I’m ready for the rebuttal post: “different clocks have different approaches to conveying information about seconds within a minute” which uses the same photos as examples.
As a Chicago Bulls fan, this site seemed like a lot of effort to explain a very small shift in their jerseys. I’m happy to see the Bulls are a low-flair outlier, and it was cool to be able to switch teams to compare.
I’m working on a crossword app, with the intent to add “kaizo” elements, as a way to take any puzzle and add obstacles aside from the clues, which I hope will be fun. But I guess I won’t know until I try.
I love this comment. One of the worst feelings at my old job was putting a ton of effort into describing a problem, only for somebody else to recognize it as a known, studied thing that already has a name.
It’s really hard, in my experience, to come across the existing name for something while you’re still figuring out all the angles of a problem for yourself.
Of course, you still have to do all the work of describing the problem. But if you iterate through your problem and solutions within a conversation you can get to what you need (a conventionally understood term) faster than writing a fully-fledged blog post.
I copied the context of the article into ChatGPT (v4) and asked it "What are the names of these methods that are conventionally understood in the wider industry?"
It suggested terminology like: "adjacency list", "materialized path" and "nested set".
When I work on a problem that’s new to me, I ask around, explaining the problem, checking if someone recognizes the domain, if it is known.
When someone explains to me what I’m working on is a solved problem, I take great joy from it since I already understand the issue some, I can criticize or take great energy from learning something for sure.
I believe how to feel about it is a choice btw. As movie says “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
That's generally how I do it as well. One of the positives about remote work is I can go on my general programming slack channel at my work and write out my problem and get better visibility than going around my local area in my office.
Also I end up getting to meet programmers from different projects/departments that I would have never met if I was only working in office.
> It’s really hard, in my experience, to come across the existing name for something while you’re still figuring out all the angles of a problem for yourself.
Absolutely! Discoverability is a huge challenge. There is so much amazing work that's been done in the past that is virtually impossible to find out about.
I only know this stuff because I was working with databases fifteen years ago and an older colleague encouraged to me to learn more about it.
I don't know why you should feel bad about that. If anything, you should feel good that you independently recognized a problem so significant that it was given a name.
I assume most problems I face are solved, and that I just don't know shit. So I scramble to research the solutions, and I'm shocked when what seem to be widely-encountered problems are NOT, in fact solved.
One recent example I encountered was API definition. I was tasked to define a new API for my company's products, and celebrated when I discovered OpenAPI. I was a bit surprised to find that only the very latest version of the standard (3.1) was competent enough to be useful.
And despite 3.1 being ratified for years, today there are still no usable code-generation tools that support it. I wasted weeks studying and trying to fix various tools, after studying reams of redundant and conflicting documentation in different repositories... thinking it was my problem. No. It's just a hideously broken mess.
Today I'm dealing with the same thing in SwiftUI... and again have reached the conclusion that the programming paradigm it pushes has not been thought through. Its rushed and immature state shows in its kitchen sink full of overlapping and rapidly-deprecated approaches to problems that were solved in traditional application structures a decade and a half ago.
Just typing that out, I wonder if I failed to learn from my first example and wasted too much time on the second. But if you're a thorough person, you have to satisfy yourself that you've been diligent in trying to inform yourself of best practices.
I think we’ve all had that one friend/classmate in c plus plus 101 who always “cried wolf” saying there’s a problem with the compiler making the instructor proclaim that 99.9999% of the time if your code fails to run it is not a bug in the compiler. We’ve been taught/trained to find the fault in our own work.
Which, to be fair, is really the correct thing to teach since in the vast majority of cases that's where the fault is!
On the other hand, I find a lot of bugs. Not in things as refined as compilers, usually, but if I had a dollar for every time I've heard, "Well, nobody else has reported this before," I could probably buy a tank of gas. And that's saying something today.
Latest example: Amazon's Web site rejects all phone numbers entered on an Apple Silicon Mac. I was setting up a new address, and it said "remove invalid characters from phone number field:" https://i.imgur.com/mjwiCqc.png
This happened in both Safari and Firefox. Amazon support couldn't figure it out in 1.5 hours of chat. I went to an Intel Mac and entered the exact same number, no problem.
That’s concerning. I’d understand iPhone or iPad or such sandboxed devices but not this. If you are so inclined, can you see if you can reproduce this on a simple html page? Do you think the problem is client side or on their servers?
I like neocities.org for small experiments like this but you can use anything you’d like.
Thinking it through, I assume it's on the client side. Maybe something is wrong with the JavaScript that's doing the validation... but do Safari and Firefox use the same engine?
I don't know what else could vary based on platform. One thing I can't control for is browser and OS versions, because the older Mac I have (the one that works in this case) can't be updated to the latest.
It must be sending garbage characters. But the vast, vast majority of sites work. It's really mystifying.
As far as other sites are concerned... I just remembered one that's not quite as clear-cut. Zoro.com complains that my credentials are wrong, but if I reset my password it complains that I'm trying to use my current password... so it's obviously not wrong. As usual, they just threw up their hands... and sent me a 10% coupon... which of course I can't use because their site is broken. Just tried it again, and it's still unusable. Didn't try the older computer yet.
On that note, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences [0] is a fantastic resource for certain algorithm-stuff where you want to figure out if mathematicians have already named something.
Every generation wants to reinvent the wheel, because otherwise they'd feel helpless and it's way more fun. Further than that I think that every generation wants to make their own mistakes, regardless of how well documented they were.
Overall this is healthy, a new set of eyes to an old problem can yield new solutions. In some cases though, it's a facepalm situation. Like the whole Javascript world of today.
That's certainly the reason I wrote my own static site generator for my website.
I knew I was reinventing the wheel but I also knew the learning results would be immense. I usually work in real-time systems and it was great to have a project to learn how to do offline data-in data-out types of problems. The two types of problems can be very different.
Also it gave me a good excuse to finally actually do something with a functional language.
I'd never recommend my static site generator to the general public though.
I recently started writing about my experience as a full-time caregiver, having recently left my software career: https://crawlwalkrunbook.substack.com. Striving for one post each week.
The MathLabs competition reminds me a lot of speedrunning progressions in video games. The routes and techniques used to complete a video game as fast as possible evolve as the speedrunning community shares videos of their record-setting runs. It's a really cool environment for developing the "technology" behind each speedrunning category, and I'd be fascinated to read analysis similar to this article.
Hey, thanks for writing these comments. I think these are great examples of how to talk about these topics without inviting more conflict or devolving into condescension.
Once you get wherever you wanted via train, you are now pretty much stuck at a train station.
So much of America is not walkable, and we don't have great public transportation within cities and towns, so if you arrive somewhere without a car there's not much for you to do.
But the same is true of flying. Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport.
The difference, of course, is that airports tend to have sufficient passenger numbers to justify car hire agencies locating there (or at least providing a shuttle), but that case is harder to make as long as there are comparably few trains per day.
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