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    1. What is a software you wish existed?

      I've been feeling pretty bored for a while and my job isn't really giving something fulfilling to do, So I want to make something. However, I don't want to make something useless. unfortunately, I...

      I've been feeling pretty bored for a while and my job isn't really giving something fulfilling to do, So I want to make something.

      However, I don't want to make something useless. unfortunately, I can't think of any software I'm in a particular need for. I would love to make something that solves a real problem for a real human.

      So, please tell me, what's something that you wish existed because it would reduce suffering in your life that little (or big) bit?


      Edit: Wow wow and wow, I didn't expect this thread that I made on a whim to blow up so much. So many idead!

      69 votes
    2. Struggling with first dev job - seeking advice

      This is my cry for help. I'm a newer programmer who just got hired for my first actual programming job a few months ago. Before now the only things I really made were simple python scripts that...

      This is my cry for help.

      I'm a newer programmer who just got hired for my first actual programming job a few months ago. Before now the only things I really made were simple python scripts that handled database operations at my last job. I live in an area with no opportunities, and so this new job I got is my saving grace at this point. For the first time in my life I can have actual savings and can actually work on moving to an area with opportunities. However...

      Everything is falling apart. I have no idea how this place has survived this long. There is no senior dev for me to go to. There are no code reviews. There is no QA. There is a spiderweb of pipelines with zero error handling or data-checking. Bugs are frequent and go undetected. The database has no keys or constraints, and was designed by a madman (so it's definitely not normalized whatsoever). I already have made a bunch of little scripts handling data-parsing tasks that are used in prod, and I've had to learn proper logging and notifications on errors along the way, and have still yet to learn how to do real tests (I ordered a book on pytest that I plan on going through). I am so paranoid that at any moment something I made does something unexpected and destroys things (which... kinda actually happened already).

      We're in the long and arduous process of moving away from this terrible system to a newer, better-designed one but I'm already just so lost and... lonely? There's a few separate dev "teams" but one is outsourced and the other is infamously unapproachable and works on a completely different domain. There's no one there to catch me if/when I make mistakes except myself. The paranoia I have over my programs is really getting to me and already affecting my health.

      I guess I just want advice on what I should do in this situation. Is this a normal first experience? I care deeply about making sure the things I make are good and functional but I also don't have the experience to forsee potential issues that may come up due to how I'm designing things. And how can I cope with the paranoia I'm feeling?

      EDIT: It takes me a while to write responses, but I want everyone to know that I really appreciate all your advice and kind words. It does mean a lot to me! I'm doing my best to take in what everyone has said and am working on making the best of an atypical situation. I'm chronically hard on myself, but I'm gonna try to give myself a bit more grace here. Again, thanks so much for all the thoughtful replies from everyone. :)

      34 votes
    3. Yarn, React, and Udemy. Help requested.

      My apologies if this kind of content is not allowed here. Mod(s) please feel free to delete it if it is not without any butthurt on my part. I'm new to React Testing, so I am taking an Udemy...

      My apologies if this kind of content is not allowed here. Mod(s) please feel free to delete it if it is not without any butthurt on my part.

      I'm new to React Testing, so I am taking an Udemy course on it. The Udemy course uses yarn, so I would like to stick with that though I do know yarn isn't the top accepted tool in the React community.

      I've posted this question elsewhere, I haven't gotten any responses, so I am posting it here ( costs nothing ).

      I am getting this error when executing yarn build:

      $ yarn build
      yarn run v1.22.22
      $ react-scripts build
      Creating an optimized production build...
      Failed to compile.
      
      TS2305: Module '"web-vitals"' has no exported member 'ReportHandler'.
        > 1 | import { ReportHandler } from 'web-vitals';
            |          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
          2 |
          3 | const reportWebVitals = (onPerfEntry?: ReportHandler) => {   
          4 |   if (onPerfEntry && onPerfEntry instanceof Function) {      
      
      
      error Command failed with exit code 1.
      

