Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s Sudoku solver (2018)
leetcode.com
leetcode.com
Off the top of my head, I only recall one other example: COBOL on Wheelchair [0], a web micro-framework for GNU COBOL, written by Adrian Zandberg [1], a Polish MP.
https://techblog.bozho.net/i-have-been-appointed-as-e-govern...
is a top Stack Overflow contributor:
https://stackoverflow.com/users/203907/bozho
as well as a moderately active HN user:
Lets remember his answer on stackexchange regarding how many Greeks pay high taxes vs Greek owners of Porshe Cayennes, when he not recognized and was asked for references for his figures: "Hi, can you provider references for your figures? - Skiiv The figures come directly from SQL queries I executed on the General Secreteriat for Information Systems database.... – Diomidis Spinellis" https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6883
He got an ICPC bronze medal in 2001, and before getting into politics, he was at an IT company for about 10 years, working his way up from a software engineer to the CEO. The company now has 9k employees and $200M revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Volkov_(politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corruption_Foundation
Scroll down to page 150: "Anhang A1: Das Programm FPROJ". Google translate tells me that "Anhang" means "Appendix" in German. I will not soon forget the term "das programm".
I must admit: You nerd sniped me good on this one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
https://metacpan.org/author/AUDREYT
(And of course she is the initiator of the PUGS Perl 6 implementation project)
He understood how the IT services industry worked - from his time on the inside of it at IBM - and saw an opportunity. He likely had a good salesman's grasp of the structure of the industry technologically (what was selling, what wasn't; who dominated what segments; what companies were spending on various segments). He got started from spotting a market inefficiency that IBM wasn't interested in pursuing (leasing unused compute time), so Perot formed EDS and the rest is history.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
* First in his Naval Academy class
* PhD from Caltech
* Reached flag rank
After leaving office because of the Iran-Contra scandal (during which Poindexter reportedly set up a secret communications channel on the IBM PROFS system the NSC used), Poindexter became a software developer!
Edit: Great HN username!
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky describes in some detail the job position of programmer archaeologist (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology>). Set thousands of years in the future, such archaeologists search archives going back to the early days of Unix for useful code.
2. Current government openly admitted to spying on the opposition and introduced an anti-abortion law that already killed a couple women, as hospitals decide to play it safe and wait until the fetus dies. And they dismantled the separation of powers. And probably already stole hundreds of millions of dollars, with independent investigations confirming at least tens. Our politics are so messed up that absolutely no one will bat an eye at a 7 years old non-PC joke.
When I was a child in the United States, Lech Wałęsa regularly celebrated as a hero by helping to lead Poland into democracy as head of the trade union Solidarity/Solidarność. I always felt he was "Une Hacker Originale" by forming a worker's union in a (nominally) Communist state! It was like they back-doored a democratic institution into a unfree state. Amazing stuff to read about.
nah he was just a puppet/poster boy for a good story. The real reason why communism fail in Poland were:
- coup d'etat by deep state. General Kiszczak did an excellent job. System has changed without a bloody revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Kiszczak - communism was inefficient. Trading barier made it worse. As a result Soviet Union was weak and didn't have enough influence to keep the system stable. - Kissinger managed to convince China to counter Soviet Union. In 1969 they had to throw and enormous resources at the border.
http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
I don't happen to think the "wheelchair" is offensive here, you can tell yourself it's ageist and ableist if you need to, but the punchline is clearly at COBOL's expense.
https://princeezraj.medium.com/the-indian-prime-minister-who...
It's quite amazing that he learned COBOL and BASIC and wrote UNIX programs during his career in politics. He's credited with liberalizing industrial policies that helped Software/IT services industry dramatically grow in the following decade after his tenure.
His secretary BN Yugandhar is the father of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Edit: apparently, you can't directly link to the files inside the Drive, as the URL doesn't change when you open it in their file browser. What's the point even?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2G2LjIu7WbdNkZ5aW96ODNxNms...
Edit: That link you put misses the context of the directory you're in (unless I'm missing something else unintuitive again), for some reason. Seems the UX of Drive is essentially broken for files living inside directories.
This way, you can share multiple files in a same folder to different people and they won't see other files.
OneDrive works similarly.
TBF, having the address bar to dynamically reflect whatever the user currently is seeing on screen is really a relatively "new" idea, so I typically don't expect that. It would be great if they have it, of course.
