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What real life bad habits has programming given you?

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Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#61

Post by thwarted »

igorhvr wrote: post #55

Sometimes I get really annoyed that I can't automate all the boring parts of my life in the same way I can do (and I always do) in a computer. From the top of my head: dishes, picking clothes, paying bills and banking in general (I would be willing to pay $100/month for a bank that provided me a good API instead of forcing me to use their crappy stupid websites), organizing physical stuff (why the fuck can't I have "…

You do actually have to run the Garbage Collection thread/function every so often. The key is to not use mark and sweep, but rather to time stamp everything when you use it. Get rid of the emotional attachment. If you have not used something in a while but your caching algorithm for the item says you might need it again, swap it out (to a box in the garage, get it out of your sight). Otherwise get rid of it. Periodically, throw out everything in the slow-to-access storage (the box in the garage).

The problem with using mark and sweep when trying to garbage collect your life is that the default method is just to mark everything and never actually sweep.

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#62

Post by maneesh »

astrec wrote: post #52
Timothee wrote: post #29

Whenever I pay for something in cash, I'm trying to make it so that the change I get back requires the least notes or is simpler. For example, if I owe $7.84, I might give $13.09 so that I get $5.25. I sometimes get confused looks. Related to that, I don't like having more than 4 $1 bills. I feel like, at some point, I didn't give the cash I should have.

Me too, only it's easier here because 1c and 2c coins have been removed from circulation so you round to the nearest 5c.

where is here?

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#65

Post by paulgb »

Hexstream wrote: post #43
BeefingJection wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure?

Does walking continuously for 1000km merely take 100 times longer/more effort than 10km?

Good point, but you answered your own question: the "walk then rest" algorithm will do it in linear time.

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#66

Post by byrneseyeview »

"There's a sandwich in the fridge, if you're hungry."

"No, there is a sandwich in the fridge whether or not I'm hungry. In fact, if I'm hungry, it's more likely that there is not a sandwich in the fridge, since I would have eaten it by now.

I hate Magical Grammar -- any sentence structured so that the existence of a need leads to the existence of a means of fulfilling it is annoying.

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#67

Post by d0mine »

sokoloff wrote: post #42

Two stick out: 1. Answering questions fairly literally. a. "Did you like the salad?" "No, I did not." b. "Would you like to go to the fine art museum with me and 4 of my friends on Friday night?" "No, I would not like that." c. Note that I can escape from this pattern only when it's extremely obvious the truthful answer is a bad one. "Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" "I don't think it's the jeans..." I can avoid…

There could be a correlation between programming and the habits you've pointed out but correlation does not imply causation.

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#68

Post by tjpick »

paulgb wrote: post #65
Hexstream wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does walking continuously for 1000km merely take 100 times longer/more effort than 10km?

Good point, but you answered your own question: the "walk then rest" algorithm will do it in linear time.

null pointer on your drink-bottle instance results in fatal runtime exception.

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#69

Post by bkudria »

cabalamat wrote: post #35
nihilocrat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For God's sake, don't use our punctuation rules. # Carefree means "free from care or anxiety." (American style) # Carefree means "free from care or anxiety". (British style) That has bugged me so much that, unless it is being proofread, I intentionally use British-style quotes.

One of the nice things about the English language is the difference between U.S. and UK rules, so you can mix and match them to your own taste and people can't tell you you're doing it wrong. So for example I write "center" not "centre" but "axe" not "ax".

I do this too.

Cheers!

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