Tips for people new to programming

1. Start counting from zero
2. Trees are upside down, root's probably at the top
3. Warnings are usual, go rogue!

What more? 😂

Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.

I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.

This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)

Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”

He runs out.

I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).

Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”

Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

I've always found those "age++" rants to be annoying.

are you people storing age as an integer rather than as an epoch timestamp?! seems rather tedious to upkeep.

either way. another year down! (that's 31,536,000 seconds for those of you counting correctly.)

My job quickly went down the shitter. A mass exodus happened, with half of top talent leaving, and the other half let go. The gig started out great, and offered me the growth I needed at the time, but sadly, life changes and moves on.

Determined to leave amicably on my own terms, I started looking elsewhere about a month ago.

I got an offer today! It's a perm position to offer stability to my fam, but with a consulting firm, so I'm excited for the relatively consistent change of pace with projects, technologies and clients. After spending years on end working on good projects that fizzled out and never saw the light of day, I'm longing to have my code released to the wild! (Not counting various patches and bug fixes)

Wish me luck!

it was 12am when we are ready to launch our new web design which requires a lot of hardwork and routing processes. my team lead was the one who pushes the button to production using "cap production deploy" command. everyone in the room (including PM) was like counting down like launching a rocket to space. the feeling is great knowing that everyone was sleepy at that time. im glad it went smooth and everyone congratulates each other.

So excited! My brand new drive finally shows up in the mail today so I naturally want to install it right away.

Power down, install drive, power up.

Windows decided now is the perfect time for an update! 30 minutes and counting....on 84%....for 30 minutes....

FML

I'm coining a new scale on how to rate a manager:
The BTCD rating.
My currently one was at 4, now I'm still counting...

It stands for: Beers To Cool Down (after a meeting).

I am currently blocked from doing my job by a firewall policy handed down from corporate that prevents WSL2 from connecting to the internet. Three days of no dev environment and counting.

We make linux software to be hosted on linux in linux containers in linux. We use linux command line tools to make it work.

"NO! WE ARE THE ALL-POWERFUL IT DEPARTMENT AND YOU MUST USE WINDOWS BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY."

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

"No my phone is faster then yours. I prove you"
Puts Android Device and iPhone next to each other and opens Facebook app at "the Same time" by clicking on the app icon after counting down from 3.
"See its way faster"

*Facepalm*

Sat here at my desk, facing a wall after my desk being moved whilst I was working from home, counting down the days until I resign.

5 Years here and was ready to leave almost 2 years ago but let them convince me to stay around. Now stuck with a 3 month notice.

Built the same homepage 5 times in as many weeks due to constant changes and ready to throw in the towel.

I'm here until Christmas, then I am going it alone. Just not sure how I am going to make it to Christmas without walking out

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

I get a mail 2 months into this fiasco telling me to register on their website and take up another test. I was already over with my emergency and was working my full-time default. (Fortunately I found another internship during this time which was one of the best initiatives I've worked with).

It asks me to register as a new user, take up the test and "share" my results. Not pushing it on insta/fb but legitimately share my test results link to my friends manually like a referral code. The more shares the more marks I'll get in the test. Why the test you ask. Of course to sign you up for the same Whatsapp trickery bullshit.

Luckily these nutcases didn't know they could be bypassed. I simply opened the link in incognito and logged in with my own account and that counted as a point. So I automated that shit.

Surprise surprise. The same fucking "Hello everyone" message into my mail. To my surprise I was relatively lucky to get ghosted after my attempt. This story is quite depressing in general cases. You're supposed to do this assignment shit for 2 months and then they ask for 2000 INR for a training period, past which you are paid between 1000/- and 7000/-. Though I didn't get the chance but I'm willing to bet you get 1000/- per month in a 2-MONTH INTERNSHIP. WTF.

You also have the other option of ranking first in their 3 consecutive competition that they hold. The theme is again to create chunks of their actual outsourced work.

