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Redkey

@ Redkey @programming.dev

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96
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • top 5 unsolved problems in computer science

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  • For 2, one of the few pieces of Windows software that I haven't been able to replace in Linux is GetRight. Many HTTP servers support downloads starting at an offset from the beginning of the file, and GetRight uses that to allow download pausing and resumption.

    It was a real life saver back when I had an extremely flaky Internet connection.

    EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll definitely take a look at them. Simply resuming downloads is why I initally started using GetRight, but it also came with a bunch of other useful tools that I came to rely on. While I've been able to replicate some of the basic functionality with individual browser plugins or programs, I haven't seen anything that integrates it all so well, with such a smooth interface. I haven't looked for a long time, though, so maybe one of your suggestions will be the one!

  • Wizardry

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  • A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?

  • Wizardry

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  • "... [it] isn't actually necessary... the whole spell falls apart without it for some reason."

    That's peak cargo cult programming spellcasting right there.

  • Training Payoff

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  • https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

    TL;DR: It all seems to have started with a (possibly deliberately) misnamed pair of socks for sale on Amazon. They began showing up as suggestions when people searched for programming-related items.

  • Micro$oft when I try to enjoy my local drive in peaC:\

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  • I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

    I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

    People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

  • mmmmm pasta

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  • Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol...

    ...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...

    The list is infinite.

    Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.

  • Noncoders are using AI to prompt their ideas into reality. They call it 'vibe coding.'

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  • Guys, I know AI slop sucks, but maybe don't shoot the messenger (downvote OP)? I think it's worth knowing how mainstream media is presenting this.

  • Programmers then and now

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  • In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

    Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

  • Courses for SIMPLE, website-orientated, javascript development

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  • MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I've always found their material much more useful for reference once I'm already familiar with the general usage of whatever I'm trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.

    I usually go read W3Schools first. It's mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it's useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I'm comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.

    And OP, it sounds like you're already wary of this, but don't let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you "need" some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you're doing.

    I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.

  • The general feeling of documentating things

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  • I've had to interact with too many people who say this with a straight face.

  • Relatable

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  • I think it depends a lot on a person's individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there'll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something "just works", but it will no longer feel like that's what your main field is based upon.

    Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a "feel" for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don't need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

    For my personal interest, I've learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn't directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it's built on a mystery.

    I don't recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don't have to feel that our work is based on "magic smoke" if we really don't want to.

    ADDED: If anyone's curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater's YouTube videos about "Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!" It's a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

  • AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say

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  • AI coding is an improvement on infinite monkey Shakespeare in the sense that it only types whole words from a dictionary. Although that dictionary has been built from a mix of classic literature and SNS posts.

  • Pain

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  • So this is a list of responses given by AI when you correct it? My guess was "Things you will never hear from a client when you politely point out a logical inconsistency, an incorrect assumption, or a wild over/underestimation in their project plan." 'Cause in my experience the response you will get, 99% of the time, is "That won't happen."

  • Labels go brrrr

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  • ASM doesn't care about your variable types, because it doesn't care about your variables. What's a variable, anyway? There is only address space.

  • Do any of you here use Programming socks?

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  • Only Winsocks.

  • Bingo of crappy IT processes

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  • How to Forget C++

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  • How to Forget C++

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  • I don't think that even C++ is that bad. Like a lot of shows and music acts, I think it's more the toxic fan base than the thing itself that really sucks. I've had the same feeling with a certain kind of JavaScript programmer.

    *Edit for clarity: I'm not saying that the entire C++ community is toxic, just a vocal segment of it, in line with the other examples I gave.

    The added difficulty with this in programming is that it can be much harder simply to ignore them, because you may be forced to work with them, or stuck needing to learn something from them (shudder).

  • Angry ComSci Prof. noises

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  • Tail recursion in particular is usually just turned back into a loop at the compiler, and typical modern architectures implement a call stack at the hardware level, which allows you to do limited-depth recursion, but breaks like in OP if you try to go too deep.

    Yes, in my experience this is what the term "recursion" means in a programming context; it doesn't usually refer to a mathematical ideal. That was what tripped me up.