Even the simplest of projects have these engineering challenges, but people cannot see the forest for the trees when it comes to maintenance.
Since I did not enter the industry with a computer science degree, I was relegated to less desirable maintenance work for the majority of my career. I have twenty five years of experience reading other people's sometimes great, frequently benign, and occasionally really bad code.
Unfortunately, most of my experience is wasted and not well respected. Most people do not care to look far ahead, they are far too consumed with 'just getting it up and running'. It's all engineering in the end. The house building analogy holds. Make smart tradeoffs. Don't paint yourself into a corner. Build exits for yourself: from platforms, APIs, libraries, and seldom trodden code paths. If you can write it yourself and it's not that complicated, write it yourself. Dependencies are a nightmare from a security and long term use perspective. They might be good for starting out, but you really have no idea where your project and organization will take you.
If I were a hiring manager I would value this experience more than anything else. It's nice if you can bang out some algorithms, but I think it's much more useful for most organizations if you can make forward-thinking engineering decisions.
Ah cool to see this on HN! I'm taking a numerical calc class right now and it's nice to get some historical context around something you're studying. I'd recommend checking out some cool graphs about Runge's phenomenon and Chebyshev polynomials.
The code, tests and comments convey what actual business rules are implemented.
While documentation is someone's non-precise natural language expression of what (to the best of their imperfect human capacity) expected the code to implement at the time of writing.
Especially on teams where deviance has been normalized, and broken things are just expected. I've been bitten both ways before: is this an obvious mistake? Or the lynchpin holding up the house of cards? Of course, if someone had just written some text explaining it, or perhaps a decent commit message instead of just "WIP", maybe we wouldn't have to do archaeology every single time.
"Oh yeah, those tests are always flaky. We just rerun them until they pass. Or we turn them off. I mean, Jeff wrote them like three years ago and he quit last year, so..."
I'd rather have the prose. And if it's wrong, then fix it. I'm so tired of these excuses.
“While our study did not differentiate between methods of cannabis consumption, cannabis is most commonly consumed by smoking,” Kokot said in an email. “The association we found likely pertains mainly to smoked cannabis.”
So yeah if you inhale smoke that can cause cancers. Sure seems like a hit piece when you bury this sort of information.
Sounds like the future is bright for the field and that it has lots of applications. I'd imagine future aging treatments would employ several of these methods together, say cell reprogramming for your organs, along with resetting some of those aging biomarkers.
It's funny that it was considered a pseudoscience for such a long time, when there's lot of clinical applications outside of trying to live longer. For me, as someone with celiac disease, I know the age of my intestines are probably older than most people, after constant damage from gluten. It'd be nice to have a cell reprogramming treatment for intestines.
That would be nice, and for other things too, but wouldn't it theoretically be simpler to grow cloned organs and other body parts and surgically replace your old ones with those? (Obviously, there's real technological hurdles to growing cloned organs, but these seem somewhat easier than the hurdles for reprogramming your cells.)
I was thinking about it. It looks like sperm from PSCs is a thing[1] so might be ovums. That means you can clone yourself from yourself. It’s even more intense if the statement that stem cells start to combine themselves autonomously and make embryo is true.[2]
I’ve heard that it is possible to let grow one type of animal inside another’s animal womb is that true, any sources?
How so? Surgeons do it all the time. You've heard of skin grafts, right? You can remove patches of skin and replace them with other patches of skin from the same person and it'll work fine, aside from scarring at the sutures of course. A common problem is not having enough skin to work with of course (it's not like people have lots of spare skin), but if someone got severe burns for instance and we could grow cloned skin for them to implant, that's far preferable to current techniques.
Of course, replacing anything has issues with 1) the trauma of surgery itself, and 2) scarring where things are cut and spliced, but this is better than not replacing things at all and just dying or getting an amputation or whatever. Of course, if you could just get an injection that programs your body to fix these things itself, that's better, but my whole point is that it seems to me that growing cloned organs is closer to our current technological capability.
> It's funny that it was considered a pseudoscience for such a long time, when there's lot of clinical applications outside of trying to live longer.
That's probably the reason why it's taken more seriously now (and not just by venture capitalists hoping to live forever): by now, all Western societies have population ageing problems. Due to better medicine, people live longer, but their actual productive lives are still comparatively short because of age-related diseases like dementia, increasing physical frailty etc. Plus, not enough children are born so the working population can sustain the elderly. So, even if the goal is not (yet) "living forever", societies are now more interested in at least tackling age-related diseases. Not sure if that will significantly increase life span, but it might still be an improvement.
A good SWE salary doesn't necessarily elevate you to the same strata anymore. Most of the programmers I work with have parents that supported them, especially monetarily. I myself, could not rely on either parent. Well-off parents can help you with a down payment on a house, be a better present grandparent, and be a reliable source of financial support in hard times. For most people in these well-paid positions, a job doesn't guarantee buying a house anymore, or a stable future. Only generational wealth does.
Since I did not enter the industry with a computer science degree, I was relegated to less desirable maintenance work for the majority of my career. I have twenty five years of experience reading other people's sometimes great, frequently benign, and occasionally really bad code.
Unfortunately, most of my experience is wasted and not well respected. Most people do not care to look far ahead, they are far too consumed with 'just getting it up and running'. It's all engineering in the end. The house building analogy holds. Make smart tradeoffs. Don't paint yourself into a corner. Build exits for yourself: from platforms, APIs, libraries, and seldom trodden code paths. If you can write it yourself and it's not that complicated, write it yourself. Dependencies are a nightmare from a security and long term use perspective. They might be good for starting out, but you really have no idea where your project and organization will take you.
If I were a hiring manager I would value this experience more than anything else. It's nice if you can bang out some algorithms, but I think it's much more useful for most organizations if you can make forward-thinking engineering decisions.