Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
I'm 46, and while I do think my cognitive speed has declined a tiny bit, my abstract thinking has improved throughout life. The one change I have noticed though is that programming has become insanely complex during the 37 years I have been programming, but more especially during the last 10-15 years. It's at the point now where you can't even create a basic website, to modern standards, without spending months of work to develop it, or without spending 95% of your time on StackOverflow wrestling with bugs and complexities of 7 different pieces of framework that you're trying to get working together. It's utter insanity.

What I suggest for your current situation is to diagram everything. Just buy some big sheets of butcher paper, and draw out the entire nested API structure. Rely on your visual sense so that you don't have to do as many mental gymnastics. Your visual processing center is the GPU of your brain, it has vastly more parallel processing power than the language processing centers of your brain.

Also remember that everyone has different aptitudes. You might not be decreasing cognitively at all, it might just be that this problem doesn't click with you like it does with the other developers.

Comment · 3 years ago
Try switching to Dvorak. It's a trip for your brain (which will stave off cognitive decline), but also 70% of the keystrokes are on the home row on Dvorak vs. 30% on QWERTY, so you move your fingers around less, which should result in a lower error rate once you get back up to speed.
Comment · 5 years ago
Kind of a silly question when we're not saying FAANA rather than FAANG.
Comment · 5 years ago
How about instead aiming for 1000x as fast, so that it's as fast as a statically-typed language? (Google's pure Python Protobuf implementation is literally 1000x slower than their Python front-end that wraps the C++ Protobuf library...)

Oh wait, achieving native speed is close to impossible for a dynamically-typed language.

Comment · 5 years ago
I'm pretty sure the only thing that playing Factorio really tests is the player's ability to learn and play Factorio.
Comment · 5 years ago
What's the previously-investigated dataflow processor architecture that the author refers to in the bolded text?
Comment · 6 years ago
Planes can be switched out last-minute. I plan to check the plane type at the gate every time I fly for the next 10 years, and if it's a MAX, I'll reschedule my flight on the spot.

They claim they solved the software problem, but they didn't solve the physics problems created by the engine position (which necessitated the software in the first place).

Comment · 6 years ago
Pretty sure it's 100% satire, but that doesn't mean it's not the story of 80% of startups.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is a straw man argument. Python's associative array code is written in C, not in Python, and Redis is written in C. So you're comparing C to C. The 40% loss in performance is due to Python being much slower at doing the stuff that's actually written in Python.
Comment · 6 years ago
I grew up in NZ and find it hilarious when I see a tub of manuka honey in a supermarket in the US. This is the most genius marketing ripoff of all time. Most honey you could buy in NZ back then was either clover honey or manuka honey, it cost about $3 for the same amount, and there was nothing special about manuka honey. Manuka is just teatree, by the way. And all honey has the same antimicrobial properties -- it has nothing to do with hydrogen peroxide and definitely nothing to do with UMF. The reason honey kills microbes is it has exceptionally low water content.
Comment · 6 years ago
These days the standard way to do this is to use a USB UART adapter, or a USB-connected Arduino, an Ethernet-connected Raspberry Pi, etc. -- they have GPIO ports, both analog and digital, as well as I2C, SPI, etc etc. There are enormous numbers of options for motor controllers and sensors available off the shelf. You can bit bang all you want from your desktop computer, via this interface!
Comment · 6 years ago
Next thing we'll hear from QAnon is that the Clinton Foundation is putting MDMA in the water to turn everyone liberal.
Comment · 6 years ago
I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout 20 years ago (in the middle of a mission-critical project, no less), and not only doubled my typing speed, but significantly reduced arm/finger strain. Once you put in the 3-ish weeks to retrain your brain, and get back to at least your original typing speed, you'll never go back to QWERTY.
Comment · 6 years ago
Because the average of infection has dropped by over 20 years.
Comment · 6 years ago
They say in the article that the conversion efficiency is 90%, which I assume means that if the reagent supply is infinite, 90% of the electrical energy you put into the catalyst is turned into chemical bond energy.

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