How to find out if programming is for you | Hacker News Reader

How to find out if programming is for you

zackproser.com

21 pointsgus_leonel28 comments

OP here. Thanks for all the feedback! I truly consider it a gift. My takeaways are: you want more pixel art and you want it to be more frequent throughout the post. I'm on it!

In all seriousness I deeply enjoy generating pixel art images and tweaking prompts to get exactly or closer to what I want, but across everyone giving me feedback I seem to get a 50/50 split between they're really pretty, which I tend to think is the case personally, or I'm a terrible person/ programmer/ artist for including them.

You may be interested to know I'm building a side project to help me write posts with generated images while I'm on the go:

github.com/zackproser/panthalia

So at least im the short term, be on the look out for more posts with terrible pixel art.

To be fair, I generate a bunch of Neon Punk stuff, too.

I think the pixel art was a bit much in this article but I'm not against them in general as filler in blog posts. I think a good rule is to just toy around with prompts a lot in general and then if you happen to find an image that really stand out as nice looking alone (as a cool piece without any text) then that's what I'd consider adding somewhere in a future text. But not like "ok I have an article, now I need 5 images to go with it let's quickly pick the 5 first ones I get from a simple prompt". Just my perspective and take on the matter. :)

Thanks and that makes sense. I may come so far as to admit having a bit too much fun with this one

Simple, did you find the "Higher or Lower Number Game" fun as a kid? and did you try many unique strategies before settling on an optimal solution... It may sound silly, but this will generally forecast if people will stay with the hobby.

Similarly, Engineers were the kids that constantly destroyed their toys with magnifying glasses and illegal fireworks. This is why society must keep them preoccupied on beneficial projects, and spicy BBQ meat to attenuate their true nature. You can test folks by placing 3 Liquorice jelly beans on a pile of vanilla beans, They will try to covertly remove the defective beans at any cost, and this compulsion continues into adulthood. If this imaginary jar of beans still concerns you, than you likely should have been an engineer.

Have a wonderful day, =)

I read your comment 24 hours or so ago while walking and I still can't get the image of the improperly sorted beans out of my head

I'd go one step further than the article: never go to a coding bootcamp!

You're getting a certificate that means less than the most meagre undergraduate module. This may be fine relative to their cost, but degrees in some countries are free or subsidised, so it's worth looking at formal education first.

In terms of the actual learning, if you're polite, patient and willing to put in some personal effort, you'll be able to turn any stranger online into a teacher! IRC or Matrix channels, programming language forums and local groups can often provide a good sense of community, and to be quite honest documentation that you pay (as in books or courses) is rarely better than what you can get on the Web for free.

Even in the USA we have taxpayer-subsidized "bootcamps" for all sorts of valuable skills. They're called community colleges, and they get a bad rap, probably because of our university-focused work culture. Doing coursework at a community college is a great way to try out a field you're not sure you're committed to yet, that's more structured than self-study. And it's going to be cheaper than a full university and certainly more so than a private bootcamp.

That's very interesting. I don't think we have those here in Britain; we have pre-university colleges, but these are generally only available to those of the correct age to follow on from school. Full degrees are associated with a pretty good state-funded loan (which is written off automatically if not paid before retirement), but there are no longer grants for most people. In my parents' time, things were different - my father graduated from university getting more money for attending than he paid for the degree!

We have them in Britain

The article touches a lot of interesting points, but often the novelty (and the shiny pay) is the main attraction point.

For me, I just figured out that am good at it and enjoy it when I was doing some embedded work for six months. Before that, I was doing a lot of matlab and wouldn’t dream of doing that as a profession ever.

Best to try it out a while as a small internship/apprenticeship(EU thing) before deciding if you want to do it long term.

I saw a very many people try to learn Python and then read cool things about C++/Rust folks and then try those to build basic CRUD and then loses interest. At the beginning best to use the easy tools and see if you can persist at it and once you have mastery, try to dip in more complex topics.

Thanks for the reply! I agree with your point - most of the time when people find out what I do they ask about the comp first.

I also think it's critical to have those progressive wins, and progressively more difficult, ambitious projects in order to keep learning and growing.

It feels like this article is only half done.

Thanks for the feedback and this is really interesting to me. What would you have liked to read about that you felt was missing?

Generative AI has come a long way but it's still so clear that these illustrations are not hand made.

I didn't pay too much attention other than to notice that there were a lot of them. I wonder if the biggest problem is going to be the flood of material heading towards us.

I, for one, quite liked them and felt they gave the article a nice vibe.

they blend pixel and other rendering styles together, which is awful since they each demand stylistic consistency.

Sorry, I'm not following your argument; it sounds like you're making an argument that the mere idea of mixing different styles is somehow an illegal operation.

Your overuse of algorithm-generated images is very cringy.

Unrelated AI-generated images make me close a tab so fast.

The probability that the article itself is written by GPT-4 becomes so much greater if that's the case too.

I can assure you this post was not. I even remember why I wrote it!

If you take a look at some of my previous posts you'll see I've experimented thoroughly with integrating GenAI services into my workflow, but I don't like using generated text. I'd rather write the article myself.

I find myself more likely to take some generated code as a starting point or talk through a thorny technical issue with GPT4 until the path forward is clear in my mind.

I believe you that this article wasn't written by generative AI. I'm not really accusing you of either. I'm just saying that the conditional probability that an article is AI written given that the images are AI generative is much higher than if it doesn't have those (mostly since on average such authors have likely played with both if they've played with one of them).

Yep, totally makes sense!

At least, I find it similar to(or slightly tolerable with images disabled) the previous emoji packed sentence trend.

One at the top is usually fine. Ten or so is a bit excessive.

What is it about it that makes you feel this way?

Thanks for the feedback! I disagree, personally, and quite enjoy them, hence why I've included them.

I love them, myself and - this part is really going to bother you - I'm working on an open source project to help me generate them with even greater efficiency: github.com/zackproser/panthalia

But yeah: my content is definitely not for everyone!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com