Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.
The truth is that it’s actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.
Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.
The truth is that it’s actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.
Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It’s approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It’s fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.
This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.
This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.
California HSR has been a zombie project for a while. Even before Musk was a factor, there were annual plans but nothing ever got done, year after year. It’s probably going to take intercity projects to become popular and economical for something as ambitious as long-range passenger rail to actually receive serious attention.
Splitting individual atoms isn’t that difficult, you just need a neutron supply and some material (paraffin wax works) to slow them down and it will eventually happen at least with uranium. Doing it reliably and efficiently is a much harder problem.
“From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly”
This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.
I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.
“So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that”
This isn’t really an issue though, of you don’t have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it’s calculated matter?
Mathematicians are good at writing algorithms, but not at the development aspect, which is basically building for different systems, packaging software and documentation.
I would disagree on the performance part, the vast majority of software developers aren’t writing high performance software and the ones that are tend to be computational mathematicians or physicists.
“seeing the differences in the result”
This just means that you are testing against a very narrow output. It’s actually pretty common to run across tests that don’t even check for the likely failure cases, because the developer(s) don’t actually understand the algorithm.
A common example is prime factorisation, most nontrivial factorisation algorithms (Pollard rho, elliptic curves), don’t guarantee producing a prime factor they simply tend to produce them because they prioritize small factors. Programmers see that their function produces primes for the one or 2 test cases (out of say 2^64) and assume that it works. It generally does, but when it doesn’t you get incorrect results (often undetectably) which poisons all the rest of your calculations.
Some people (like myself and other scientists/mathematicians), write software for specific fields so if you follow them you find it out what work they are putting out, and issues they find in other software etc.
You could write bindings to machine-prime . Hardly anything challenging for an actual programmer, but I’ll take the free labor if it is available.
Wrote a basic primality checker library, it’s not by far my most interesting or complex project but I like that I accomplished all my initial goals in a timely fashion.
This requires many assumptions that you or any computational system have no formal reason to make. Having an interpreter that just guesstimates exactly how you want the program structured, is going to run into problems when you, say want to extend the program.
Reading Goldwasser’s paper on elliptic curves, got me into math and then automating math calculations.
Well it was a disappointing post. This is the sort of thing you keep as a novelty program that you run once a year.
I did seriously expect some modeling that wasn’t just rotating points.
Is it really a quasar when you use no actual physics calculations?
It’s okay. The thing is when running an attack are you going to permutate through every combination of characters, or are you going to use words from a dictionary first? correcthorsebatterystaple (not a dictionary word) is better than antidisestablishmentarianism (a dictionary word) but in a realistic attack concatenating dictionary words is going to be the next step.
CamelCase directories and snake_case files.
Wouldn’t this just prevent you from allocating more memory (than zero)?