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Resolutions for programmers

matt.might.net

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Re: Resolutions for programmers

#141

Post by SickAnimations »

slowpoke wrote: post #122
jwallaceparker wrote: post #109

+1 for trying the vegan diet If you do this, please go to restaurants and request a vegan meal. The environmental benefits of the vegan diet are well-documented. The best way to enact change is to get restaurants to start listing vegan options.

I do not believe that Veganism is healthy at all. Vegetarianism with a correct diet (and only then) can be, but the human body isn't fit for a vegan diet in the long run. I respect your choice if you do it, but at large it's just not reasonable. Oh, and something slightly offtopic: if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

> if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

That's ridiculous. Would you not agree that vegetarian people are likely to be more conscious of their nutritian than the average person?

Here's an anecdote. I know three children brought up in vegetarian* family. All three were high achievers academically and athletically. It's worth noting that their mother was very conscious of nutrition, and did give them supplements.

*Pescatarian, actually. Though many pescatarians call themselves vegetarian, including this family.

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#142

Post by justindocanto »

You will never be able to accomplish being "Healthier". What is healthier? a little healthier? maybe a little healthier than that? until you feel healthy? eat green stuff?

Try something more concrete like "Eat no more than 2 fast food meals a month".

Basically, your first resolution should be "Set 11 tangible goals".

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#143

Post by pknerd »

Though the entire list is pretty awesome but somehow I missed or got overlooked that it does not contain the factor to give time to family.

Most of us, programmers when get busy in work tend to ignore our families unintentionally.This pattern is not different than artists who pain pictures.

After watching the TED Talk by Matt Cutts(mentioned in my last post) and some serious complaints by my wife and kid, I decided to make a resolution of this year to give more time to family than I used to give last year. It's covering few things mentioned in the post:

1- Coming out of comfort zone: When I start coding or doing something relevant of it, I just forget everything and often work in wee hours. Now coming out of it is definitely not comfortable for me but eventually would turn out to make things sane around me.

2- Be social: When one gets social,even with wife and other family member, you got to face things which don't pertain coding. While things like that could be painful at times due to bad situation but it naturally makes your brain cells think about other things as well.

So, I request to myself and entire HN community to give more time to your family too. You never know how such "non-technical" moments make your technical journey more beautiful.

my 2 cents.

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#144

Post by slowpoke »

SickAnimations wrote: post #141
slowpoke wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe that Veganism is healthy at all. Vegetarianism with a correct diet (and only then) can be, but the human body isn't fit for a vegan diet in the long run. I respect your choice if you do it, but at large it's just not reasonable. Oh, and something slightly offtopic: if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

> if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse. That's ridiculous. Would you not agree that vegetarian people are likely to be more conscious of their nutritian than the average person? Here's an anecdote. I know three children brought up in vegetarian* family. All three were high achievers academically and athletically. It's wor…

>Would you not agree that vegetarian people are likely to be more conscious of their nutritian than the average person?

That's certainly true, and actually a necessity for vegetarianism to be healthy in the first place (just removing meat from your meals isn't going to magically be more healthy, it's actually the opposite). It's still pretty much impossible to supply a growing child with the needed nutrients on a purely vegetarian basis. While it's of course possible for children to grow up into healthy adults this way, it's still not without heavy risks to the child's physical development.

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#145

Post by rohitnair »

slowpoke wrote: post #122
jwallaceparker wrote: post #109

+1 for trying the vegan diet If you do this, please go to restaurants and request a vegan meal. The environmental benefits of the vegan diet are well-documented. The best way to enact change is to get restaurants to start listing vegan options.

I do not believe that Veganism is healthy at all. Vegetarianism with a correct diet (and only then) can be, but the human body isn't fit for a vegan diet in the long run. I respect your choice if you do it, but at large it's just not reasonable. Oh, and something slightly offtopic: if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

> Oh, and something slightly offtopic: if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

Why? A good number of children in India are raised with a vegetarian diet. Of course, Indian cuisine has a large number of diverse and flavorful vegetarian dishes (unlike most other countries) The lack of availability of good vegetarian/vegan food could also be a concern, but again, that does not hold true in India. In fact, there are diets way more stricter than just vegan/vegetarian which are fairly common as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism for example.

