Someone on quora asked:
In the long run, these will tend to be the same. If people perceive you as confident, it tends to create a positive feedback loop that soon enough you will be confident
Answers I’ve written on Quora.
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May 2016
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Someone on quora asked:
Why do my thoughts get all jumbled up? How do I organize them?
Write. Keep a journal or write a blog. As long as you write regularly.
Writing lets your sort out your thoughts and clarify them and lets you learn how they should be organized.
Don’t worry that other people might not like what you write, you can write for yourself (at least at first). Writing for yourself is a lot like meditation, except that the physical act of typing out or manually writing out your thoughts can make it more satisfying and give a better sense of permanence.
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Someone on quora asked:
Adverbs don’t work the same way in Tagalog as they do in English. Most adverbs will be a phrase combining an adjective with something else, with the exact form depending on context, usually “nang”.
For example, “deeply”’s root adjective is “deep”, which is “malalim” in Tagalog.
“He was stabbed deeply by a knife” -> “Sinaksak sya nang malalim gamit ang kutsilyo”
“I loved her deeply” -> Minahal ko sya nang malalim.
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Someone on quora asked:
What is a PHP function that can be used to store information about a user?
On the client-side, you need to use cookies.
You can set a cookie using setcookie: PHP setcookie() Function (The link also describes how to get the cookie values)
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Someone on quora asked:
What do you understand by education to build a better future for all?
Sounds like a worthwhile and lofty goal. It means educating people to allow them to both build a better future for themselves and also to inspire them to help other people and do things for the betterment of all
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Someone on quora asked:
It will be more difficult. It’s not really that you need specific types of math knowledge, but you need to have a certain problem-solving mindset.
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Someone on quora asked:
Hacking at its most simple consists of knowing what vulnerabilities to test for in an application deployment.
Vulnerabilities can happen at multiple levels, not just at the application level. If you are already confident that your own account is secure from most forms of hacking (not just SQL injection, but also including brute force attacks, username/password enumeration, cross-site scripting, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc), then the next step is making sure your deployment is secure. Check for out of of date web server/container versions, known vulnerabilities in the deployed versions, exposed ports, exposed admin urls, that kind of thing.
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Someone on quora asked:
Sixteen years old is way too young to be full of regrets. Actually any age is way too young to be full of regrets :p You have your whole life ahead of you. Look to the future and not to the very short past
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Someone on quora asked:
How can I determine if I’m smart enough to do Computer Science?
It is not necessarily generally smartness that’s required for computer science, more of you have to be able to think in a certain kind of way. If you’ve done well in high school math, that’s a pretty good indication. Preferably multiple different kinds of math.
Additionally, learning programming online is incredibly easy, so you could just take some quick free online lessons right now to try things out how programming feels like so you could have an idea.
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Someone on quora asked:
What exactly do you mean by taking advantage of Excel’s features?
There is an Apache library called POI that allows Java programs to read and write office files including Excel, maybe that can help
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Someone on quora asked:
This will largely depend on the implementation of the servlet container. It will be called whenever the servlet container deallocates the servlet instance. The servlet spec does not specify when this should happen. The servlet instance may be active for the entire duration that the servlet container is up, or it may deallocate instances earlier for performance purposes
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Someone on quora asked:
No.
I realize the answer is trite, but really, no other words should be necessary.
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Someone on quora asked:
If people are really being extorted by corrupt personnel, that’s a problem of the government.
If people are being ignorant and really bringing along ammunition for whatever reason, that’s not a problem of the government (this was I believe the context of that quote)
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Someone on quora asked:
If you feel that you are working on a team where everyone else in the room is smarter than you, then you are very lucky! You have a unique opportunity: you can learn from everyone else!
There is a saying “If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.” This is because if you are the smartest person in the room, not only will you be doing all the work, but you will not be growing as much as you could if you were working with people who are smarter than you.
So take advantage of this opportunity to learn from your coworkers and better yourself.
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Someone on quora asked:
I think it’s a mistake that will unnecessarily tie down future Batman writers. It might even be seen as a sign that they have creatively run out of ideas for the Joker as a character.
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Someone on quora asked:
Which are the most important 3 skills that smart people should develop (like programing)?
