schwurb

It can also be not entirely or to any degree selfish. Depending on the particular state one is in, the world can be like a place where one is only causing harm, no good. Friends and family suffer because of oneself, one is betraying work and society and one is also constantly disappointing the once beloved pet. It really can be an act of "whelp if everyone is better of without me, then...", it can be an altruistic thought in a really twisted way that stems from a highly disturbed sense of selfworth. I have been there, and it was not all about me, I was genuinely convinced I would make the world a worse place in every way, that every person loving me is fooled etc.

> Building stuff

Oh, absolutely one should build much stuff. Just don't get stuck in the own, in all likelyhood shitty, bubble.

> Experts

You made it sound fatalistic tho, as there were no use in even trying to identify experts. If you have difficulties telling experts from wanna-be experts, that is your problem, not the problem of beginners.

You also don't have to be an expert to recognize an expert. The level of competence needed is way lower than that. The level of social skills needed to recognize the different schools and camps is high tho. But this is rather a social problem than a domain-specific one.

Yes, we are on the same page there. I think due to depression during my formative years, I have a mix of slight apathy towards expectations and a slightly off motivation system, which leads me to be very lazy - really only doing what is necessary to get a mantainable product and not so much caring about what other people want. Working in two software companies during studies was okay, but I really hope to sell my own software one day!

Glad to see you making progress!

Of course it all depends on the application at hand, but databases and other system endpoints are something I treat as volatile. However, I don't commit to the madness of replicating a whole database interface in our codebase. Instead, I find it sufficient to bundle all database access in a single point. (i.e. by using a singleton class). That way, later change is much easier and it's a very low investment in maintenance.

I never went through the over-engineer phase personally. I am a very very lazy person, which leads to me to correct balance most of times: Not enough abstraction, I suffer because of too much change to the code base, too much abstraction, and I feel pissed about my risk management. Since I suffer greatly when I suffer, I avoid suffering in my own code as much as possible. What also helps is that I plan most of my algorithms and program designs on paper, actually touching a computer is the last step in that process.

> You should write as much code as possible, run into as many problems as possible, and solve them. This is how you actually learn how to program. Feel free to play with and adapt other people's code along the way though.

Agree, but as much as possible should be limited by reading other code. If one spends 95% living in his own bubble, he will likely progress slower.

> Sure, there may be "excellent code" out there by some standard, but nobody can agree on what "good code" is.

The exact semantics of "excellent code" don't matter here. For all practical purposes, "excellent code" is what a "hey I am a python beginner please tell me your three favourite codebase to learn from thank you" thread on reddit yields.

On the other hand, it is stupid to ignore advice by experts. It is also stupid to not become able to recognize experts. This is a very important step in becoming good in any field - recognizing people who are better than oneself.

> (highly impractical)

Forget everything practical - we are in deep theoretic waters here! There are thousands of algorithm with even a polynomial solution where you still go for the heuristic because the polynomial version is way to slow.

> Isn’t there some (highly impractical) algorithm which dovetails through different Turing machines, in a way that has an asymptotically optimal runtime for a given problem, just with really terrible constants?

Optimal might be, as long as optimal does not mean polynomial. Otherwise you would read about it in the newspapers ;) I don't know of such algorithm, but "trying out different turing machines" gives me a strong gut feeling of "not polynomial".

> I thought we knew an algorithm that, if P=NP, would solve NP problems in P time, (but with absurd constants), and otherwise solves the problems is worse than polytime.

Is that the algorithm you are refering to? Sounds like what Turing proposed once. The interesting branch is the P=NP, since then you could answer really really interesting things in P. Theoretically - and if indeed P=NP ;)

Others gave good answers. I just want to emphasize that your progress will greatly depends on inter talent (which you can't influence), passion and discipline (which you can influence to a degree) and methodology (which you can influence even more).