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#146

Post by vacri »

yoos wrote: post #132
vacri wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colemak is supposed to perform slightly better then Dvorak as a layout, and be easier to learn for a qwerty typist. http://colemak.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Colemak

Second vote for Colemak here! I spent the first two of my high school years in Japan essentially being homeschooled. I had developed shoulder pain and a ganglion cyst in my wrist due to lots of typing and playing tennis, so I took the opportunity to try both Dvorak and Colemak. I used to average 110 wpm on Qwerty. I started at 30 wpm Colemak and reached 80 in three months. After fourish years, I'm back at 110 wpm, wi…

I haven't actually tried an alternate keyboard layout yet so I can't vouch for it, but Colemak seems to have the edge on Dvorak.

I also do the ls -l thing all the time and finally succumbed to just uncommenting the relevant alias in my .bash_rc. 'll' just makes it easier; I don't know why I resisted enabling the alias...

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#147

Post by Permit »

parfe wrote: post #2

Learn Dvorak - I'd warn against bothering with Dvorak. Huge time sink with dubious claims of speed improvements. While a mythical programmer may exist who feels his raw typing speed limits his productivity, I never met that unicorn. While learning you have an increased error rate, run into incompatibility with other programmers and programs (emacs or vim... good luck) and end up needing to defend something no one act…

I've always wondered why people were so concerned with improving typing speed in the first place. Perhaps it's just the fact I'm a young programmer and have only been doing it for a few years, but the bottleneck for me has never been how fast I can type.

Most of my time is spent planning things out, thinking things through and debugging, never typing.

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#148

Post by [deleted] »

vacri wrote: post #95
jules wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn Colemak [1] instead. The change in comfort when typing is incredible. The difference in how much you need to move your fingers when typing is big. Typing with QWERTY feels you moving your fingers all over the place as fast as possible; typing with Colemak feels like letters flowing off your hands. Whether it is faster I do not know (obviously after years of using Colemak and rarely using QWERTY I type faster on…

How do you find the two-backspaces-no-caps-lock thing?

[deleted]

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#149

Post by dudurocha »

crazygringo wrote: post #52
parfe wrote: post #2

Learn Dvorak - I'd warn against bothering with Dvorak. Huge time sink with dubious claims of speed improvements. While a mythical programmer may exist who feels his raw typing speed limits his productivity, I never met that unicorn. While learning you have an increased error rate, run into incompatibility with other programmers and programs (emacs or vim... good luck) and end up needing to defend something no one act…

I learned Dvorak in my teens, and can touch-type fluently in it. But I've found it doesn't provide a lot of speed improvement, and for programming (with all its punctuation) I still use QWERTY. Since programming isn't primarily normal English language text, Dvorak really doesn't help, plus you have to touch-type. What I use Dvorak for is for proper, sit-down, full-screen writing. I'm not sure it's much faster, but it…

Man, do you have any contact info?

Re: Resolutions for programmers

#150

Post by hopeless »

scelerat wrote: post #55
tomjen3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it that makes people assuming exercise -> running? It has all the unpleasant effects of exercise + it destroys your knees and you still don't have a sixpack.

> it destroys your knees This is a myth. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/phys-ed-can-running...

The problem^ is that the biggest predictor of knee pain/problems is previous knee pain/problems. So you could run for years (or even decades if I recall the research) with no problems but once it occurs it can be hard to recover from or avoid in the future. As someone with plenty of metal in my legs and interior surface damage to my knee joint, I'm acutely aware of my need to find non-running exercise.

^ as I understood the paper I read last year, which I now can't find but it might have been mentioned in the NYT

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