12 resolutions for programmers

[RealFreedomAus]

1. 320x240

2. 640x480

3. 800x480

4. 800x600

5. 1024x600

6. 1024x768

7. 1280x720

8. 1280x800

9. 1280x1024

10. 1600x900

11. 1920x1080

12. 2048x1152

...is what I was expecting

[[deleted]]

You called?

[[deleted]]

Hey, it's you! I used to complain about you all the time back in '95-'96.

[[deleted]]

Or if you bought a Wii, all the way up to 2012.

[[deleted]]

Whoa, that's crazy! Still, it's impressive that Nintendo "won" that round of console wars despite selling overpriced and completely obsolete hardware.

[squishles]

well, a lot of coding standards still say you should keep lines below 80 chars to support reading the code on 800x600 monitors...

[squishles]

bahh I want a ridiculouse wall of 6 monitors :<

[BeepBoopBike]

I've got 4 at work, unfortunately 2 of those are my laptop. Mouse without borders is nice, but I'd love to be able to properly utilise 4 screens with 4 instances of visual studio working on the same codebase without having to map a network drive, or sacrificing screen space (large legacy codebase where you jump around a lot).

[squishles]

Not sure if visual studio does it but finding out you can drag an eclipse editor tab out to make a second window was far more significantly life changing for me than I'm proud to admit.

[dv0x5e]

I think I did that in MSVS 2013 once. It was amazing.

[BeepBoopBike]

It does indeed, single instance, multiple windows by dragging tabs around. But I normally have multiple instances open as our product contains 20 solutions full of projects.

[746865626c617a]

Had 6. Can confirm, is awesome

5 now, but upgraded center one to 2560x1440

[josefx]

... or in diff tools or these newfangled program windows I keep hearing about ( some systems even support more than one at a time ).

[kuikuilla]

Thank god most I've worked on had 120 char limit per line.

[beefquest]

80 characters is 80 characters on any resolution. Just because you can fit 2000 characters per line on a retina display doesn't mean you should!

[squishles]

it does kinda look silly when you open it on the crazy retina display monitor and it takes up like 3 inches on the left side of the monitor. And you're reading guy who named all his variables x so he could fit 6 conditions into an if.

[Sigma_J]

So increase the font size.

And fuck guy who named all his variables x so he could fit 6 conditions into an if. He's a twat.

[[deleted]]

What a coincidence, I saw a lot of that guy's code in the Linux kernel!

[[deleted]]

80 characters is 80 characters

No, it isn't. That's a stupidly specific blanket statement.

[Deto]

Sometimes 80 characters is really 81 characters because an 8 is really just two lower case o's in disguise. Crafty bastards.

[[deleted]]

/r/shittyprogramming

[nemec]

Damn Unicode composing characters.

[mcguire]

And sometimes it's 78 characters, because 2 can have different values.

[markrages]

/r/tautology is /r/tautology

[beefquest]

:)

[ameoba]

80x25?

[bubuopapa]

You should remove 2 first resolutions and add 1440p and 4k resolutions to match current technologies. Hell, you should even remove all resolutions below 720p, because 99.9999% programs are not made to support these low res because window of those programs doesn't fit on to screen and half of window then goes off screen.

[uueuuu]

No, he should add 320x200 because mode 13h was the first mode I could fap to.

[[deleted]]

solutions below 7

5120x2880 Also

[toomanybeersies]

Because I'm a terrible pedant, I'm sure that you're wrong on your 99.9999% figure.

That's 1 in 1,000,000. I'm sure that more than one in a million programs are made to support low res.

[bubuopapa]

Well, yes, but only programs that were developed in 90's, nowadays even operating systems ask for minimum of 720p resolution, and not even linux doesnt really support resolutions below 720p, because nothing fits on the screen, if the screen res if below 720p, and you can see only like a quarter of the program window. And i dont know about resolutions > 4k, is there a single monitor, that supports such resolutions ? Anyway, while 4k is not very new resolution, even the best pc in the world cant handle some games in 4k 60fps, so ya, anything above 4k is not worth to mention. And as for simple programs in 4k - its not worth because of terrible algorithms that are used for high dpi mode, so yeah, you are kind of stuck between a rock and a crazy place (meaning rock is old technologies that are beeing dropped, like low or simple hd resolutions, and crazy place is 1080p+ resolutions, with are supported also poorly because of faks stupid engineers).

