Why am I not allowed to know????

[InDarkestNight]

I am sorry, but I am really pissed right now. Anytime I ask anything ANYWHERE on the internet, I just get assailed for daring to even ask. I've asked about scientific facts on the science sub-reddit, I got harrassed by the mods for DARING to want to know truth. Seriously.

More recently, I've been trying to teach myself to code in pygame using a guide my professor gave me years ago. The biggest problem I'm having is he never taught us about efficiency. He encouraged us to make overly complex code just to thwart our future competition, seriously. I don't know a damned thing about it, but I can't for the life of me find out how to do it.

I tried asking on here to no avail. I've been tyring to ask on stackoverflow, but the garbage website keeps blocking my posts and won't let me actually post NO MATTER WHAT I TYPE IN. I just tried to ask if one bit of code I discovered was a better way than another I had been using, but it refused to even give ma post option; literally the only option it gave me WAS TO DISCARD MY DRAFT. The only question that did get through, about a bug I was experiencing in a program, only won me ridicule for even making the damned thing.

Why the bloody hell am I not allowed to know anything? I've literally BEGGED scientists to 'let me know truth'. No one will tell me a damned thing I need to know. I want to learn something my degree did not cover, but I AM BARRED FROM DOING SO FOR NO REASON.

What, are all only allowed to know f*#@ing lies???? I simply want to know things that are f*#@ing true. Why am I not allowed that? Why is seemingly everyone hell-bent to thwart me on my quest to find even the simplest answer to one thing? What the bloody hell is wrong with the world? I'm honestly tempted right now to email my old professor and ask him about this, BECAUSE HE'S THE ONLY PERSON I'VE EVER ENCOUNTERED IN THIS ENTIRE WORLD WHO WAS WILLING TO TELL ME TRUTH. Maybe that was because I was paying him granted, but still.

Anyway, I guess I have no choice but to write shitty code that eats more performance than it should since I'M NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW BETTER. f*#@ the world btw. At least can I have an answer to why WE AREN'T ALLOWED TO KNOW TRUTH ON MATTER HOW MUCH WE f*#@ING BEG AND BEG???????

[HeyYou]

Welcome to the internet. I am not a fan of Reddit, at all. I consider it the Mos Isley of the internet..... There is sometimes some good info to be found there, but, overall, I want nothing to do with that 'community'.....

As for the rest, yep, there are buttheads everywhere. The anonymity of the internet makes them brave, they will type things they would NEVER even consider saying to your face..... Finding a good community for your interests becomes harder every day.

Welcome to the 21st Century.....

[Guest deleted34304850]

7 hours ago, InDarkestNight said:

I am sorry, but I am really pissed right now. Anytime I ask anything ANYWHERE on the internet, I just get assailed for daring to even ask. I've asked about scientific facts on the science sub-reddit, I got harrassed by the mods for DARING to want to know truth. Seriously.

More recently, I've been trying to teach myself to code in pygame using a guide my professor gave me years ago. The biggest problem I'm having is he never taught us about efficiency. He encouraged us to make overly complex code just to thwart our future competition, seriously. I don't know a damned thing about it, but I can't for the life of me find out how to do it.

I tried asking on here to no avail. I've been tyring to ask on stackoverflow, but the garbage website keeps blocking my posts and won't let me actually post NO MATTER WHAT I TYPE IN. I just tried to ask if one bit of code I discovered was a better way than another I had been using, but it refused to even give ma post option; literally the only option it gave me WAS TO DISCARD MY DRAFT. The only question that did get through, about a bug I was experiencing in a program, only won me ridicule for even making the damned thing.

Why the bloody hell am I not allowed to know anything? I've literally BEGGED scientists to 'let me know truth'. No one will tell me a damned thing I need to know. I want to learn something my degree did not cover, but I AM BARRED FROM DOING SO FOR NO REASON.

What, are all only allowed to know f*#@ing lies???? I simply want to know things that are f*#@ing true. Why am I not allowed that? Why is seemingly everyone hell-bent to thwart me on my quest to find even the simplest answer to one thing? What the bloody hell is wrong with the world? I'm honestly tempted right now to email my old professor and ask him about this, BECAUSE HE'S THE ONLY PERSON I'VE EVER ENCOUNTERED IN THIS ENTIRE WORLD WHO WAS WILLING TO TELL ME TRUTH. Maybe that was because I was paying him granted, but still.

Anyway, I guess I have no choice but to write shitty code that eats more performance than it should since I'M NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW BETTER. f*#@ the world btw. At least can I have an answer to why WE AREN'T ALLOWED TO KNOW TRUTH ON MATTER HOW MUCH WE f*#@ING BEG AND BEG???????

pick up a book read it and educate yourself.