"Relatively" and "new" being very... Relative in this case :) I remember writing client-side web applications (SPAs before they were called SPAs) in 2008/2009 where we did this because tying loading resources based on the URL (compared to the opposite of loading a resource then manipulating the URL) was so obvious, wouldn't surprise me if the practice was older than that as well.
In terms of how fast the web moves forward, I'd say it's not very "new", but in terms of anything else, yeah I guess it is relatively new :)
> int valbit = Possibles & (-Possibles); // Lowest 1 bit in Possibles
(Also "Hackers Delight" if you really can't get enough of it.)
My country's current PM is a school teacher but unfortunately doesn't seem to bring any of the good traits associated with that to the country. The last PM (and who will be PM again soon) was a doctor. Unfortunately he was is just a media/attention addict who won't tackle any big issues like housing costs or homelessness.
Singaporean here. Not if we take the recent performance of our COVID task force into account — it's run by a bunch of bumbling ministerial clowns (one who might potentially become the next prime minister) that can't seem to agree which direction to take Singapore, end up toeing the middle line between endemic and COVID zero, and wrecking everything including the mental health of most Singaporeans staying in their small public flats.
Lee Hsien Loong's main involvement during the pandemic/endemic (Singapore still can't decide how to treat COVID) seemed to be encouraging people, especially the elderly, to get vaccinated.
in retrospect, LHL distancing himself from covid policy is pretty brilliant/convenient, as whoever proves a credible leader through this mess will have demonstrated the qualities we'd probably want for PM
They implemented a unnecessary, ineffective lockdown for two months and a mandatory nationwide tracking system (which differs wildly from the open sourced version they published) without any published efficacy data, went back on their word regarding data collected (without any zero consequences) and will now be using that data for future “policing”.
i respect him more for how he conducts foreign policy. professional, eloquent and incisive, IMO he really brings the best side of our country to the international table.
Relative to DLX it's faster on the easiest puzzles and slower on hard ones, though its performance degrades significantly in two specific still-easy cases: (1) 17-clue puzzles since these punish solvers that don't propagate hidden singles, (2) 0-solution puzzles since the solver doesn't check for consistency during initialization (something the author acknowledges in a comment).
For context see these benchmarks from a modern laptop (https://github.com/t-dillon/tdoku/blob/master/benchmarks/res...) and compare lhl_sudoku to the other simple solvers tdev_basic_heuristic, zerodoku, fast_solv_9r2, kudoku, and norvig.
For details on the solvers and datasets used in these benchmarks see here (https://github.com/t-dillon/tdoku/tree/master/other) and here (https://github.com/t-dillon/tdoku/tree/master/benchmarks)
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/obama-becomes-first-president-...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SGExams/comments/azb9rq/uni_why_is_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTWKAMyFBY
PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2021
while (!isSolved(sudoku)) {
sudoku = generateNextPermutation(sudoku);
}
https://github.com/tonyedgecombe/Sudoku/blob/master/Sudoku/P...
It's not 1ms but it's not that slow either.
I wrote a solver for it back in school, it... wasn't the best? But it worked. The one solution I built solved it like I did - go through every row, column and block, then every number, and ask "is this number possible here" - look for conflicts. The next iteration was "is there only one number possible in this space".
Of course, the teachers were expecting a more brute force approach; I forgot the name, but basically it involved iterating over every space, then every number; if the number fits, move on to the next square; if no numbers fit, backtrack to the previous space and iterate on that number. It solved everything within a second or so, but it was really brute force.
Then I wrote one with SAT. I think it was 60 LOC, super easy to understand, and ran in about 0.4 sec.
What are people trying to make out of this? That he is a tech expert and and therefore should be trusted with tech policies?
Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal).
So whilst it’s impressive that politician can code, I don’t like him, his views, or his political party.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...
Imagine Obama suing a college student for something they wrote on their blog. Now, Trump might have done something like that.. which is the main parallel to draw with the current leadership in Singapore.
As my other comment mentioned, this is not about leaks. This is about open questions being raised by citizens of a government, who wish to see more investigation into the activities of the government. I said nothing about prosecution for leaks, nor is this discussion even about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-...
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-invoked-espionage-act-i...
Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, added: “Obama’s attorney general repeatedly allowed the F.B.I. to use intrusive measures against reporters more often than any time in recent memory. The moral obstacles have been cleared for Trump’s attorney general to go even further, to forget that it’s a free press that has distinguished us from other countries, and to try to silence dissent by silencing an institution whose job is to give voice to dissent.”
https://www.cato.org/commentary/vendetta-how-obama-administr... Fast and Furious involved a sting operation that the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives concocted to infiltrate and weaken Mexican drug cartels. The scheme entailed shipping traceable guns to the drug trafficking gangs and then following the trail to identify and neutralize those organizations and the kingpins who ran them. But Operation Fast and Furious backfired badly. Law enforcement personnel assigned to maintain the traces lost track of where the weapons ultimately ended up. The cartels received more than 1,700 additional weapons at the expense of US taxpayers. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration sought to conceal the nature and extent of the fiasco. Invoking “executive privilege,” Attorney General Eric Holder even defied a congressional subpoena and refused to testify before a House committee investigating the Fast and Furious scheme.
But yes, Obama==GOOD, Trump==BAD
The american state is a large behemoth that moves on its own for much (and almost always in the wrong direction), but it's not like there are absolutely zero differences between who sits in the chair (and there is a lot of potential for someone who has the will to effect change).
As someone who has spent much of my life in that country, yes it does. However, I think that you are conflating orthogonal concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore#Politica...
What Singapore's PM has done is personally sue people, such as college students, for speculation on their blogs. Not at all the same thing -- no leaks of government information, instead, open questions attempting to investigate and raise awareness of conflicts of interest. Some students have gone bankrupt by these attacks.
Trump is also that petty.
I've found some talk about a Fox News reporter being investigated, but I don't see anything anywhere (yet) about any reporters being arrested. Can you cite your sources, please?
> jailed any reporters, unlike the record achieved by Obama
I completely agree with you about the Singapore PMs political views. But this is a turning in the weather - all of us must become coders - the "elites", our leaders, our children, our accountants etc. And one country has now got one "literate" leader. He will make different decisions because of his literacy.
We might not like those decisions, but software awareness will affect his decisions (although probably less than local politics, economics, bribes etc)
We are seeing chnage happen
During the last industrial revolution, the leaders who we all hear about weren't directly involved in building the machines which automated processes. Rather, they were experts at leveraging skills of people who could do it.
It's not difficult to project how software might affect the decisions of someone who allows for no checks/balances aka some form of democracy.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/12/kill-chicken-scare-mon...
Wow, I was surprised to see that Sri Lanka was not on the list. Does anyone know the story behind that? Also, Nepal and Bangladesh are missing. That is also strange. All of them are certainly (proud) democracies!
The point is; Singapore doesn't toe the US line on China and therefore gets HRW and similar thrown after them.
Which is absurd as Singapore is by far the best-governed country in the neighbourhood.
Give them time! Don't assassinate them for being who they have been for years upon years and how they still have not changed as much as you would be pleased.
Honestly, the world will start to see a backward shift on woke culture after the PR disaster that the far left wing administration in the US is becoming.
So, no, suing for libel in a personal capacity does NOT equate to exercising state power as you assert. Unless you claim the entire Judiciary and state apparatus which has a long track record of issuing rulings both for and against public personalities is somehow flawed.
This is HN, i wouldn't have expected a comment such as this to go unchecked this long.
Also, I don't understand this part: <<has loads of national security concerns including destabilizing forces spreading misinformation.>> I think the ruling parties (including opposition!) of every sovereign state on planet Earth could/would/does make the exact same claim. Claims like that feel like "The War on Terror" which makes no sense on so many levels. See also: Countries that are permanently in a "revolution". Example: Iran's Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR; Persian: شورای عالی انقلاب فرهنگی)
The sentence and the security environment in the region are well documented and covered in the security posture reviews routinely covered by official press.
What specifically is your argument?
—- Here it is: He is obviously a smart person. I wouldn’t vote for him though. He recently sued and won a “libel” case against a blogger who reposted a link to a Malaysian web site claiming the PM is involved in the 1MDB scandal. Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal). So whilst it’s impressive that politician can code, I don’t like him, his views, or his political party. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...
Btw, upvotes are one factor in the system here. They are not the only factor. Indignation, sensationalism, flamewar, and other bad-for-HN things routinely get tons of upvotes. It's not a reliable signal of goodness, which is why countervailing mechanisms like flags and moderation are also necessary.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Honestly, HN seems worlds better than any other forum in this regard. Just the fact that dang responded to this post with information about the moderation process rather than banning the guy shows far more restraint and respect than any other internet moderator.