View points on methodology: 1) Read more than you write. There is excellent code out there. By reading it, you learn to think like an experienced programmer. 2) Hands on > Books. The best approach is to pick an project and program away. Problems will arise naturally (How do I print something to the command line? How can I store data in a list? How can I search an element in a list? ...), which is the best time to look up the solution. 3) Mentors are invaluable. If you live in a big city, there will be programming meetups. If personal contact is not possible, try to see somebody online.

All the best!

> That sounds awful, but apparently this is what the world wants: carefully filtered speech that doesn't stray far from what people already agree with.

No, it is sufficient already to not blurt out controversial things at bat-shit-insanely-bad timings. Similar to how people would be mad at Einstein if he pulled a non-ironic "Yeah, but to be honest he wasn't THAT great" a friends funeral.

I don't like mobs and I lament the fact that one such important figure in computing has such difficulties making himself understood. But that does not mean that the world has a problem somehow. It just happens to be a world that is not fine-tuned to Stallman-communication and that values reducing sexism higher than technical accuracy. Some people don't work that way, some people get therapy to allign themselves, some withdraw from society, some manage to get by. Stallman happened to fall on the friction side of things this time.

I know right?^^

Where do you take your certainess from? If even Stephen Wolfram could not produce such predictions, then I doubt anyone else could. In all likelyhood, it is just not a good physical model.

> P=NP in that a solution can be used to attack RSA encryption.

Note that 1) P=NP does not necessarily give raise to any polynomial algorithm that solves a NP problem. The proof would prove the existence of one such algorithm, but it might well never be found (which is the current status quo) 2) even if it would be polynomial, it could still run longer than the heat of the universe. O(n) = n^10000000 would still be a polynomial runtime for example. The second reason is why Donald Knuth does think that P=NP might be possible.

It's the same story as with many other deep and important math problems: Practically, not much would change. Many papers already assume RH - we would just have confirmation that they are reality then. What would change is that we would likely have novel and powerful methods that were used in the proof. This is what most of the buzz is about. For example, the proof of Fermats Last Theorem introduced novel connections between sub fields of mathematics.

I just want to thank you for all you work! I have enjoyed your answers and content in the past, and I will continue to do so, be it as a PhD. or as a hobbyist :)

> I'm leaning towards the same school of thought. I'd rather see this tech widely accessible and hence all video/picture material henceforth considered completely untrustworthy, than living in the misguided notion that video evidence is trustworthy.

This is why I am all for the current hype and the apps. Everyone that has access to electronic media should now that videos are now more easily to manipulate than ever. This undermines the attack vector of supporting fake news with fake videos. (At least it should, I do not know about the psychological side of it. Maybe even knowledge of a video's falsehood does not diminish its impact that much. Still I think it is best to make video fakeability common knowledge.)

> If we find a completely different way of computing it that doesn't map to a CA, we'll know it's false.

This is wrong. You would have to additionally prove that the other thing is the only alternative.

Also, CA is not testable in the sense that the theory of relativity is testable. The latter makes measurable predictions that can be satisfied, the former does not. I can imagine any model - unicorns and fairies included - and say that is behaves like the universe. The only way to falsify my claim is to empirically contradict one of my claims. NKS does not put forth such claims. Not the kind you would build a new CERN for.

Good! We need to 1) further strengthen an awareness of the "free product means you pay with your data" and 2) channel that into willingness to pay for products. The more news that link "paying" and "social media" together, the better!

> It turned out it was one of the most successful way to win games.

Meh. That statement is euqivalent to "Turns out being able to calculate 400.000 chess positions per second it one of the most successful ways to win games". Given perfect Micro, SC2 is a totally different game that what we are playing.

Dunno if that is helpful to you, but one tip from the link related it to always think of new CT constructs in terms of partially ordered sets if possible. They make for nice visualizations and are generally quite intuitive.

Our lifetime is finite. Given the choice, I'd rather invent the car than reinvent the wheel.

> I lost out on those long term friendships

That would still have happened, only two years later.

