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Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?
I'm curious to see some examples of what people consider good visual illustrations of CS concepts, from both usefulness and aesthetics perspectives.
We need a lot more electricians
Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
Genders.wtf
NYC Slice
NYC Slice
NanoGPT
Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
Names should be cute, not descriptive
Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.
I'm around 40 and recently I have been asked to port an API from one language to another. The code I'm porting is average code, not terrible, but plenty of little things to complain about.<p>I feel like my past self could have handled this task, but I am really struggling. Porting this API will require a deep understanding of the existing API, which, of course, has several layers of abstraction.<p>I can't seem to hold more than about 2 levels of call stack in my head. There's the entry point function which calls other functions, which call other functions, which call other functions, etc. You know how it is, code calls other code, and logically it forms a tree of calls and return values that often goes several layers deep. I struggle to hold more than about 2 levels of this call stack in my head. By the time I'm down in the weeds I've forgotten what I'm doing, what the purpose of the actual API call is.<p>I don't know how to break this into small enough chunks that I can understand it or make progress on. Imagine I gave you the code for the sha512 algorithm, and a hash, and asked you to find the pre-image (the input). This is how I feel. Where do I even get started? How do I find even a single chunk of manageable work to break off.<p>The hard part is, several other developers are making progress on porting this API. Why can't I? What happened?<p>I don't know if this task is just an especially bad fit for me, or if my mental abilities are declining?
Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API
Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API
Taking over a Dead IoT Company
Taking over a Dead IoT Company
Identity thieves bypassed Experian security to view credit reports
An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast