Posted
Hi everyone! While I finalise my 'motivators for hacking' article, I thought it would be fun to do a small post about what I'm currently reading or researching. This is a new format that I am trying out, where I link to a tab that I have open right now and then give a description of why I find it interesting. I enjoy reading different people's content and listening to their opinions just as much as I like writing content and sharing my opinions, so this is the best of both worlds :] consider this to be my version of Pluralistic.
I was reading Dijkstra's seminal 1968 paper "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" -- really interesting! I stumbled across this particular link while trying to understand how much his ideas hold up today. I don't think that the original poster's argument is very compelling, so wish that the anti-goto opinion had been more thoughtfully presented. Bearing that in mind, I thought Rik van Riel, Robert Love and David Lang explained justified uses of goto quite clearly.
I have a few posts from Dan Luu open -- I actually started with his post on the way people underestimate the time, energy, money, etc. it takes for a business product to go from "MVP" to "actually commercially viable", and how you couldn't actually just 'build that in a weekend'. But this post on debugging especially resonated with me -- firstly because of its relevancy to my 'engineering reliable software systems' (software testing) class, and additionally because of his frank and very clear style of writing. This article brings up a lot of memories of frustration early on in undergrad, where I felt like I should be able to get everything immediately or else I wasn't cut out for computer science. It went on for too long, but finally letting go of that mindset was a great relief.
This tab will be open for a bit -- it describes my first deliverable for my independent project with Dr. Shuai Wang, due in two-ish weeks. I've never encountered SVD before, but so far my research into zero-knowledge proof implementations has been really interesting! I'm continually referencing and re-reading the the ZKProof Community Reference. I'd love to contribute to the docs someday, maybe by producing some of the proposed future figures that the creators want.