More challenging projects every programmer should try • Hacker News Board

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#91

Post by KMag » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #17

henning wrote: post #9

As someone who has played with writing trading bots but never traded them with real money, some advice: if your results seem too good to be true, they probably are. Your trading bot may be doing unrealistic things or its results may not be reliable if the following are true: - You are trading in a market with low liquidity or one that is controlled by a small number of market participants. I'm not an expert but I thi…

I worked on a unique HFT system which was capable of starting the response packet before the incoming packet's final byte had arrived. Negative latency. If it mispredicted the future, it would simply scramble the trailer and cause the packet to fail UDP checksum. It didn't make money in the real world because the quality of decision that could be made at that speed wasn't good enough.

That's super clever!

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#92

Post by jmt_ » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #77

jameskilton wrote: post #2

I would also recommend, if someone is interested in games, to do Tetris. It's a simple concept that is trickier than expected once you have to figure out the details of how it all comes together.

You're getting some great nostalgia responses to this. Here's mine. In highschool, I cranked out a version of tetris in Turbo Pascal that basically worked. Fast forward a few years, I am taking CS219 with Prof Stark (random that I remember the course number) who is hard-core and really tough since it's year 2000 and the class is full of kids who are taking CS cuz it's "the thing" but have no passion or talent for pro…

Wow - I took CS219 with Stark in 2017, didn't realize he'd been teaching that class at SBU for so long! You may be interested to know that shortly after I took it, they broke that class up into CS216 and CS316 allegedly due to complaints from students. It was definitely a brutal class, but I learned a lot. Surprised they didn't break it up sooner.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#93

Post by xyzelement » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:03 AM UTC

jmt_ wrote: post #92

xyzelement wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting some great nostalgia responses to this. Here's mine. In highschool, I cranked out a version of tetris in Turbo Pascal that basically worked. Fast forward a few years, I am taking CS219 with Prof Stark (random that I remember the course number) who is hard-core and really tough since it's year 2000 and the class is full of kids who are taking CS cuz it's "the thing" but have no passion or talent for pro…

Wow - I took CS219 with Stark in 2017, didn't realize he'd been teaching that class at SBU for so long! You may be interested to know that shortly after I took it, they broke that class up into CS216 and CS316 allegedly due to complaints from students. It was definitely a brutal class, but I learned a lot. Surprised they didn't break it up sooner.

Dude - awesome! Was he still teaching emacs and cygwin and CVS as the development environment :) I have to say, this class was a definitive quantum leap in my transition from "kid who fucks around with computers" to "a sort of professional programmer."

What are you doing now?

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#94

Post by sterlind » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #56

sterlind wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they're really simple, in their basic form and for simple ISAs! it mostly boils down to keeping a bunch of registers and a giant switch statement. Each case simply implements the opcode. You have an array of bytes for the memory, and some emulated devices (e.g. trigger a screen update when the framebuffer memory gets changed, or set the instruction pointer to a handler when a key gets pressed.) It gets hard when inst…

It seems like a lot of the complexity may also come in when you have important circuits to emulate other than the CPU. In that case you'd have more to worry about in terms of timing, dataflow, and synchronization. And some platforms might conceivably have analog circuits that play an important role too, although I guess you might be able to abstract that out by trying to create a rough digital functional equivalent e…

that's true! but I still think you can get a lot of the way with a NeoGeo emulator without it being perfect on timing. that's a lot of the reason emulators work well on most games but fail to replicate the right graphics or sound in some - some games played hardware tricks to optimize.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#95

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

avl999 wrote: post #74

iainmerrick wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing it in C is good advice if you want to learn C (or you already know C but want to understand it better). It’s bad advice if you don’t want to learn C. Why would you want to learn C? To better understand the machine at a fairly low level. I think there’s still a lot of value in that. I’ve found that programmers who never learned C often don’t fully understand how memory management works, for example (not that t…

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 new perspective. Some of it makes you question modern software development.

Also, I learned a lot more about C (and computing in general) by working on complicated projects rather than simple ones. I had built all sorts of simple C projects, but one complicated one taught me twice as much as I'd previously learned. It took me a long time, but it was all valuable because I got to learn what designs didn't work for C and which did.

Anyway, it's up to the reader to decide how much of their time to invest and what they want to get out of it. If you don't want to write it in C, don't, but I personally think the incidental lessons are some of the most valuable.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#96

Post by rex64 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:22 AM UTC

I recently went through the process of creating a ray tracer project from zero for learning purposes. It was a humbling and eye-opening experience. I've written an article[0] to explain my process in detail if you're interested.

[0] https://alessandrocuzzocrea.com/how-i-made-a-ray-tracer/

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#97

Post by theshank » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:34 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #51

simias wrote: post #27

I would add "build a toy regex engine" to the list. A couple of years ago I implemented a toy regex engine from scratch (building NFAs then turning them into DFAs). I thought it was an enlightening experience because it showed me that the core principles behind regular languages are fairly simple, although you could spend years optimizing and improving your implementation. How do you deal with unicode? How do you mod…

I really enjoyed taking Ullman's Automata course on Coursera. I found it was great for better appreciating topics like * searching * implementation of automata in electronic circuits * challenges of formal specifications for things like protocols and grammars, as well as for verifying their correctness; implementation strategies for applying these specifications * computability and complexity * programming language t…

Thank you for sharing this one. I was looking for a course like this! BTW this course is now offered on edx.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#98

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #59

iainmerrick wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing it in C is good advice if you want to learn C (or you already know C but want to understand it better). It’s bad advice if you don’t want to learn C. Why would you want to learn C? To better understand the machine at a fairly low level. I think there’s still a lot of value in that. I’ve found that programmers who never learned C often don’t fully understand how memory management works, for example (not that t…

> Most other non-garbage-collected languages would do the trick, like Rust or C++ Only as long as you avoid any fancy libraries that do a lot of the work for you. Granted you can use fancy libraries in C too...

It's worth it to try to implement in a low and high level language, to see the huge differences in how they can be implemented. We all know "C is fast" but it takes a project like this to go "OH. It's because the high level language is abstracting me into a corner." It was a trip when I first realized how much high level languages can limit you.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#99

Post by throwaway201103 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:44 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #43

IMHO a text-based browser isn't exactly in the "challenging" category, as it basically amounts to stripping all the HTML tags out and doing some very simple transformations (like replacing 's with newlines.) Then again, one of the things I've been working on intermittently for the past few years is a graphical (CSS2+) browser, which is definitely in the challenging category. There are some other public efforts too: h…

Doing proper table layouts (including rowspans, colspans) is a little more than stripping and replacing tags.

Re: More challenging projects every programmer should try

#100

Post by jackschultz » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

Instead of a stock trading bot, go for daily fantasy sports contests. It can cover pretty much all parts of programming.

Web scraping to gather data, databases for storing it, ML for analyzing, front and backend web dev to show the daily information and adjust.

And instead of having to deal with trading regulations, contests can be really small and easy to enter. There are daily contests for 5 cents an entry, and you can enter 150 optimized lineups from an uploaded csv for $7.50 a day. You can really learn a ton.