Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

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This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills.

It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which applies to businesses and startups as well.

If you're in the latter group -- you've already got the skills to build real shit. Don't waste your time on homework problems. Find a problem you have and build a solution for it. Don't listen to people who tell you to work on homework problems that have already been solved; it's a complete waste of your time if you already know the fundamentals.

As for stock trading bots -- if you don't have a mathematics degree or equivalent (e.g. having incredible math skills), don't even bother. You won't be profitable, and you will learn nothing useful in the process, because you will approach the problem as a naive CS student would. Smarter people than you have made trading bots and have failed miserably. Without having an extremely strong foundation in mathematics, your trading bot will amount to nothing more than a futile exercise in gluing APIs together.

> If you're in the latter group -- you've already got the skills to build real shit. Don't waste your time on homework problems.

I disagree. Not everything is about business and money. Many people already build "real shit" for a living and want to simply have fun building other things, and focus on the cool parts, and not all the boring parts involved in a commercial project.

Also CS is constantly evolving. Nobody knows the "fundamentals" once for all. A ray tracer is still a ray tracer, but languages and technologies have changed immensely in just a few years. Git didn't exist 15 years ago. A langage like Rust is 10 years old. React is 7 years old. We need these homework problems simply to keep up to date.

Totally unrelated, but what's the connection between your name and the famous Muay Thai fighter Yodthanong Photirat, better known as Yodsanklai Fairtex?? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodsanklai_Fairtex

He was my inspiration for the name, first name that popped to mind when I chose my HN user name :)

That's awesome! Really cool to see another knowledgeable fan of Muay Thai on this forum!

> Git didn't exist 15 years ago. A langage like Rust is 10 years old. React is 7 years old. We need these homework problems simply to keep up to date.

None of them were innovative (as in something new) nor belong to CS fundamentals.

It depends on what your goal is. If you believe that programming is a craft, akin to woodworking, then you'll soon realise you need to practice and work to put in the 10,000 hours to master it. Yes the list in the OP doesn't make for good ways to make money, but they are good for practicing your craft.

I do not understand this reasoning and divide between student and post-student for lack of a better word. I have math/cs education, have worked both in startups and big companies, in the front-end, rendering and ai in the (“serious”) game industry. I have always worked on exactly these sort of educational projects on my own and it’s a complete joy: git client from scratch - yep, useless, but extremely educational, jit for befunge - same, etc etc. I am extremely happy people still engage and do “useless”stuff and HN is for me a big inspiration in that sense.

Real shit is rarely interesting and typically won’t challenge your skills as a coder. Generally they just test your ability to wire together APIs, learn mundane domain specific concepts, and tolerance of boredom. Getting low level can be really fun and helps refresh those skills you may not flex much since university. For me personally this is the kind of thing that made me passionate about coding. If you already live a day job where you are coding ray tracers, emulators, and databases then I envy you but this article isn’t really for you.

You should grow a second spike. I'm at the point where visual design skills are a greater bottleneck than my computer science skills. I can build purely functional CAD models but man, making them functional AND look good is the real challenge.

Agreed. Everyone should aim to have 3-4 spikes they are passionate about. For every spike you have, you become exponentially more of a domain expert at the problems that are at the intersection of those spikes.

Yes, proper senior expertise often looks like being a jack of all trades and a master of three or so.

Another perk is that you have other spikes to grow for variety to keep you from burning out or becoming disinterested.

What's a "spike" in this context? This one's hard to google. I'm assuming something like "area of competence", but a more precise definition would be nice to know.

Check the link from GP. You're correct a "spike" of knowledge is some topic that you specialize in.

Depends. I'm doing Advent of Code in COBOL. I know those problems have been solved a long time ago.

I'm having fun, and that's reason enough.

These toy projects are worth doing if you want to continuously build your skills and like knowing how things work at a fundamental level. If you want to create an OS, it will obviously never be used by anyone ever and in that sense it's "useless", but you learn a lot in the process and it's fun.

I completely disagree with your comment. Learning for the sake of learning is great, and "homework problems" are an excellent way to achieve that goal. It's not a waste of time. Profit is not always about making money, there are more things in life.

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