Learn SQL (because it's basically the only option) but much more importantly, learn databases. Know why atomicity, consistency, idempotency, and durability matter. Understand the wire protocol and the client-server model. Do relational data modeling; think beyond databases as a dumb store. Join. Know when to normalize. Internalize indexing strategies. Think deeply about what work belongs on the database server (work that can leverage relational set theory) and what work stays in the application. Once you figure the true capabilities of databases, SQL as the language interface is a side note - about as important as the leather on your steering wheel.
> Understand the wire protocol and the client-server model.
I'm a DBRE, and have locally compiled MySQL with debug symbols to step through something with gdb. I have yet to examine the wire protocol for MySQL or Postgres beyond a brief read from docs. I'm not saying it's not useful in some circumstances, but I can't think of a reason why a developer would ever need to know it.
I take "understand the wire protocol" to mean, perhaps, understand nature and shape of the communication between the client and the server.
Here's an "understand the wire protocol" story:
Years ago I dealt with a Customer's thick-client Win32 ERP application that back-ended into Oracle. They wanted to use it across a VPN. They naively thought bandwidth would be the major potential showstoppper and did measurement of bandwidth usage on their own. The app didn't throw around many bits so the Customer declared the test a success and spent the money on the VPN solution.
After the VPN was implemented they were unhappy w/ the performance of the app and asked me to take a look.
The application was built with individual SQL queries "bound" to many of the UI controls. Depending on what the user was doing, displaying a dialog might require 20+ round-trips to the Oracle server. The developers just assumed LAN latency and gave no thought to minimizing round trips.
Web devs are used to dealing with RTT latency today, but this was another time. The devs had no sense of how the wire protocol worked and ended-up making users like my Customer hamstrung into "solutions" like Remote Desktop / VDI.
Friction is the mechanism by which mammalian brains acquire skills. This is as close to proven as we get in cognitive neuroscience; without a struggle, we literally don't learn. This is not a controversial statement. The only way to improve our cognitive skills is to intentionally add friction - aka practice. Use it or lose it.
This isn't necessarily anti-AI. Imagine a tool that could quiz you, provide context for decisions, and make sure you're up to date on your knowledge of the codebase - instead of just writing code for you. IOW an AI-based system could intentionally add the right kind of friction to improve understanding.
Agreed, an LLM could be scaffolded on your deficits and with enough time, empower your learning and growth arc far better than you or any other human could outline a bespoke learning framework for a particular subject.
Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
The sugar you get from fruit is also accompanied by fiber, water and other nutrients. Also harder to overeat and generally gets released into the bloodstream more slowly. I think the argument here is to eat less (highly) processed food in favour of whole foods.
I've known people that think switching to fruit juice from sugar sodas was going to fix them; very much not. Doesn't matter where you get the sugar, sugar is sugar and is not good for you or your arteries or weight loss.
Fruit juice you didn't press yourself have no fibers.
Honestly, the 'avoir sugar' crowd is wrong in its messaging, the correct message should be 'increase your fiber intake'.
Also an effect of fiber is that it increases your transit speed and quality a lot (a lot). I don't know if that also have an effect on how much sugar and fat is absorbed in the small intestine, but I recently managed to loose weight I had a lot of trouble eliminating without changing my calorie intake. Basically I went from 115 kg to 95 with reducing my calorie intake without much trouble (stopped sugar and alcohol basically) in 2-3 years, and didn't manage to go much lower in the last 6 year (I was around 90-88 by starting physical activity, but those 5kg took 4 years to loose and I stabilized again). But I recently had transit issues, and started eating more fiber like 3 months ago. I lost 1 kg over the timeframe, while having a way better time on the toilets, and it was even easier than stopping sugar (just eat more greens, beans and oats), as I didn't change my meal size.
My thoughts are that it's too sweet, though I don't know what quality its fiber has: like is it decent dietary fiber or a nutrition label dodge of some sort.
Yesterday I ate lots of sugar in the form of sweets. It happened during a 100km bike ride (against a strong headwind even) and I would otherwise bonk [0], so I'm pretty sure it was good for me, my arteries and my weight loss.
And that's the issue with simple messaging like 'sugar bad'.
Citing a 100 km bike ride as a counter-example is not very helpful. Sure, technically, the parent was worded as an absolute statement, but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier that it is irrelevant to a discussion about diet. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about relatively normal diets, and clearly biking 100 km is well outside normal.
Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
> but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier
I don't think it is, there are a lot of bikers, runners, triathlon people between my colleagues and friends that regularly do that much energy output. Several of them even do much longer rides. And we are not even that young or sport-mad.
> Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you?
Yes, you don't want to get your bowels very active/full during biking.
As an aside, top road cyclists (and I'm sure also long distance runners etc) are currently consuming up to 120g of glucose/fructose per hour during their performance, and have to train their guts so they are able to consume that much.
> And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
And the point of my post was exactly that I think that either there should be always explicit qualifiers around 'sugar bad' or better just don't write that at all, because it's plain wrong. Sugar as a reasonable part of a quality diet is fine. It's different for children and obviously some other groups of people, but it's not bad in general (and if you want to lose weight, try to eliminate starch, not simple or short-chain sugars, but that's too hard for most people, and might not be healthy either). And messages like that just destroy the credibility of the speaker.
