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The best programmers are the quickest to Google

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171–180 of 205 posts

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#171
post #3

I thought from the title that you meant that Google, the company, thought that faster coders are just better.

The best programmers may be the ones that work at Google as they are very quick at mining for search requests, such as gleaning what other software developers are working on. This may be what gives Google a competitive advantage.

Spread that competitive advantage around. So as not to give our secrets away only to Google, I may search for programming help using duckduckgo and other search engines.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#172
The one thing that this post completely overlooks is that storing knowledge, even Googleable knowledge, can be very beneficial.

Knowledge can help develop intuition, to know which pieces connect to each other. For example, in a programming competition you could google various algorithms to determine solutions. But Google won't tell you "which" algorithms to look for, or give you the intuition you need to piece the correct solution together.

A good analogy is chess. Before computers could beat humans, it was a pure game of human mind vs. human mind.

Then the computer was able to dominate humans.

And now, we're discovering that a human paired with a computer, can beat either alone. But that human still needs to have the intuition, experience, and knowledge to know how to work with the computer.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#174
Re framing this a little- "The best programmers are the quickest to discover things".

When I was a kid, and when I first heard about open book exams I was amazed. Well if they allow you to carry your textbook to the exam hall you should ace through the exam through flying colors, right?

Not quite, later when I studied the question paper I realized it was so framed, that the test was not to copy the facts from the textbook and answer as such. But the questions were basically problems and you will be forced to look up the text book as a reference with your own problem solving ability being the core test being tested here. In such cases it makes far more sense, to simply allow the person to carry the textbook to the exam hall.

Its easy to get access to a textbook/google/documentation/manual/whatever. And spending your effort to remember facts is a waste of time and energy which are often in short supply. Now extending this same philosophy, what if the solution patterns to large number of problems is readily available?

In such a case it makes more sense to focus on a) Quantity of problems one can solve b) Quality of problems one can solve. Instead of learning the solutions to the problems, use the solutions to do something big, or use the solutions to do a lot of things.

If you are wondering why the CS illiterate guy next to you is as equally productive as you who has read some thousands of pages of CS literature, its because when solutions are available easily and for cheap- Putting everything in your brain is a pointless exercise.

What matters is getting things done.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to wting, but HN doesn't let me reply to a reply by the same author as a way to combat back-and-forth style arguments, I guess. He said that experts doing that is "trained pattern matching gained through experience, i.e. machine learning." But that's backwards: machine learning in this style is a model of something we observe in ourselves. The thing that's in us is the pipe, the machine learning algori…

You have to either wait a few more minutes till the "reply" link appears, or simply click on "link" link(!) and write your reply there.

Thanks! I've been an HN member for ~5 years and I didn't know this. :D

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#177
post #8

"The best doctors are the quickest to Google." "The best scientists are the quickest to Google." "The best engineers are the quickest to Google." Are the above statements true? Quite possibly. I would argue that the best in their fields are those writing the answers that are indexed by Google to be found by others. However, usually the best in their fields are also good at using Google. Unfortunately, the worst in th…

Any doctor who says he knows everything/a lot of things is plainly lying or just BS'ing his way through.

The doctor's way of googling is if the patient falls under common pattern of diseases, like say common cold, cough, fever etc kind of diseases or some thing like commonly known infection that is spreading around to everyone. Treating such patients is a cake walk as there is a well defined treatment protocol to follow that works flawlessly with near 100% success rate.

When faced with a disease rare enough to warrant deep diagnosis thought process and further investigation. They simply put the patient on a 'safe mode' go do their homework and come back Or send him to a specialist.

Emergency cases are a little different. But besides that anything beyond a well known problem, a general doctor will know as much as what a Google search would tell you.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#178
I Googled "how to handle error messages in php" for your co-founder and came up with this http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_error.asp, since clicking on the "Get an invite" button (on https://framebase.io) while leaving the email field blank throws an exception error:

Error: exception 'Exception' with message 'MDB2 Error: null value violates not-null constraint, _doQuery: [Error message: Could not execute statement] [Last executed query: EXECUTE MDB2_STATEMENT_mysql_8edec1a3e8682362d38c86df48ba2cd8 USING @0, @1] [Native code: 1048] [Native message: Column 'email' cannot be null]

Executed SQL: INSERT INTO `waitlist` SET `email` = ?, `created_at` = ?;' in /var/www/.submodules/TinyDb/TinyDb/Orm.php:630 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/.submodules/TinyDb/TinyDb/Orm.php(194): TinyDb\Orm::check_mdb2_error(Object(MDB2_Error), Object(TinyDb\Sql)) #1 /var/www/.submodules/TinyDb/TinyDb/Orm.php(165): TinyDb\Orm::raw_create(Array) #2 /var/www/.submodules/Framebase-Models/FSStack/Framebase/Models/Waitlist.php(20): TinyDb\Orm::create(Array) #3 /var/www/Includes/FSStack/Framebase/Controllers/register.php(38): FSStack\Framebase\Models\Waitlist::create('') #4 [internal function]: FSStack\Framebase\Controllers\register->__post_waitlist() #5 /var/www/.submodules/CuteControllers/CuteControllers/Base/Rest.php(25): call_user_func_array(Array, Array) #6 /var/www/.submodules/CuteControllers/CuteControllers/Router.php(28): CuteControllers\Base\Rest->route() #7 /var/www/index.php(47): CuteControllers\Router::start('/var/www/Includ...') #8 {main}

...thought that might help

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#180
post #175

This has to be one of the widest pricing plan spreads I've come across: $99, $699, $4999 https://framebase.io/pricing.html

I don't really understand their place in the world. For something that can be done for free with youtube or vimeo. It's pretty non-sensical!

Oh yeah, 700 per month for "Export to YouTube / Vimeo".

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