Singapore is a real, functioning democracy. It’s a city-state not much bigger than Chicago. Is Chicago a “one party” state? When was the last time San Francisco voted for a Republican mayor? Singapore is an Asian country with a significant Muslim population. How they exercise their democratic self determination to structure their society is none of our business.
Frankly, bringing up individual rights in every discussion of Singapore strikes me as a very privileged take. As someone from Bangladesh, I wish Americans and others in the international community would focus more on understanding how Singapore turned itself from a poor third world country into an affluent one in a single generation. How it managed to crack down on the corruption and political instability that plagues fledging democracies. Studying those lessons would pay far greater dividends in terms of improving the human condition in Africa and Asia than imposing western notions of individual rights.
For folks who do care about this issue, reading Lee Kuan Yew’s thoughts is fascinating. https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd.... This interview, in particular, is great. The interviewer. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, is one of the most insightful observers of international politics in America.
I sort of agree, but both should occur. Letting transgressions slide because economic progress is made should not occur. Letting the bad happen and excusing it as ‘growing pain’, ‘we are bringing them to the table’ etc has all occurred in the past. The next thing you know, they are big and powerful and don’t want to change.
It doesn’t take much reading about Singapore to be fairly alarmed at the state of human rights and government control. They are listening, recording and require you to register for things like public speaking. This is apart from issues like gay rights, workers rights, flogging of criminals and executions. Government opposition parties are under active surveillance and quickly sanctioned should they push too far. I’m surprised anyone argues for it, however those I know from Singapore strongly defend it.
That assumes that these things are uncorrelated, and I don’t think you can make that assumption without proof. For example, Singapore is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society with a delicate balance between Chinese (Confucian), Malays (Muslim), and Indians (Hindu). This is a mix that in many countries could devolve into perpetual ethnic conflict. Indeed, Singapore separated from Malaysia due to conflict between the Chinese and the Malay.
Part of that grand bargain is that the culture of government is Anglo and Confucian, but the government otherwise avoids intruding on the culture of the other two groups. Homosexuality is simply not accepted in Islam and among Indians. So a push to legalize it would be seen as an attack by westernized English-speaking Chinese upon the two other cultural groups.
Lee Kuan Yew was, in fact, extremely westernized (he spoke English as his first language), and opposed the law against homosexuality. But he was not about to upset social stability and unity in the country over that issue: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-homosexuality-i...
In America, we take social stability for granted. Imposing social change without broad public consensus creates social strife and more than a little dysfunction even in America. In a developing country, such conflict could be fatal. The calculus of individual welfare versus collective welfare is simply different in a developing country. Singapore’s infant mortality dropped from 35 per 1,000 to 2.5 per 1,000 from 1960 to 2000. Anything that sets back economic development, no matter how well intentioned the goal, means literally tens of thousands of dead children. That’s the cold hard reality people in wealthy countries don’t have to deal with.
So caning people for public disorder? Well it’s relative. If an authoritarian government is what it takes to straighten out society and get it on the right track, it is what it is.
It’s not lost on me that the predecessors of the prosperous northeastern states were extremely repressive Puritan, Dutch, and Quaker communities.
Singapore is a "democracy" where the system is heavily stacked against opposition parties, and where supposedly apolitical institutions funded with public money like the "grassroots" People's Association [1][2][3] are heavily biased towards the dominant People's Action Party.
[1] https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/explainer-perennial-is...
[2] https://theindependent.sg/wps-sylvia-lim-has-to-use-void-dec...
[3] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/jamus-lim-reiterates-...
Singaporeans I know are very defensive though and love their “benevolent dictatorship” and bring up homelessness in SF or dirty sidewalks or something similar.
For example, the city is built by immigrant workers often from Bangladesh. You should see the living conditions they are forced to endure. It's shameful.
During Covid, they don't even refer to these hard-working people as being members of the community, and they segregated the Covid case counts by those who were and were not a part of society, in their eyes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_from_Online_Falseho...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Interference_(Counterm...
[3] https://newnaratif.com/shanmugams-stealth-coup-in-singapore/
As it stands, the top comments are all "Oh wow, cool!" which is exactly the reaponse you are cautioning against.
"Being gay" is largely a western obsession. Different cultures have their attitude towards it (as they should). Polygamy is banned in the US and many western nations and accepted in many parts of the world, nobody argues it is a human rights issue.
Let the Singaporeans be.
I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer.
