More challenging projects every programmer should try • Hacker News Board

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#191

Post by elbear » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

m3at wrote: post #102

kamel3d wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did it work at the end? I want to make a crypto trading bot seems simpler than stock one

Not the GP but I made trading algorithm for a living (not on crypto) and have friends still doing that (on crypto): yes it can work, but in 99% of cases you shouldn't do it for the money. Let me expand: If you can afford to spare part of your income and invest that for long term buy and hold, that'll work better (ex. ETF). If you can't spare anything, focusing on leveling up trendy skills, then you can land a better…

Could you share what you learned in order to make that trading algorithm?

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#192

Post by yiyus » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

I completely disagree with your comment. Learning for the sake of learning is great, and "homework problems" are an excellent way to achieve that goal. It's not a waste of time. Profit is not always about making money, there are more things in life.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#193

Post by burnthrow » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #122

macintux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, adventofcode relies heavily on mathematical literacy that I suspect is neither all that common among developers nor all that important to most programming jobs. Plus there’s no good way within the context of the puzzles to find out what mathematical trick you need if you don’t already know; you need to go find a virtual water cooler. I may simply be biased because each year it reveals how little…

Not only that but adventofcode seems to leverage purposely-obtuse input formatting as an artificial difficulty enhancement. I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.

The puzzles aren't fun at all. Like you said, they're basically "write a parser + complete a tedious word problem." They require substantial time investment for little creative reward, it's basically masochism.

Perl Advent Calendar is my jam.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#194

Post by andrepd » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

caffeine wrote: post #180

IgorPartola wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind if I asked you a question since I have never worked in this industry but did play with crypto trading a while back. Before Mt Gox was shut down I was trading on a couple of tertiary small exchanges and at the time there was a lot of talk of arbitrage between different exchanges and how transaction latency and fees made it very risky at best and a losing proposition in most cases. But what I was wonderi…

Your idea is right but the timescale is much shorter. Essentially it's a race. And in 2014 you could make good money doing exactly what you described, the timescale was millis. In 2016-2017 even more money, but different venues. What you are describing is the most basic, canonical form of latency arbitrage. That idea is implemented widely in the HFT industry across all sorts of products, not just crypto, with billion…

Honest question: do you feel comfortable knowing that your job is doing something which is essentially net zero value to society? Negative in fact, you're burning resources which are needed elsewhere, and contributing to concentration of wealth.

Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#195

Post by KittenInABox » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #194

caffeine wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea is right but the timescale is much shorter. Essentially it's a race. And in 2014 you could make good money doing exactly what you described, the timescale was millis. In 2016-2017 even more money, but different venues. What you are describing is the most basic, canonical form of latency arbitrage. That idea is implemented widely in the HFT industry across all sorts of products, not just crypto, with billion…

Honest question: do you feel comfortable knowing that your job is doing something which is essentially net zero value to society? Negative in fact, you're burning resources which are needed elsewhere, and contributing to concentration of wealth. Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.

Intuitively, providing more flow + allowing more efficient allocation of resources via algo is pretty valuable to society. Problem is that society is squandering that efficiency.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#196

Post by iainmerrick » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #95

avl999 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning C however is completely orthogonal to learning and building challenging projects (in this specific instance a distributed datastore) that the OP is talking about. It is not going to make you understand the domain better or provide any other tangible benefits. If anything it is going to add negative value by distracting you from $TheChallengingConceptYouWantedToLearnInTheFirstPlace If I am working on a challe…

I agree that the complexities of C will add to the challenge and workload and make the project take much longer. But certain aspects of C can raise interesting questions that you might not face otherwise. Some of those things will be about algorithm design, some about language design, some about computing in general. Especially if you spend most of your time in high-level languages, it can really help to have this ne…

Agreed -- writing toy programs generally doesn't teach you a whole lot about a new programming language. To learn it in a deep way you need to use it properly, on real problems.

Although, if you're mainly interested in getting something done rather than using it as a learning experience, using an unfamiliar language is probably a bad idea. You'll learn a lot about a new language, but you probably won't build anything you could actually ship.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#197

Post by cambalache » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #189

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

> If you're in the latter group -- you've already got the skills to build real shit. Don't waste your time on homework problems. I disagree. Not everything is about business and money. Many people already build "real shit" for a living and want to simply have fun building other things, and focus on the cool parts, and not all the boring parts involved in a commercial project. Also CS is constantly evolving. Nobody kn…

> Git didn't exist 15 years ago. A langage like Rust is 10 years old. React is 7 years old. We need these homework problems simply to keep up to date.

None of them were innovative (as in something new) nor belong to CS fundamentals.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#198

Post by nvarsj » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #130

This article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which appl…

Real shit is rarely interesting and typically won’t challenge your skills as a coder. Generally they just test your ability to wire together APIs, learn mundane domain specific concepts, and tolerance of boredom. Getting low level can be really fun and helps refresh those skills you may not flex much since university. For me personally this is the kind of thing that made me passionate about coding. If you already live a day job where you are coding ray tracers, emulators, and databases then I envy you but this article isn’t really for you.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#199

Post by qw3rty01 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #194

caffeine wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea is right but the timescale is much shorter. Essentially it's a race. And in 2014 you could make good money doing exactly what you described, the timescale was millis. In 2016-2017 even more money, but different venues. What you are describing is the most basic, canonical form of latency arbitrage. That idea is implemented widely in the HFT industry across all sorts of products, not just crypto, with billion…

Honest question: do you feel comfortable knowing that your job is doing something which is essentially net zero value to society? Negative in fact, you're burning resources which are needed elsewhere, and contributing to concentration of wealth. Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.

This is a pretty loaded question to then say "not trying to be judgemental"...take out the bias if that's actually the case: "What kind of benefit do you believe your work provides to society?" or "How do you justify the extra resources taken away from society that may be more beneficial elsewhere, such as X?"

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#200

Post by wizzwizz4 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

KittenInABox wrote: post #195

andrepd wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: do you feel comfortable knowing that your job is doing something which is essentially net zero value to society? Negative in fact, you're burning resources which are needed elsewhere, and contributing to concentration of wealth. Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.

Intuitively, providing more flow + allowing more efficient allocation of resources via algo is pretty valuable to society. Problem is that society is squandering that efficiency.

The stock market is about allocation of profits, and high-frequency trading is about extracting profits from the profit allocation system. This isn't investment we're talking about; this is the stock market.