Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More challenging projects every programmer should try

web.eecs.utk.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 232 posts

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#151

Post by anonytrary »

mobiuscog wrote: post #150
anonytrary wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are trying to think of an idea, you're already doing it wrong. The best ideas are motivated by problems you encounter yourself, not by trying to think of ideas. This is the biggest mistake you see with 20-something founders. Best way to come up with ideas is to use existing solutions and realize how shitty they are. Pretty much every single company was formed this way. > They are programmers, not creative afte…

> Finding ideas in a list is the last advice I would give to anyone. If it's public, it's probably not a profitable idea. Why do they have to be profitable ? Many programmers like solving challenges to learn and have fun - it's not all about money. Advent of Code is a great example of this.

> Many programmers like solving challenges to learn and have fun

If you could choose between doing a contrived homework problem and learning something VS. creating something original and learning something, you should always choose the latter, hands down. Learning on the job or while you are solving a unique problem that you have is always preferred to doing a homework problem.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#152

Post by anonytrary »

T_O_T_O wrote: post #148
anonytrary wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are trying to think of an idea, you're already doing it wrong. The best ideas are motivated by problems you encounter yourself, not by trying to think of ideas. This is the biggest mistake you see with 20-something founders. Best way to come up with ideas is to use existing solutions and realize how shitty they are. Pretty much every single company was formed this way. > They are programmers, not creative afte…

For a beginning programmer, these could be good projects. For someone with a lot of experience, I mostly agree with your comment.

I agree, it makes sense to do homework problems as someone who is learning a skill for the first time.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#153

Post by username90 »

anonytrary wrote: post #151
mobiuscog wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding ideas in a list is the last advice I would give to anyone. If it's public, it's probably not a profitable idea. Why do they have to be profitable ? Many programmers like solving challenges to learn and have fun - it's not all about money. Advent of Code is a great example of this.

> Many programmers like solving challenges to learn and have fun If you could choose between doing a contrived homework problem and learning something VS. creating something original and learning something, you should always choose the latter, hands down. Learning on the job or while you are solving a unique problem that you have is always preferred to doing a homework problem.

If you have the know how to create something original then this article isn't for you.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#154

Post by thealig »

sverona wrote: post #114
nik_0_0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - I felt this way about Project Euler, which within the first few problems was exactly as you described - heavy mathematical literacy. I haven't gotten far into an Advent of Code since 2015 (~18 days), but have done the first 5 days of 2020; no mathematical literacy needed. For 2015, and 2020 so far - its mostly text parsing, data structure building and basic iteration/permutations.

Project Euler 1-50, maybe 1-100, is similar in difficulty level to Advent of Code, I'd say. After that it quickly starts to become about how much number theory you know.

That's true, the later problems are thought-provoking but have prerequisites. I enjoy number theory but I won't mess with currently. I plan to go back to them one day, not sure though :P

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#155

Post by chubot »

profquail wrote: post #104
chubot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the "optimize for years" part is interesting... Supposedly the derivatives technique (re-popularized by a 2009 paper) will build a more optimal DFA directly, rather than building the NFA first, converting to DFA, and then optimizing the DFA. I put a bunch of links and quotes about that here, including nascent implementations: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/07/ideas-questions.html Also related: http://www.oils…

I wrote an implementation of this several years back. If you’re interested in the code: https://github.com/jack-pappas/facio/tree/master/Reggie The derivatives approach makes Unicode support easier since its able to keep the symbols sets for each transition edge (in the DFA) more compact by virtue of supporting negation. If you add in aggressive term-normalization, hash-consing, and an efficient dense-set implementat…

Very cool! And thanks for the reminder about Unicode. I think supporting union and intersection is also somewhat unique to the derivatives method, and also related? (Although I think there are really 2 derivatives methods: Brzozowski and Antimirov)

What happens if you don't do the optimizations? Does the DFA blow up in size, meaning the compile time is large? Or does it make for a slower runtime? I would expect most DFAs to run at about the same speed, unless they are really huge...

I'd be interested in any rough ideas about performance, e.g. how fast a realistic lexer+parser is, maybe in lines/ms.

It does look like the code is pretty short -- a large part of it is an AVL tree library I guess for hash consing?

I'm interested in any downsides of the derivatives technique vs. the NFA->DFA method. I feel like regex compile time shouldn't matter for many applications, and most DFAs will run in the same speed, which only leaves runtime memory usage (or code size for generating F# code like you appear to be doing).

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#156

Post by anonytrary »

username90 wrote: post #153
anonytrary wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many programmers like solving challenges to learn and have fun If you could choose between doing a contrived homework problem and learning something VS. creating something original and learning something, you should always choose the latter, hands down. Learning on the job or while you are solving a unique problem that you have is always preferred to doing a homework problem.

If you have the know how to create something original then this article isn't for you.

You overestimate the skill required to be original. Anyone who has the know-how to do ray-tracing, web browsers, and trading bots from scratch has a leg-up on the bootcamp coders who are getting paid $200k to work at Dropbox. Don't waste your time doing shit other people have already done. It's the best advice any of these kids will ever get, so I completely disagree with the associate professor who wrote the article. Take it or leave it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#157

Post by thealig »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #29

I wrote a raytracer in 1996, and then a year later used Intel's VTune to speed it up. Just removing unused "return" statements gave me 3x speed increase. Apparently Borland C/C++ wasn't very smart back then. A fun project I did after that was writing a AI frame language to do goal-stack problem solving, specifically with path finding. I connected it to the ray tracer and made movies of spheres having wars. (I used an…

That sounds fun. Do you have code for reference? Also I want to try out building a raytracer sometime as a hobby project, is it advisable to learn some 3d graphic concepts like WebGl and so?

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#159

Post by username90 »

anonytrary wrote: post #156
username90 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the know how to create something original then this article isn't for you.

You overestimate the skill required to be original. Anyone who has the know-how to do ray-tracing, web browsers, and trading bots from scratch has a leg-up on the bootcamp coders who are getting paid $200k to work at Dropbox. Don't waste your time doing shit other people have already done. It's the best advice any of these kids will ever get, so I completely disagree with the associate professor who wrote the article…

You often get a lot of ideas when you build old things from scratch that can let you create novel things based on it. Knowing how to build it is not a substitute for actually building it.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#160

Post by PeterisP »

anonytrary wrote: post #137
imtringued wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should grow a second spike. I'm at the point where visual design skills are a greater bottleneck than my computer science skills. I can build purely functional CAD models but man, making them functional AND look good is the real challenge.

Agreed. Everyone should aim to have 3-4 spikes they are passionate about. For every spike you have, you become exponentially more of a domain expert at the problems that are at the intersection of those spikes.

Yes, proper senior expertise often looks like being a jack of all trades and a master of three or so.
Post reply on HN