> I don't have high school reunions to attend.

Is this an american thing? I am living in Germany and I know plenty of people that don't care about high school reunions at all.

I don't know your situation, but you might be idealizing.

> 32% to 34% doesn't really sound like a win :( We are talking about human lives here, not about beating some CPU benchmark. Detection improvement by 2% is huge in almost any sickness.

Note that Haskell makes very few assumptions about the users; the quality and complexity of Haskell code varies greatly. The author of this block is dealing with an abstract topic, resulting in somewhat arcane looking code (I am sure that after some refactoring it would read nicer). It is however very possible to write really easy to understand Haskell code by ignoring its more fancy features and sticking to the most used abstractions: Monads, Applicatives and Functors. They alone are enough to write great code, no category theory, effect library, type magic or whatever is needed. Simple, real-world Haskell exists, it is just not often blogged about.

> Nevertheless, they 'successfully' close their JIRA tickets and deliver.

Leave those quotes away and I agree. If they know enough Java to finish those tickets in a way that the bug is actually fixed and the fix itself does not impose more technical debt than needed, then those developers know exactly enough java and close their tickets successfully indeed.

I wrote my own compiler for a subset of Java (including inheritance and overriding) to MIPS in uni, among the top in class, and am currently looking to compile Haskell to a very neat kind of calculus (check out "Formality-Core"). It was a really fun experience, but I feel that compilers are immensely overhyped. I guess that is because it is a hard topic and for many people, the investment is huge, so they exagerate the benefits they percieve to reap.

Being proud of understanding something or admitting that a topic is hard is all fine, but I am absolutely allergic to elitism where it isn't just. And no, in 2019, knowing all about parsing and register allocation won't unlock superpowers anymore.

Excellent advice here!

I add two more:

* Check out the pomodorro technique. It forces my to break tasks down into even smaller chunks that usual and give me a rush of dopamine when I finish those.

* I try to stay away from systems and languages that are not responsive enough. I need to see results fast and am willing to take quite a pay cut just so that I don't get bored waiting for a job to be done. So no big enterprise company for me, but rather prototyping and freelancing.

Don't mistake that normal occurrence for anything aching to ADD tho. Saying "I got a little bit ADD because I something loose focus when I find something boring" is equivalent to saying "I got a little bit cancer because sometimes my stomach hurts".

> How do you know you have ADHD?

That is best found out by a multi-angle approach including brain images, intelligence tests, patient history, family history, etc...

Seeing a doctor is critical because a) it is easy to misdiagnose oneself and b) there are some problems that lead to similar symptoms as AD(H)D, i.e. bipolar, problems with your thyroid gland, vitamin deficit, trauma and so on, so it is also important to exclude these.

> Since working memory is a factor in intelligence, one of these statements must be false.

That is quite easy to reconcile: "ADHD has no negative effect on intelligence, when accounting for the impaired working memory". It is something you do all the time in psychology, you observe effects in presence or absence of other effects. Psychologists are smart enough to ask questions like "Now that we know that ADHD impairs working memory, does it further impair other factors of intelligence?" The answer seems to be no - which is important, because it implies that improvements in the working memory transition well into improvements in intelligence.

I give you the benefit of doubt here, but I'd wager that most of the non-academic folk that Dr. Barkley communicates with is intuitively aware of what I wrote above and able to form the right mental picture.

> If one doesn't care that the carpenter building his house is using a hammer upside down, that's a whole 'nother bunch of issues I won't go into here.

I'd love to see at least a small allusion to what nature the issues are made of. Because, to iterate, I'd rather have a well-built house build by an absolutely unconventially working carpenter than a mediocre house build by someone that knows how to use a hammer according to the textbook.

If I want to see nice processes and fantasies fulfilled, I watch movies. In real life, I care about results.

What is the problem about not knowing how computers work? I care about well-written and working code. I couldn't care less about technology. In fact, I consider it an unfortunate fact of life that programming is tied to computers.