Extreme sports is definitely nothing "normal" - whether I define "normal" as a today's statistic, or as evolutionary history. Your needs and metrics are nothing Joe Regular can use in his daily life, which the OP pointed very clearly and you don't need to refute. Your body is a completely different beast and we would be comparing apples with oranges, only confusing an already confused domain. Because I don't believe that any of your guidelines about guts training is coming from "general surgeon advice" - you are using specialized forums and special indications, while this discussion here is on a general forum, about general indications.
There is nothing extreme about doing a 100km ride from time to time, I don't even have the body of an athlete. That bit about training the guts was an aside and clearly marked as such. I don't do it.
'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.
Arguing that a 100km bike ride is not an edge case seems disingenuous. Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives. "Added sugar bad" is generally good advice for most the population which statistically is fairly sedentary and doesn't require a huge amount of immediately available, low fiber energy.
> Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives.
I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?
"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.
They didn't say "added sugar" they just said sugar. If you want to avoid sugar, you have to realize that fruit does contain sugar (fructose is the culprit here) and it isn't always healthy.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
I'm not trying to lose weight, and I've never knowingly bought a specialty orange. Sugar is in basically every plant food, and saying "give up all sugar" means going carnivore plus eggs and a select few dairy products.
Which, to be clear because some people legitimately believe in this diet, this is bad for you. Diets high in animal fat cause heart disease, and eating this much red meat without fiber is going to cause gastrointestinal distress and increase your risk of colon cancer. Also, it is very difficult to eat a reasonable amount of calories when you consume calorically dense food that's high in fat.
It's a matter of amount of course. A tomato has 1/4th the sugar of a normal orange.
The point here is saying "fruit is healthy" is just not true in any sort of black and white sense. Someone can easily get fat and be unhealthy by eating fruits with lots of sugar, and if they are juicing them, even more so.
See but here is where I get confused. The advice you are saying is to "completely eliminate added sugar" but then you say it's due to fiber, nutrients, and hard to overeat.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.
On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.
Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.
Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.
you can overeat fruit and vegetables and not all fruit is the same. Bananas vs kale is a good example. You should eat more kale, but you should avoid bananas unless they’re green (lots of resistant starch)
I suspect that the vast majority of the population is not overeating fruit and vegetables. Even if someone is eating ripe bananas, that's likely to be much better for them than eating another portion of fries/chips etc.
The sugar used to make alcohol is not found in the alcohol itself. Like the oil used to make plastics is not found in the food packaging. Don't mix two very different end products with very different effects - what gets killed by alcohol is not what gets killed by refined sugars. And overweight is not caused by sugar or by alcohol directly, or alone, so again it's a third discussion. Long story short: don't overuse anything. If you want only the simplest answer.
And overweight is not caused by sugar or by alcohol directly,
They are the major contributing factors to obesity. This is not generally disputed. It is a systemic problem and trying to deny the problems by saying the primary factor isn't "the direct cause" (without any detail, nuance or information of your own) is the kind of hand waving people have been doing to obscure people understanding these problems.
I watched people ask LLMs for linting/refactoring help, burning easily 5 minutes for something that could be completed deterministically, locally, in ms using any modern editor.
Quite frankly it was embrassing. We've had tools for static analysis for ages. Use them.
Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. They did it the slow, expensive way but at least didn't have to think? Odd flex.
Another framing is "Prioritize". It's not yes or no; it's what are you focusing on right now. There may be plenty of good ideas that are "no" today because you can only work on one at a time.
> The unit you plan in is the truth you will or will not face.
This 100x. "Story points" are evil, simply because they can't be measured. The qualitative nature of story points means that planning assumptions are NEVER checked against reality. It's a strong incentive for management to avoid any responsibility; stay "agile", use "story points", and never ever assess your actual performance or velocity.
The worst managers I've seen straight up forbid talking about the story points. Anyone asking for more information or discussion gets shot down; story points are "just an estimate" after all. Then when that lack of information becomes a problem, employees are forbidden from referring back to previous estimates. Even calibrating story points in a relative sense is expressly forbidden. There is no feedback mechansim to correct poor planning. And that's by design; the system protects and shields mediocre managers from accountability, period.
No, this is quite backwards. I find myself reading code more, to gain context and build the theory for the feature I'm working on. The time it takes to write the code is now trivial compared to designing a good idea. Reading/thinking about code absolutely dominates now that writing code is cheap.
> Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for
Well put! Now that we have a magic tool that can generate tokens on demand, the quality of the underlying idea gains enormous importance relative to the code. Tokens are cheap. Good ideas are not.
I would like to hope that some people take advantage of this newfound agentic power to create better theories. But there's a sizable population that seems intent on generating more and more code, regardless of quality.
The plant still need solar energy. They still need electricity within the tissues of the organism to survive (ATP and krebs cycle). Humans have always burned organic matter for light.
Not trying to be a pedant but "Light without electricity" falls down when examined from any angle. It's not a serious claim.
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