
Excellent. How about you, Tyler?
So I'm sort of a, you know, my training is in nuclear engineering,
but I've been working for a couple of years now on what's essentially an industrial engineering problem in a nuclear engineering context.
So I do systems analysis.
I tell people that I've sort of write the nuclear fuel cycle version of SimCity.
You tell the code, you know, all of the, you know, you sort of give it a plan for how we should sort of expand the nuclear power industry in terms of which types of facilities to build and when.
And the code simulates them as, you know, simulates that scenario and gives you sort of performance metrics of, you know,
whether all the different facilities received the materials they needed and how much power all the reactors produced and that sort of thing.
So I don't actually do that. I'm not just very much physics.
I do, you know, sort of systems level, systems level modeling.
Well, I think you guys really touched on our need in science.
Like you said, it's not just the computer engineers that teach the scientists who need to know how to do a lot of powerful programming with computing research.
If you want to do good scientific research and have a good background in mathematics,
if you have a good background in computing and to be aware of these really good tools that are out there and getting in touch with a lot of these very powerful open source tools and just being aware can be very helpful.
You guys mostly reach people through, I saw a flyers that were about the blue cats that you did.
You get a unique blue cat and a few plus plus blue cats which, I know I had a friend who lived to that and it's almost a great successful.
Very, very good. So you put fires out and you said where to melt and you get a lot of people from all different departments.
You have a web site, HackerWritten.org, and you maintain a rookie on there, it looks right.
And it looks like you also have a group of groups.
More or less, that's your main organization.
All right?
Oh, yeah, that is our information.
And you set up your meetings there and you can see it.
And if you want to allow offers for jobs or help them programming or research positions, it looks like a good networking research resource tool, which is very great.
That's really all I have for you guys.
Do you have any plans that you want to make about experiencing this HackerWritten?
Kyle?
Well, you know, I guess we've had a lot of the big things.
I think what's exciting about this group is this idea that, you know, there's a group of people who have identified a need.
Here's this field that we all end up in.
Most of us are sort of inadequate training to do well.
And so the real sort of, you know, we mentioned that our advisor was involved.
But it's been, you know, a sort of a grassroots effort in which wasn't, you know, this isn't officially, you know, tied in with anything that the university level.
And it's really just, you know, just been student helping students.
It's an exciting model, something that we talked a lot about, Kyle.
And, you know, this is something a lot of my clients stand on.
How, like, a lot of this material is best taught in these, you know, short meetings and short sort of series of workshops rather than a full-out course.
And so, you've sort of mobility, which I think is cool.
Definitely, definitely. I agree. A lot of students will be hit with the programming task.
I believe they've never had programming. It might take them a couple of weeks to finish the school assignment.
Yeah.
That's the entire teaching course.
So, you know, I mean, really good.
I was just going to say that I think like Kyle kind of got a little bit, but, you know, the key problem is basically that, you know,
there's departments where there's only like one or two people writing codes.
You know, if you're in a position where you're one of the few people working on a code,
there really might not even be a really good venue for you to go and get help.
You might not even know where to go.
And we just want to make sure that those people know that we're kind of have our doors in to help them with any issues they might have.
You know, a story I like to say that when I was learning a lot of the stuff, I remember like spending a really long time trying to figure out answers to questions
where if I just kind of known someone more experienced, and I could ask them, they could have just told me the answer in a few seconds.
And instead I had to spend like an hour searching around trying to figure out what the answer was.
And I just want to make sure that other people kind of don't have to go through that.
Because when it comes to scientific computing where it's just people kind of scattered around in all these different departments,
you know, they just might not have a venue right now to go get help.
Yeah, so that's what I'm kind of hoping you can do.
Definitely. I really agree.
And I look at the topics where you're moving and how it's timeless that we searching and looking around and trying to figure out and discovering all those different things
that I just had some money there to spend, or in a form, I could just spend a couple of minutes shaping a lot of time and be very helpful with research
and a lot of times with research people will repeat work that a lot of wasted time and energy, and it can be done once and be done once right.
And just have to be out there that we've done.
Yeah, that's a real common theme, I think, you know, this idea of not reinventing the wheel.
So that applies both to, you know, not having to sort of bang your head against the wall to learn something that person, you know,
across campus or across the hall might have learned. And then also this not, you know, re-implementing methods and libraries and software to do very common tasks
and this whole sort of, like, there's probably an open-first tool to do what you're, you know, tempted to do by hand all over again.