As an undergraduate, he studied maths at Trinity College Cambridge. Béla Bollobás said [1]:
> I certainly taught him more than anybody else in Cambridge. I can truthfully say that he was an exceptionally good student. I’m not sure that this is really known in Singapore. “Because he’s now the Prime Minister,” people may say, “oh, you would say he was good.” No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap between him and the man who came second was huge.
> I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician. I’m sure his father never realized how exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No, Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan Yew, “Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage him to do mathematics,” then he implied that that was impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good point indeed. Now I am even more impressed by Lee Hsien Loong than I was all those years ago, and I am very proud that I taught him; he seems to be doing very well. I have come round to thinking that it was indeed good for him to go into politics; he can certainly make an awful lot of difference.
He then did the (now-discontinued) Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims....
I dont know if he's good for Singapore but I mean, he did one of the most noble thing a human can do so I wouldnt blame him. I hope to do 1% of what this politician tried to do in my lifetime.
Solve sudokus?
The early pandemic outlined how many politicians lacked even the ability to reason about exponentials (let alone scientific thinking!) I am very glad that there is at least SOME representation of great thinkers amongst our leader-class
This is not a pervasive opinion. The prime minister has directly sued personally anyone who attempts to investigate the state wealth fund and there is a lot of questioning about the motives and conflicts of interest among Singapore's ministers and their families.
The lack of free press, and that it is illegal to investigate these government activities, is worth noting as well.
Note this ranking is based on "perception of corruption". Given that Singapore is a one-party state with extremely little press independence (https://theindependent.sg/singapore-in-bottom-20-countries-i...), citizens would be less likely to hear of any major corruption that occurred as the media wouldn't report it.
As an example, PM Lee's wife was CEO of Temasek, the national investment company, for many years. Consider, of all the five million plus people in Singapore, what is the probability that the prime minister's wife just happens to be the most qualified of anybody in the country to manage the country's money?
She somehow also finds the time to make hundreds of Facebook posts a day: https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/g33rvv/how_is_ho...
I spent some time there and I honestly believe that corruption is probably on par or better than other developed countries. They take it very seriously.
However, as you mentioned, if there was corruption, you’d probably never know. With the libel laws and control of the media, I doubt many would be willing to speak out.
Singapore’s system has worked so far, but all it takes is some corruption within for the whole system to rot to its core. It’s not setup to self-correct. It seems like a well oiled machine on the surface but that’s just because you’re not allowed to see all the warts.
Singaporean here. It's mostly "reputable and highly regarded" if one gets a top-tier government scholarship [1], since that leads to civil service postings with more exposure and chances to take credit.
Everyone else is just a "farmer" [2][3]. :)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Are-scholarship-holders-more-likely-to...
[2] https://www.mycarforum.com/forums/topic/2675951-lousy-schola...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/7p5unh/degree_ho...
Does Taiwan count? I would hardly say it has diminished or fallen apart. Of course, that is only my humble opinion.
From what I’ve experienced, the lack of corruption in Singapore is partly cultural and partly due to their heavy penalties for crime.
Even if you know you have to keep your eye open for it. E.g. my personal favourite is that I 100% did not spot until it was pointed out to me that the printing dwarfs in The Truth are all named after fonts...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/haoyi-li-3b3291182?originalSubdo...
/s, obviously, my dad is actually very proud of me.
edit: this attempt at a sarcastic jab pissed some people off I guess. My point was that sure, the critique that issue of "people who understand one thing think they understand everything" applies disproportionately to programmers (and STEM people in general), but trying to defend against that by acting smugly superior about your own domain of expertise isn't going to fix that, that just makes you a problem on the other side of the coin.
I don't know if microbiology is special in some sense, but I have witnessed several times during my career cases of programmers turned into domain experts(in Logistics for example).
Obviously you don't became an MD that way, if that was your point.
Plenty of people still live in a world where coding is low prestige.
The material was about the fundamentals of programming (loops, lists, dictionaries). I found it hard to stay focused because the applications and usefulness of the concepts weren’t immediately obvious (any problem I could solve at that point could easily be solved better with a ‘no-code’ solution). Some of the concepts also took a few days to understand, while I was struggling with maintaining motivation.
I’ve since used other learning materials, and now I better understand why new programming courses nowadays (like Harvard’s CS50) like to start their courses with the Scratch language. It communicates earlier the usefulness of the fundamentals (e.g. using if and while statements to animate a cartoon character).