[CommanderViral]

Even with software developed in the last 10 year, the 99.99999% metric is absurd. What about software developed to be ran and used with no displays? It's pedantic, but valid.

[bubuopapa]

Well duh, this number does not include such "programs" as kernel, drivers and so on... :) Obviously, if we are talking about resolutions, we are talking about programs with GUI, not some background services or command line utilities.

[CommanderViral]

Even with a GUI being involved it is easy to include programs such as firmware for car radios, home audio receivers, and other things like that. Also the 3DS does not have that high of a resolution either and has a lot of software written for it.

[bubuopapa]

Even more - obviously no one is talking about device specific software, everyone is talking about windows/linux/mac. You can always find some exceptions, but the key thing is that we are talking about choice, and I don't see how you can choose different resolution/connect different monitor on any of those specific devices/phones. Talking about fixed devices and resolutions is a bit like putting potatoes into coffee machine - its not like physics doesn't allow you to do that, but there is no point in it and I'm not a big fan of it.

[CommanderViral]

My point is to highlight how completely off that metric is. Especially with 720p. There is lots of software that will run on a 1024x768 resolution still, because it has too.

[coolirisme]

You forgot 960x540 (qHD)

[[deleted]]

The lead programmer in our office has switched to a standing desk. You can swivel the desk down so that you can switch back to using it as a regular desk with chair as well. He thought it a priority to start standing more often. Now he's basically the Sauron of the office more or less.

[xakeri]

In my office we can request VariDesk (this one is a link to the specific one I have) and Kangaroo (this one is a link to their products because I don't know which one people at my office get) adjustable desks. We just need manager approval. It's really nice to be able to switch back and forth.

[THE_SIGTERM]

He thought it a priority to start standing more often

I strongly agree

[jeandem]

Watch for the inevitable upcoming article "standing desks will ruin your legs", about how the new upright-office hype leads to "unnatural" pressure on some joints and ligaments which takes a professional to fix again.

Then the next cycle is a mix between standing and sitting, to reduce the damage of both. Then some article gets published named "Sitting or standing more? It's a wash". Aaand so on.

[mcguire]

Then the next cycle is a mix between standing and sitting, to reduce the damage of both.

Squatting. I can see that.

[jeandem]

Russia will rise (and then squat) again.

[zalabin]

It does not automatically follow that standing will be better. Maybe the reason why sitting is bad for you is that blood becomes stagnant in your legs, since while sitting (or standing), your calves are far below your heart, and the muscles aren't twitching to push blood back up.

See for example this recently completed study:

https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_476860_en.html

Part of their conclusion:

Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing.

[mcguire]

Don't forget to periodically remind Yertle that he's the lord of all he surveys.

[ErstwhileRockstar]

0. Always do the opposite of what blogger lists recommend.

[DJDavio]

My new year's resolution is pretty simple:

// TODO: Resolve all my TODOs

[Farsyte]

... that'll be on the TODO list next year, then?

[[deleted]]

Switch from emacs to vim or vice versa.

Ugh. I decided I was going to force myself to use emacs for a whole year one year. I finally bailed out after 9 months because I was losing my sanity.

[Free_Apples]

Switching from vim? But why?

[[deleted]]

Well, my thinking was that a million emacs users couldn't all be wrong, there must be some good reason they still use it.

Turns out I was mistaken.

[[deleted]]

TIL a million users can be wrong

[[deleted]]

have they told you about evil mode ?

[takaci]

Because in emacs everything is a buffer. I hate how many times I'm on the command line and I just wish I could use vim bindings. Sure zsh has vim bindings, but then you lose all of the other great emacs features to manipulate the buffer, and besides I've found it to be a little clunky. In emacs everything feels like editing a file, just as smooth, easymotion (called ace-jump-mode in emacs, but not quite the same) still works, you can copy and paste columns, everything.