[zixi]

I agree with HeyYou. There are people out there who seem to take an absolute delight in being spiteful. I don't  have an explanation. I did some work once to see how far people are influenced by the nature of the comment that comes before the one they make and predictably, if someone says something negative, subsequently others are likely to follow that 'lead'. The data we produced was too 'iffy' to publish and I never got round to redoing it. But I bet someone has. 

In your position, I'd educate myself as best I could (been there - done that!) and try to find a programming  community that isn't too self-obsessed... or contains some nice people. They exist too. Some are so very generous with their time and they're altruistic. It isn't about how they look, it's about how they can help. 

In the forums I've built and managed there's been the opportunity to block content from people you find obnoxious. I expect the same is true here. It won't stop you from seeing their nonsense if someone quotes them, but it might help. I'm so used to being in charge of forums that blocking  doesn't dawn on me as a solution for myself. But I suggest it as a method for not being wound up. 

If it's any comfort, I've noticed on some forums that mods have started stepping in when a brand new member posts to the wrong place or asks something a long term member doesn't like. So they've intervened when there have been responses like  you've necroed a topic or you've posted in the wrong place or that question has been asked before... I've actually got a bit more hopeful for the web... 

[xkkmEl]

19 hours ago, InDarkestNight said:

The biggest problem I'm having is he never taught us about efficiency. He encouraged us to make overly complex code just to thwart our future competition, seriously. I don't know a damned thing about it, but I can't for the life of me find out how to do it.

I think the subject you are asking about is "Algorithmics" and "Complexity theory".  Fascinating but complex subjects.

The short version is: (1) counting instructions and trying to optimize your lines of code has little impact on performance; (2) instructions that are within loops inside loops get executed most often, and optimizing those may be worth the effort; (3) the same result can sometimes be attained by different methods/algorithms, and the algorithms that use fewer loops nested within other loops run faster.

The reflex of beginning programmers is always to "optimize", but that is more often than not counter productive.  The general wisdom on code optimization is, "don't!".  The truth is that your efforts should first go into selecting the right algorithm, and then making the code easy to read and maintain, and almost never into optimizing.

 

[InDarkestNight]

I had no clue loops ate up performance. Why would things in a loop even take up more performance than things outside? Yeah, they get called more often obviously, but that doesn't mean they should eat up more performance for each time they're called. Like I said, I know nothing. I couldn't tell you which line of code was more efficient; to me if they do the same thing, they're 100% identical as far as I can tell.

Just to give an example, I just found an odd way to make a boolean that I was completely unaware of. Before, I thought the only way to make a boolean was to declare a variable True or False, or use an if statement:

if x=0 then y=True (python doesn't technically use then-statements of course, but its not easy to copy-paste python code into a board for obvious reasons)

Now however, I found a way to write this line that doesn't involve an if-statement. Apparently I could just write it like this:

y=x<=0

I had NO idea you could do this. Before, I would've assumed such a statement would've thrown an error message due to it having two equal signs in it. I had no idea it was an operator like + - * / and %?

Which is better though? What is the interpreter actually doing with these two statements? I wouldn't know. Maybe its a shortcut like typing x+=1 rather than x=x+1? Or maybe its harder for the interpreter due to it obviously being further from the more typical language? It would be closer to assembly code. Then again, I've heard if-statements eat up the most processing power. Its why people tend to encourage you to minimize their use as much as possible. So which way is better? is the first better, or the second? I have no clue AND YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO ASK ON STACKOVERFLOW APPARENTLY.

My one question that did get through, I was accused of engaging in 'pre-optimization'. I don't see what difference it would make. If I made a huge program and it started lagging late into development, I wouldn't know what I could do about it. What, am I supposed to just re-write the whole thing in a different way and see if it makes an improvement or not? I straight wouldn't know. Keep in mind, I'm trying to use python and pygame here, so performance is sort of at a premium. Even this memory game I made from this pdf lags pygame sucks so much.

As for making programs shorter, screwing around making my own programs I did once decide to reduce the lines in this one program I kept re-making over and over. I did manage to pull if off, but it was VERY esoteric in how it worked. On future versions, I never bothered to replicate that. All future versions the source code was far more self-explanatory how it worked. The only reason I saw to even make such a program was to reduce the storage space it took up, which obviously isn't something one should bother considering on a modern computer, especially with tiny little programs like that.