It’s not really about specific skills like programming, but more towards high-level skills that can be applied to a broad number of areas:
- Critical thinking. This means being able to analyze critically both your own opinions and those of others, being able to identify and compensate for biases, and being able to make rational decisions.
- Communication. This means being able to express your ideas well and knowing how to sell your ideas to other people. It also includes understanding other people and their perspectives and their messages
- Collaboration. This means working well with others, knowing when to be aggressive in pushing your opinion and when to be diplomatic and form a consensus. Working well with others involves a lot of #1 and #2 as well. You need critical thinking to properly assess the way forward for a team, and there needs to be good, constant communication within a team to make sure everything stays on track.
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Someone on quora asked:
When developing new features, make sure to write to clean, maintainable code that future maintainers won’t have a problem with. If you can write unit tests, do so.
When maintaining old features, it’s kind of like being a doctor: first, do no harm. Perform the minimum changes necessary to implement your changes to minimize the chance of breaking existing behavior. But still try to avoid writing terrible code. It helps if the existing feature has unit tests
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Someone on quora asked:
How do people scoring high on IQ tests think to solve problems?
Often it will be a matter of differences in experiences and perspectives. Typically, people scoring high on IQ tests are more used to thinking out of the box or approaching problems from different perspectives, enabling them to see more possible solutions than people with a narrower focus. Also, practice matters. If you are more used to solving different kinds of problems, you will have more experience to draw on when approaching a new kind of problem, and problems that are similar to ones you have encountered before will be much easier.
Apr 2016
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Someone on quora asked:
When I’m on the Internet, time flies by. How can I stop that?
Be cognizant of your time. Choose how much time you want, set an alarm (your smartphone probably has one, you can’t uninstall it), then (this is the most important thing): ACTUALLY STOP WHEN THE ALARM FIRES
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Someone on quora asked:
What were the reasons for the Filipino revolt against the Spaniards?
Abuses by the Friars and other Spaniards. Filipinos not being treated equally as citizens of Spain. These are well-documented
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Someone on quora asked:
Why are you using Quora? What you expect in life from its use?
- I like answering questions and helping people
- It helps me practice writing prose and thinking out of the box
- I learn a lot of stuff too
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Someone on quora asked:
It means that optimism greatly improves your odds of success. It doesn’t mean you’ll never fail, but optimism helps you power through the failures until you get to the successes
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Someone on quora asked:
What are effective psychological methods to cope with overwhelm?
Let’s say you are faced with a decision where there are multiple viable choices such that you are unable to immediately make an easy decision. The fact that you are unable to make an easy decision means the choices are more or less the same and the differences are too small to matter or you don’t have enough available information to differentiate them.
If you don’t have to make a decision quickly, but the decision is unimportant, just pick one at random and go with it.
If you don’t have to make a decision quickly, but the decision is important, try to gather further information to help guide your choice. Eventually either the choice will become clear or it simplifies into the case below.
If you DO have to make a decision quickly, pick one at random and go with it.
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Someone on quora asked:
- People who are mean for no reason
- People who are intellectually dishonest
- Things that are slightly unaligned
- People who think only of themselves
- Things that are inefficient
- Poor UI decisions
- Bad grammar/spelling
- Poor logical thinking
- Unnecessary formalities
- Too much red tape
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Someone on quora asked:
Look everywhere. Try everything.
Life is varied and has a wider scope than you could possibly imagine. Step outside your comfort zone. Visit new places. Sign up for strange classes. Go down roads you don’t normally follow. Walk into new stores you’ve never visited. Eat at new restaurants with cuisine you’ve never tried before.
Talk to new people. Ask them about that cool thing they just did. Ask them what they do for a living. Ask them what interesting thing happened to them last week. Ask them how they met their SO. Ask them who was the coolest person they knew. Try to meet that person too.
Learn new skills. Develop new hobbies. Watch new tv shows. Read more books.
Live, live, live.
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Someone on quora asked:
Why is there so much support for Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines?
He appeals to a set of primal instincts - he does things people wish they could do but they can’t because of social norms and whatnot. He feeds on people’s fear, anger and discontent. They cheer him on because he does what they cannot - and it lets the supporters feel the euphoria of lashing out at a system that they feel has failed them, without actually doing it themselves.
Jessica Zafra has a great article on this: http://interaksyon.com/article/126627/jessica-zafra--of-course-you-love-duterte--he-is-your-id
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Someone on quora asked:
Read to him often and encourage him to read by buying him books appropriate to his age. Instill a love of reading into him.