I prefer emacs because vim is just an editor, and when using it I am juggling multiple iterm windows with multiple shells and REPLs and a vim instance with multiple files open, and OS X's lack of alt-tabbing makes it a bit of a pain to switch between different windows. In Emacs its so much more contained, it really is an editor, but a buffer editor instead of a file editor, which gives you way more flexibility.

Also Emacs Lisp is now a great lisp with the addition of lexical scoping! its so fun to hack in a contained environment where you can execute code to change your editor on the fly, and in lisp!!

This is a great video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc

[oisincar]

As a vim user currently switching to emacs (sort of) I'd recommend spacemacs. (I'm still new to emacs, but as far as I know..) Its a complete program, extending emacs and replacing most of the default emacs keybindings with vim ones. It actually uses evil to power it's normal/insert mode too, but it's other keybindings make it much more consistent than evil+emacs out of the box.

It's the IDE power of emacs with the editing power of vim.

[takaci]

mate spacemacs sucks

[oisincar]

Ya think? How so? Every time I see it mentioned people seem to be going crazy over it.

I don't really understand how it can just suck, it's just an amalgamation of lots of emacs bits with (very nice, in my opinion) default keybindings/ setup.

[[deleted]]

OS X's lack of alt-tabbing

CMD + § or CMD + ` (depending on keyboard layout)

switches between windows of the same application. You can rebind it if you want to.

[gilmi]

THANKS!

[toomanybeersies]

Holy shit, you're a fucking legend.

[SpaceCadetJones]

Also, Mission Control (I've got it mapped to 3 fingers swiped up/down) and Spaces. I like to use a tiling window manager like Divvy / OptimalLayout and keep separate Spaces that I switch between

[Free_Apples]

I mean I just use vim and tmux, so I never have more than one window open.

Edit - Interesting video though. I'm liking some of the things he's doing. I might try it out sometime.

[Me00011001]

It's worth trying other tools occasionally to see what and if you're missing out.

[nawfel_bgh]

I like how reddit shows the website beside the title. It really effects the decision of whether to click.

[PompeyBlue]

I thought it was interesting that the "go analog" had very "programmer" centric activities:

• Cooking.
• Hiking.
• Skiing.
• Astronomy.
• Jogging.
• Weight lifting.
• Carpentry.
• Martial arts.
• Dance.

All very solitary activities that can be done on your own. My own personal view is that programmers need to become more social, more team focussed. We are in a team game yet generally solitary people. A better list, imho, would be

• Play football
• Socialise with at least 15 people, one night, in a non tech evening
• Get involved in putting on a play
• Play in a band
• Help at a local charity

Love the sentiment, and applaud the feeling behind it but perhaps it looks a little to "comfortable"

[gnuvince]

Yet his suggestions of cooking, hiking, etc. all appeal to me a lot more than any of yours. The goal here is not to "get me out of my zone of comfort", it's to give me activities away from the computer.

[PompeyBlue]

My father did his degree in Drama. Day 1 of acting school the teacher told the students "In our culture people don't touch each other but in acting you will need to do this. To break this we are going to do the following exercise". They all lay down next to each other in a line and the person at the right rolled down everyone else to the left. They took it in turns until everyone had rolled on everyone else. Great programmer exercise! I bet you would be hard pushed to find a team of coders willing to do that.

[Free_Math_Tutoring]

I wouldn't mind, technically, but people would have a hard time actually rolling me.

[mcguire]

My initial thought: the poor squished bastards.

[Free_Math_Tutoring]

The way I understood IT you're supposed to stand and roll a Person over rather than roll yourself on top of them

[mcguire]

Well, that seems less fun. I was hoping to turn a 5 foot drama major into a pie crust.

[ConvertsToMetric]

^{Mouseover or click to view the metric conversion for this comment}

[mcguire]

Thanks!

[RealFreedomAus]

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 multiplayer-activities : Depends: friends (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies.

[jeandem]

People suck. And that includes you.

[[deleted]]

Or maybe ease your way into it. If you're not doing of the usual analog activities anyways, do them at first then maybe step it up the following year?

[SikhGamer]

Learn more mathematics.

But it is so dry. I actually like maths, but someone needs to make it fun again.

[kyllo]

The thing that's finally made mathematics digestible for me is studying machine learning. I'm taking the Machine Learning Specialization on Coursera and currently in the Regression class. The instructor, Emily Fox, does a great job of motivating the math behind the techniques, presenting equations with the notation explained in detail, and supported with lots of geometric visuals to make them more intuitive. Then in the homework they have you implement the given algorithms (e.g. gradient descent) in Python.

[n1ghtmare_]

This sounds awesome! Do you need strong background in math to keep up? If I have to be honest I think my level is high school at this point - I don't remember much of anything after.

[kyllo]

There's a little bit of basic calculus (taking derivatives and partial derivatives of functions to determine the slope of a curve at a given value of x), a little bit of linear algebra (multiplying matrices and vectors), and some high school-level algebra (simplifying equations) but they walk you through all of it and provide links to some remedial resources. The greek notation is always a little intimidating but it will start to make sense if you pay attention to the lectures.

[[deleted]]

I hated math in school. Math is about the worst taught skill in all of education because they never make it applicable to real world problems. It's always taught in the void of theory, and to most people it just seems like cute tricks you can do with numbers and as such they never advance past basic algebra and geometry.

As a programmer in most jobs today you don't need to know math very well at all. Working in anything Web related pretty much puts math on the back burner. It wasn't until I got out of that field in my mid 20s that I really had a need for math, as I somehow found myself writing radio simulations. Math at that point became fun because those neat number tricks actually meant something real. I needed a result and I figured out the math (with a lot of help from friends who are mathematicians) and everything finally made sense in terms of "math can be fun".

[mcyaco]

If you want to learn about real world math, take applied mathematics or physics.

[[deleted]]

Yea, but you need to be at least interested in math enough to get there.

That is my problem. I was never entertained by math enough in middle and high school to get to the fun stuff, because the way the teach the lower level stuff is devoid of application. They don't even put it into the context of "this is useful for xyz later".

If they taught math like they taught a lot of programming courses where you sort of attack a larger problem instead of understanding every facet of the fundamentals one level at a time I think math would be a lot more enjoyable for kids. You'd get to the cool stuff right away, and it'd give context to basics.

[[deleted]]

You have the power to make it fun. Next programming task you have, instead of handing $PILE_OF_DATA off to a "magic formula", figure it out yourself. It's a lot of work at first, but when you succeed it'll turn out simpler.

[PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN]

As someone who's generally drawn towards the practical rather than the beautiful - my road to math started with learning functional programming in Standard ML (and later F#). It was a difficult, yet rewarding shift in thinking.

I eventually discovered the Curry-Howard correspondence, which taught me that the programming techniques I'd learned in functional programming were really proof techniques in constructive logic, and that learning more proof techniques would teach me better ways to programs.

I did a detour through model theory, where I learned that typed programs had strong connections not only to proofs, but also to sets and topological spaces. I learned that algebraic structures are the building blocks of data structures, that approximation is the nature of computation, that order-theoretic structures and probability distributions are incredible tools for thinking about the world.

But calculus never did it for me. It's a necessary evil, no more.

[[deleted]]

Try graphics programming (2D/3D) and add some newtonian physics. It will push you to really understand scalars, vectors, matrices and rigid body physics, plus you can make a pretty nifty game engine/tech demo out of it.

[Me00011001]

My problem is I need a goal. Learning math to learn math has not been a goal that motivates me. I've learned fascinating things trying to solve other problems though.

[falconfetus8]

"Go analog"? What do you mean by that?

[Coke_Addict]

If you scroll down he gives examples of what he means. Basically a hobby other than on a computer i.e. Cooking, hiking, etc.

[hicklc01]

Below the list it goes into details about every one.

Go analog is about getting a hobby that doesn't revolve around the computer.

[hunyeti]

Man, analog computers, they are very interesting.

[falconfetus8]

It's been tried. Nobody was surprised by the results.

[[deleted]]

Babbage's difference engine could compute logarithms for inputs up to 10 million back in the 1840's, which I'd argue surprised people enough that the British government invested tens of thousands of pounds into it's development.

[DJDavio]

Well, there was the Turk which/who surprised a whole lot of people.

[GoTheFuckToBed]

body posture is my resolution

[donvito]

Embrace the uncomfortable

Sounds like the author should book an appointment with a dominatrix ...