This lack of immediate useful application (until months of study later) might not be the only reason, but it may well be a major one. It can cause people to give up even if they are diligent and dedicated in other fields (where the rewards arrive earlier).
For me the answer is I've only seen it where there is an absurdly narrow selection process: professional sports (all of them), admission to certain universities (Ivy League/Oxbridge), certain specific jobs (SEAL team, investment banks, etc).
For everything where there's no gatekeeper, I'd only count out very few people from the start.
However, there is a substantial barrier for a programmer to switch careers and become a microbiologist: access to lab equipment. Part of the job of a microbiologist is to work with (usually expensive) scientific equipment to carry out and design procedures for experiments, and it’s hard to study independently without owning a lab space or the equipment. I’ve also found less educational material for self-study online.
Contrast this with self-study in programming. The required equipment is also just a low-end computer, and you don’t need a laboratory environment to develop your skillset. Educational resources (e.g. Automate the Boring Stuff With Python) are also not only widely accessible, but often free.
If you were to ask me, programmers can't learn it because what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy. The only way to learn it is to accept all the rules and ALL the exceptions to the rules as the foundation and go from there, which not a lot of people are willing to do.
This sounds like an extraordinary claim, especially since organic chemists work along physical chemists and chemical physicists who presumably have a strong modern understanding of physics. It would be better for an expert to chime in, but I don’t see the incentive where organic chemists would be content to let their field stay out-of-date.
A) any microbiologist may eventually need to learn very basic coding to do their job/tasks effectively;
B) a programmer likely won’t be interested in learning even basic microbiology unless hired by microbiologists.
I’m a software engineer/programmer by profession and schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and Lepidoptera among insects. I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you have somebody who can explain it to you.
I’m not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly for three reasons:
1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having kids;
2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because I’m tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid half-assed TypeScript “framework” du jour every day at work;
3. I’m not confident I can make as much money in entomology as in I.T.
Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.
I tried to use the word “likely” to avoid these points being perceived as absolute laws. I think it’s simply less likely that any random programmer will have motivation to learn microbiology than it is for a microbiologist to learn some programming techniques.
The microbiologist may be compelled by functional requirements for their job to learn some coding while the programmer, unless working on business problems in that domain, would never be professionally compelled to learn microbiology to reinforce their profession aims.
In the telco industry I've heard several people say "I think it's easier for someone used to circuit switched to learn packet switched than the other way around". Every single time I heard that was from someone who knew circuit switched, and did not have one single clue about how packet switching worked, but thought they did.
If it's your field it's very easy to see people come in and think they've learned it when they haven't.
I've seen it in mathematicians, too. They very often think they can program when they can't.
Or in other words: You can teach a programmer to be a microbiologist to the point where I will believe they're a microbiologist. But I am not one.
And same with programming, except you'll only convince the microbiologist that you succeeded.
And when it comes to software development, the actual writing code part of it, I'm confident you need to have a knack for it.
Mind you, there's plenty of jobs in software engineering that don't involve writing code. We're desperately looking for a manager for example, because our current "self-managing" team is far from effective.
You can’t teach height.
- or -
Are are you saying that height is something you can't teach and of course anyone can learn microbiology?
I see utility in focusing on interdisciplinary skills
I would say in the past this was unexpected. We cannot build a better future with bureaucrats and lawyers as it was proven several times. I am hoping that going forward means we have more practical politicians who actually have understanding of different domains outside of law and politics.
I have it on good authority that Boris Johnson was viva'd at the end of his classics degree – implying he was on the first/2:1 boundary – and graduated with a 2:1.
We could do with boring in the UK right now.
He certainly inherited the size of the mouth of his father, and tried to imitate his tirades heavily 12 years ago when I lived there, but so far nothing really came out of it.
Sing in last 12 years: losing vestiges of its industry, and getting more, and more reliant on mainland money.
It’s not. (Unless you have a really expansive view of “one of”.)
Whether you mean population or economy.
/s
As a Scandinavian, the idea of someone being "safe" from taxes is ... alien, to say the least. :)
Now if you re a chronically over spending under budgeted country and look at Singapore you're like "how can they be so rich with so little tax, they re robbing us", but that may hide a few things you could try on your side.
I wonder if India would have been more non-relgious it too would have become hugely successful. Although relatively its better compared to Pakistan which is too religious than India.
Looks like Islamic nations work great under a monarch rather than democracy.