And so I think that's a theme where we still see in both of those areas.
Definitely not.
I agree. And I just want to also mention that it's not totally about just kind of people who are new to programming, getting help.
I think one thing we found, and we're starting to find, I mean, I kind of start today when I was talking to you in my office now, is that, you know, there's, it goes back to this hacker idea,
which is that, you know, there's people like, like, I think the three of us who are not in CS or computer engineering or department with the word computer in it.
You know, who do you do a lot of programming and, but they're not just using it as a tool. I mean, they're really into it. They really enjoy programming.
And the kind of, the other part of this is just getting together and talking about cool, cool things that we, cool things that we learn,
that are really interesting because a lot of the people in the group are, you know, even though I'm in engineering service, I'm still like, really interesting.
They actually really enjoy programming. So I like learning about new tools.
You know, again, I thought that kind of hacker within you, you know, that desire to go and learn about new programming things and, you know, doesn't matter what department you're in.
You should have a place where you can go and kind of talk about those things that you really like doing.
I was really surprised and happy to see that there's not just a couple of people on the wide, wide entry line who are the same interests.
There were real people in the same town and the same campus that you can meet up with, it's nice to have them.
Have a physical meeting that we can really need people and share interest with you.
Yeah, I think that that physical meeting point is an important point too.
I mean, so much of this hacker world is interactions online and I think that's great and exciting to work on projects with people from all over the world.
Yeah, that's cool, but it's nice to be able to go and, you know, talk about this stuff over beer too.
So the fact that we are able to bring these people together to meet in person is a nice compliment to the way that a lot of us work usually gets done.
Yeah.
Yeah, I really agree with what Kyle just said.
I mean, on the often weeks we have what are called, a bunch of us are really into Python.
So we have these meetings on the weeks where we don't have actually regular hacker within meetings.
We, a group of us kind of get together at our union and over a beer, we just kind of talk about Python and it's just really fun.
And I learn a lot and I'm actually just really enjoying myself and I get to just talk to people over a beer.
And, you know, I get to meet people.
I'm not a part of this that's really neat as you get to interact with people from just completely different departments.
And, you know, just talking to one guy at this last meeting, you know, if he's just doing completely different stuff than I was, then I was just fascinated by how he was using computing and the research that he was doing too.
So it's also just a tool to get people from just different areas together to talk about things.
Yeah, very cool. So you have your Python meetings at the terrace?
Well, the summer was probably going to switch to the terrace, so we're up there, Rapskuller.
Okay, that's right now.
That's a nice resource at the university that I'm going to talk about a place in Canada.
Yeah, it'll track most of the pictures.
Just a little picture on the Rapskuller on the terrace. That's good.
Yeah, I mean, we're going to continue in the summer.
Yeah, yeah. We're definitely going to continue in the summer.
And I think that we picked the terrace and the Rapskuller to a specific reason, because, you know, we've been in a lot of the turn until, like, those meetings to turn into formal meetings.
You know, we wanted them to just be discussions where people were just talking about stuff that they're interested in.
And so we think that, well, if we're in a beer drinking venue, then people are going to get the message that we're not going to be throwing up slideshows or anything like that.
But we also have regular meetings where we do give, kind of, little mini tutorials on different topics.
So, kind of mix it up.
Excellent.
So if anybody wants to take part in the hacker within the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or if they want to do something similar in their area,
they can go to the hacker within.
It's hacker within.org.
It's hacker within.org, right?
Right. And we've not only this.
Yeah. And we can also just send you some new email.
Instead of a Gmail tell us, it's hacker.within.admin at gmail.com.
And they can, if they just have a question or something, they can just email me there and ask.
Okay.
Cool.
Cool.
But the last thing I'd say is that we're always looking for new topics for meetings.
And we do regularly do these boot camps, which are these kind of mini courses.
Or I've moved on too so far.
And so if there's something that someone wants to learn, and they're at the University of Wisconsin, and they want to learn it,
and they should feel free to do that.
If you know us and just say that, hey, I want to learn about this.
Is there anyone who's going to give me a little introduction to it?
Excellent.
Well, thank you, Marad.
Thank you, Kyle.
And thank you for taking me time to meet you and review.
And thank you for starting this very week's group.
And for all the work you put into it, and also you will continue.
And give me your future.
And give us our future.
So I'm going to take over after you're done.
So thank you, everybody, for listening.
And have a good day.
Thank you for listening to Act of Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O.N-P for all of us.
For all of us.
Thank you very much.