I feel like all the points you raise could be replied by : if you do not like it, no one is forcing you into doing it.

It is my understanding that people do this for fun - to take the occasion to get into a new language and/or exercise their problem resolution skills.

Personally, although I love coding (it is a passion), after a whole day of coding I do not feel the energy to partake in a coding event. And during holidays I am busy doing other stuff. So I do not participate in the Advent of Code. But I am still glad that the event exists for people who enjoy it and have the time for it

Thanks indeed I misunderstood the problem

I misunderstood the problem. I thought the thieve came on bike to steal something. I did not get that the bike itself was what got stolen.

I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.

Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.

Let’s assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search… Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that’s much more complicated than what this post says.

For a first time don’t try to get the strongest character possible. It’s a time sink to do that. Usually the main campaign of games are beatable even if you screw up something. The worst that can happen is you backtracking a bit and spending time to level up before doing the next quest.

When you played the game once and got used to the mechanics you can make a 2nd char and plan it more deeply ahead if you wish. You know what mechanics you like so the prospect of finding what to invest in what is worth etc… becomes more streamlined. But you don’t have to. You can just be happy to have finished the game and call it a day.

That’s what I did for Diablo 4. After the main campaign I did not feel like venturing more into the game or making another character so I started playing another game. If you really want to 100% a game it does require a ton of time and planning but you don’t have to

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans, and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year

There are about 20x more e-bikes than electric cars. Of course its going to demand more oil.

The real question is what is best in terms of oil demand between electric cars and e-bikes

Agreed that some people can find it easier with explicit names - however some people find it easier with short meaningless names as it makes them focus on the abstraction rather than the naming. There is no right or wrong here. It all depends on the reader.

A specialized architecture will always be better than a general purpose processor no matter how advanced the tech gets.

So you will always need a GPU as a GPU is quite literally a Graphical Programming Unit, that is a specialised architecture for Graphical computations

A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back “why that question”. It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.

What a horrifying mentality some companies have

Hot take: Git is hard for people who do not know how to read a documentation.

The Git book is very easy to read and only takes a couple of hours to read the most significant chapters. That’s how I learnt it myself.

Git is meant for developers, i.e. people who are supposed to be good at looking up online how stuff works.

When I first got daily access to internet (back in 2009), I got curious about how programs are built. Like, if I wanted to make my own application, what should I do?

I googled something along that direction and it linked me to a famous french website for learning programming (site du zéro) where I learnt C language.

After the course I made a 2D Snake game with SDL2. How naive was I to think I could write it in one go without testing anything in between! I scrapped the 1st attempt because it was a disaster and randomly inserting/removing * was not helping.

I started again from scratch, testing in smaller steps, and I really liked it. After a couple of weeks I had my Snake game working! I was so proud of it that I showed it to my mom. I do not have the source files anymore but I still have the binary somewhere

Afterwards I sticked with it and continued programming - I was back in school without much access to internet so I programmed on my TI-83+ instead. Eventually I pursued computer science studies then a PhD… It got me hooked real good.

Looks cool! This reminds me of Freespace, another beautiful space fighter game

Yeah exactly. Here follows some spoiler for those who have never played Dark Souls

The bottom line is that I think you need to have someone telling you where not to go to really enjoy Dark souls. Because its not obvious whether you die because of your incompetence or just because you were not supposed to be there right now. I wouldn’t say its bad design though - but it’s not for everyone for sure

I used to dislike dark souls. Recently I tried it again - I struggled but I finally got the hang of it!

I think the hardest is to know what to do. I figured out I was struggling because I kept going in zones I was not expected to go yet.

Also it’s such a big shift compared to what I was used to. You have to wait for the right opportunity to attack rather than going in there and relying on reflexes.

I love Ruby since I got introduced to it. The syntax is great and you can do many things in a simple manner.

Before that, Python was my go-to language for scripting but now I cannot stand the syntax anymore. I dislike the lack of braces and forced indent.

Oh, it most definitely is scummy. It’s no news that Tinder does not care about people well-beings. Actually, they want you to get stuck to the platform as long as you can; if everyone was finding their partner after a week their platform would not be profitable anymore.

On Tinder it would not be in the same context that what you experienced. In OKCupid it’s part of the rules that you can send messages without a match. So people are OK (I guess) with it. On Tinder it’s going to come as unexpected and unwelcome. You will start with a disadvantage. Unless the woman is only interested in money (if you can spend $500/month on an app then you are probably among the wealthier half of the population).

Interesting take. I prefer spaces because each piece of code that I see with tabs has an implicit tabsize you really need to have if you don’t want the code to look ugly - especially if the person has been mixing tabs and spaces - and they usually do. Sometimes unadvertently.

When you remove all tabs at least everyone is on the same page.

To the actual problem raised by the article:

I have ADHD. Two spaces per indent makes it damn near impossible for me to scan code. My brain gets too distracted by the visual noise. Someone who’s visually impaired might bump their font size up really large, and need to scale up or down the amount of space per indent. Someone might just prefer it because…

I wonder if it could be possible to adjust the “indent number of spaces you see” in code editors. Code editors are able to figure out what are indents and what are not, so in theory it should be possible. Perhaps that would be an idea for a new feature?