      I've tried installing web-vitals over what is already in the modules section, but that hasn't helped.

      Any clues appreciated!


      Update: the tip about ReportHandler being deprecated helped. I ran create react app in a new folder, did NOT run yarn update as the instructor called for,moved my work over, and now everything runs fine.


      7 votes
    4. Can I have some advice on the neural net I've been working on?

      Apologies if this isn't an appropriate place to post this. Inspired by a paper I found a while back (https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/215545/local_215545.pdf), I tried my hand...

      Apologies if this isn't an appropriate place to post this.

      Inspired by a paper I found a while back (https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/215545/local_215545.pdf), I tried my hand at implementing a program (in C#) to create ASCII art from an image. It works pretty well, but like they observed in the paper, it's pretty slow to compare every tile to 90-some glyphs. In the paper, they make a decision tree to replicate this process at a faster speed.

      Recently, I revisited this. I thought I'd try making a neural net, since I found the idea interesting. I've watched some videos on neural nets, and refreshed myself on my linear algebra, and I think I've gotten pretty close. That said, I feel like there's something I'm missing (especially given the fact that the loss isn't really decreasing). I think my problem is specifically during backpropagation.

      Here is a link to the TrainAsync method in GitHub: https://github.com/bendstein/ImageToASCII/blob/1c2e2260f5d4cfb45443fac8737566141f5eff6e/LibI2A/Converter/NNConverter.cs#L164C59-L164C69. The forward and backward propagation methods are below it.

      If anyone can give me any feedback or advice on what I might be missing, I'd really appreciate it.

      14 votes
    5. How do you organize your Linux packages?

      Hello everyone. I am planning to get back into Linux development after working with Mac only for almost a decade. On Mac, one of the most important lessons that I learned was to always use...

      Hello everyone.

      I am planning to get back into Linux development after working with Mac only for almost a decade. On Mac, one of the most important lessons that I learned was to always use Homebrew. Using various package managers (e.g. Homebrew, NPM, Yarn, Pip, etc.) creates situations in which you don't know how to uninstall or upgrade certain pieces of software. Also, it's hard to generate a complete overview.

      How do you Linux folks handle this?

      Bonus question: How do you manage your dotfiles securely? I use Bitwarden, and it's a bit clunky.

      If that helps, I want to try Mint and always use Oh My ZSH!.

      6 votes
    6. Chrome/Firefox Plugin to locally scrape data from multiple URLs

      As the title suggests, I am looking for a free chrome or firefox plugin that can locally scrape data from multiple URLs. To be a bit more precise, what I mean by it: A free chrome or firefox...

      As the title suggests, I am looking for a free chrome or firefox plugin that can locally scrape data from multiple URLs. To be a bit more precise, what I mean by it:

      • A free chrome or firefox plugin
      • Local scraping: it runs in the browser itself. No cloud computing or "credits" required to run
      • Scrape data: Collects predefined data from certain data fields within a website such as https://www.dastelefonbuch.de/Suche/Test
      • Infinite scroll: to load data that only loads once the browser scrolls down (kind of like in the page I linked above)

      I am not looking into programming my own scraper using python or anything similar. I have found plugins that "kind of" do what I am describing above, and about two weeks ago I found one that pretty much perfectly does what is described ("DataGrab"), but it starts asking to buy credits after running it a few times.

      My own list:

      • DataGrab: Excellent, apart from asking to buy credits after a while
      • SimpleScraper: Excellent, but asks to buy credits pretty much immediately
      • Easy Scraper: Works well for single pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
      • Instant Data Scraper: Works well for single pages and infinite scroll pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
      • "Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping" / dataminer.io: Doesn't work well
      • Scrapy.org: Too much programming, but looks quite neat and well documented

      Any suggestions are highly welcome!

      Edit: A locally run executable or cmd-line based program would be fine too, as long as it just needs to be configured (e.g., creating a list of URLs stored in a .txt or .csv file) instead of coded (e.g., coding an infinite scroll function from scratch).

      8 votes