[Pagafyr]

I almost paid a person seventy five dollars to help me solve a problem in Alphanumeric codes with punctuations and symbols too.

My Dad was going out of his mind trying to make the sumation to an equation work out.

I looked in the computer he gave me a cassette player for.  A VIC20 with the cassette made it so I could play the code data that was causing him problems.  He gave me the cassette tape and the cassette player for the VIC20.  When running the tape a window opened up to make a phone call.   All the person had to do was type the phone number in.  It could also be opened so I could see the code written to do the task.  I sat there skimming over the program they couldn't get to work.  When I saw all sorts of symbols from Algebra incorporated into the code I was in awe.  Equations mixed together with a title someone thought up to make it look like it was a great discovery.  Not just Algebra.

Finding the solution for that snapped me out of my fog.  I saw what I was typing with 1s and 0s where it was supposed to be 'a' instead "A".  And in another similar case I accidently put an '@' where an 'a' was intended.  You might wonder how a person using machine language could make such mistakes.  Overlapping vision seeing the next symbol, after a letter caused by a tick in the tired eyes of programmer is the answer.  Get some rest!

The VIC20 systems phone dialing code that didn't dial the number typed in the area. 

It didn't work because the person that wrote that code forgot to put the closing symbol on the phone number space in their equation, they thought an open space followed by the activator was correct.  I typed in the correction in and dialed up the library computer.

The library computers are very useful for finding answers for what we know and use even today.

[Guest deleted34304850]

stop obsessing about instructions. are you writing in assembler? are you constrained by available storage? no you are not.

this latest post is analogous to someone whining about wanting to know how to build a house and getting frustrated because someone won't tell them how to craft nails.

have you written any code that actually does what you want it to do? you've sketched out the requirements and coded a program to deliver what you want?

if you've done that, then what is it you're trying to "optimize"? and to what end? what is the issue that needs optimization? where is your bottleneck?

i speak as a professonal programmer with 30+ years of experience, and never, not once, have i obsessed about a technique to add some numbers or put things in a loop. modern computers are built so you don't need to do any of that, unless you're coding at microcode level, and if you're using python, then you're not anywhere near that.

[xkkmEl]

Trivial details in simple code sequences don't matter, really.  Getting that code to take 1ms instead of 5ms saves you only 4ms of performance.  You will never notice it.

If that same code is inside a loop and gets executed a million times, it will take 1000s (~17 minutes) instead of 5000s (~1h23) for a saving of 4000s (~1h07). That is a worthy optimization.

Keeping your code readable and maintainable is usually a lot more important.

To know which sections of code to optimize, first ask yourself if it's worth the effort.  Then use a profiling tool to tell you which code segments are most often executed.  Then try to optimize that code.

Modern compilers are pretty good at spotting optimizable code patterns... so you likely won't find many opportunities to make actual improvements.

There are a few things you should know though, in choosing how you implement things and how you pick the algorithm.  Accessing a lot of data will clog your cache and slow all memory accesses.  Modern cpus don't like conditional branching (if/while/etc) and prefer using operators, when possible, because conditional branching prevents the cpu from preloading the next instructions until the condition is evaluated.  There are others.  But even though these things help performance, they hardly ever are an issue in common programming tasks.  If they were, interpreted languages like java, python and javascript would have unacceptable performance characteristics.

Picking the right algorithm can make it so that your "performance critical code" is called only 1000 times instead of a million.  Seriously.  Picking the right algorithm will always give you more benefit than tweaking code for performance.

 

[InDarkestNight]

Bullshit garbage internet. Having another problem, BUT I'M ALLOWED TO ASK. I tried to post on stackoverflow again, against my better judgement, and it told me I used the wrong formatting for the code. Okay, so I fixed it, but IT WON'T GIVE ME THE OPTION TO POST. I have to type that all in again? How would I even know it would let me do so anyway? IT RARELY LETS ME POST.

WHY THE HELL AM I NOT ALLOWED TO LEARN. I WANT TRUTH. I WANT HELP. LET ME KNOW THINGS. LET ME SEE THINGS THAT AREN'T f*#@ING LIES. I WANT TO KNOW IF THIS BOOK I'M LEARNING FROM IS LIES OR NOT GIVEN THAT ITS PROGRAMS DON'T WORK LIKE THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BUT I'M NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW. IS THAT WHY I CAN'T GET ANY HELP??? I ALREADY HAVE A BOOK OF LIES AND SO I MUST LEARN FROM THAT INSTEAD OF KNOWING TRUTH. f*#@ THE INTERNET AND EVERYTHING ITS BECOME.