alinajaf

Senior management at a Japanese tech company, 2 kids, most of my daily life in Japanese here. Can confidently talk circles around most N1s.

I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.

Many of the comments here talk about lifestyle changes, and I think those are key, but there are some, (perhaps rarer) conditions that unfortunately won't be improved.

Trigeminal Neuralgia is one of them. The condition is just... pain. Lot's of pain. More pain than anyone should ever have to go through. When I have episodes, I often feel awe that it's even possible for someone to feel such an incredible amount of pain.

Challenges in life help to shape you, make you who you are. But I do feel that this particular challenge was one where it would have been nice to have learned the same lessons some other way. I hope sincerely that treatment based on this research can help.

I don't know much about how a developer should try to build a secure application from the get-go. I don't think I've ever worked on or assessed a codebase where that plan worked.

I did the challenges years ago when you had to email in for them. Since then I can count at least five occasions where having done the challenges has allowed me to identify vulnerabilities in real-world crypto. I was usually able to recommend fixes that in theory made those codebases more secure. This is keeping in mind that I'm at best a hobbyist security researcher and just barely a professional developer.

I think there are about seven or eight people on Earth that I would trust to securely implement cryptography in their code. For the rest of us I'm happy with doing the best we can with libraries that make that easy (NaCl), and otherwise trying to find ways to break the thing. The cryptopals challenges help you do that, so that's where I'd recommend a developer start.

As a fellow Brit, I find your ability to appreciate sarcasm lacking :)

FYI: £26k is not average for 3 years experience. I know kids straight out of coding bootcamps that started on £10k more than that.

As an atheist ex-muslim blogger of very similar descent, I don't see how this is relevant to hacker news. I sincerely doubt it will generate any useful discussion.