WHY NOW:

The reason why this rant sparked is because I recently received an email with my results of the aptitude exam that I first took before the Whatsapp fiasco. I imagine they just pushed out a new update to their test thingy and forgot to set it's limit.

THE CORRECTION ARC:

I pushed this message to Internshala. They were kind enough to remove them from their website. I also shot down their Angel and Indeed listings. I sent a strongly worded email counting their con-artist operations and how I've alerted authorities (obviously a bluff but I was enjoying it). They most probably are not affected by this though. They might still be continuing their operations on their website.

I'm sharing the story here with the moral of:

Don't do jackshit if they're not compensating you for it

Always check for reviews before you start working at a place.

Be cautious of bulk messages (and the infamous HEY GUYS!! opening)

Don't do anything outside your work specification at least while doing an assignment.

You're free to question and inquire respectfully about the proceedings.

If you're good at your job you'll get good working place. No need to crush yourself with an oppressive job due to external restrictions.

And if you manage a company, please don't take advantage of helplessness.

There's no good ending to this tale as I have not received a follow-up. Though I want to see scumbags of their calibre shot down without remorse.

Good bye and thank you for listening.

The programming things I've seen in code of my uni mates..

Once seen, cannot be unseen.

- 40 if's in 10 lines of code (including one-liners) for a mineswepper game
- looping through a table of a known size using while loop and an 'i' variable
- copying same line of code 70 times but with different arguments, rather than making a for loop (literally counting down from 70 to 0)
- while loop that divides float by 2 until it's n < 1 to see if the number is even (as if it would even work)

..future engineers

PS. What are the things you've been disgusted by while in uni? I'm talking about code of your collegues specifically, I'm also attaching code of my friend that he sent me to "debug", I've replaced it with simple formula and a 2D distance math, about 4 lines of code.

Its funny cuz its true.

Original deadline 2 weeks ago
New Deadline 2 weeks form now
API been down for 2 days and counting

~3 months worth of work left to do, if we lucky, to meet requirements for deadline…

I've been trying to sleep for a while now. Counting sheep isn't helping because now the sheep have a whiteboard and are writing down answers to fix my bugs :/

Edit: if you were wondering, there is 1 sheep as of right now

Every passing day in this country drives me crazier.

Someday, maybe soon, I'll go insane.

I feel claustrophobic and suffocated. My interests are changing even if I don't desire to. Feels like a forced changed, as the new ones don't necessarily make me happy, and rather remould me to fit into a toxic environment/society.

While I was raised in this environment, most of my opinions formed via internet which had a heavy influence from the west. When I got to my sense, almost at the age of 24, was the time when I started forming opinions. Internet was my only pal. Family/friends never bothered about me. And now when I dream of and work hard towards moving out, the same family/friends guilt me into not doing so. Maybe they care now, maybe they are jealous, maybe something else.

Even if I settle down here, convincing myself that I desire such a life and counting the benefits of doing so, it won't make me happy.

The heart wants, what the heart wants.

Have a contractor on at work who hand writes minified css. Counting down the weeks until that contract isn't renewed.

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

@dfox Bug report:

Noticed a problem with the app counting the characters in comments. 3 or 4 times I’ve tried to write a comment that comes down to single digits remaining.

When trying to post I get a message like:

“Oops something went wrong trying to post your comment. It’s probably blank”

But, according to the counter, it should have been fine.

There is only 2^2^2+2^0 days to new year 2^2^2×2^2^2×2^2×2 - 2^2^2×2 + 2^0!!!

I literally cried to the Lord while reading the Rego language reference. Man, that thing is HARD to grasp.

After a while I just gave up and switched to Windows (wanted to play) but Windows needed to apply an update thus I decided to reboot and while GRUB was counting down I decided to turn back to Arch and give a try.

I was heard, now this damn policies works and the Go code do not panic anymore.

What's it called when you count down to 0 for your versioning instead of up. Once you get to 0 your software updates freezes. I tried searching online but I keep getting counting for "for loops." This is eating at me lol.

When you're just counting down the days to your next PTO. :( motivation come to meeeeeee.