Teach him to be kind, and to share, and to help people.
Give him some small, minor chores like picking up his own clothes. Teach him to be responsible for his own messes by asking him to help clean up.
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Someone on quora asked:
Is it to late for a 33 years old man become a software engineer?
It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.
That being said, it will be a bit more difficult to get into the industry the traditional way (companies are not likely to hire you). You will more likely be able to find work on a freelance basis.
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Someone on quora asked:
There are many reasons, but the most common is probably pride. They don’t want to admit that maybe they were wrong or at least partially responsible for any rift. This pride may manifest in making up reasons not to make amends (“I don’t need him, etc”)
That being said, there are valid reasons for letting go of a friendship and not bothering to make amends. One is if a friendship is not good/healthy for you, for example if the friend is a bad influence, or he is always hurting you and taking advantage of you. In such cases, not making amends and just letting go of the friendship is understandable
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Someone on quora asked:
Confidence. Communication. Presentation. Connections.
As an engineer I tend to value function over form, but though I hate to admit it, we live in a society where many times form matters, which means putting your best foot forward and maybe trying to appear more presentable and confident than you usually are.
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Someone on quora asked:
The answer to that depends entirely on you - do you think the point of life is just to eat, go to bars and have fun? Do you think there’s more to life than that?
Do what you want and enjoy life, but maybe try not to burn up or use up all your resources, money, etc. People can change and mellow with age, and maybe at a later date your priorities will change and you will wish you had saved just a bit more money.
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Someone on quora asked:
Why do things that start out good always go bad and things that start out bad often turn good?
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
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Someone on quora asked:
How many searches does it take on average to find a row when not indexed in MySQL database?
When there is no index in use, you are essentially performing a sequential search (iterating through each row and testing it to see if it matches your criteria), which means the search performs at O(n). If you limit your results to the first hit (using TOP 1 as pointed out by Scott Berry), the average number of checks is n/2 where n is the total size of the sample set. If there is no limit, the average number of checks is n (since you check all rows)
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Someone on quora asked:
- Practice
- Tell your friends what you’re trying to do and ask them to keep you honest
- Make it more difficult to do the thing you’re trying to avoid doing impulsively (associate a cost with the action)
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Someone on quora asked:
What are those soft or hard skills a junior venture capitalist should have? Does coding skill count?
I don’t think coding skill is strictly necessary. However, it would be a good idea to have a decent understanding of how the software development process works.
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Someone on quora asked:
You can take certification courses online. I know from first-hand experience that Java certification exams are taken online. Many employers look favorably upon applicants that have certifications. However, they are usually expensive to take.
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Someone on quora asked:
Well, you probably know the famous quote:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawisnki
That being said, regular expressions can be a good approach for particular problems. Sifting through JSON however, does not sound like one of them. Why not? JSON is already a structured format that has elements you can easily iterate through using normal programming constructs. I’m assuming you mean using regular expressions to search through JSON data by treating the entire JSON object as a string. If instead you’re using regex matching on individual JSON elements, that’s probably fine.
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Someone on quora asked:
If you love it that’s great. It’s a rare gift to be able to love something that also happens to be a skill that can net you a high-paying job/career. The thing about software development is that there is actually a wide scope within the field that makes your concerns moot.
Do you want more free time? There are jobs that offer flexible hours, working from home, etc, or you could just go freelance and control your own hours.
Want to avoid working for a company that feels like a prison? While there are companies that can be like that, there are also many companies that are better. And good programmers are always in high demand, so as long as you have sufficient competence and skill, you should be able to find better working conditions.
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Someone on quora asked:
It’s usually good to have some level of self-awareness and mindfulness about your situation, where you are in life, where you’re going, where you want to go, what steps you have to do, etc. Just don’t let yourself get too lost in self-analysis or overthinking that you fail to take action
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Someone on quora asked:
There are people who know as much as they seem, and there are people who don’t. There are people who know the tricks to look clever, but they can easily be exposed as fakers if you’re willing to dig a little deeper (which usually means only people who are genuinely clever/knowledgable can call them out!)
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Someone on quora asked:
Is it true that the best way to learn to program is to jump into a project?
I’d like to say yes because that’s how it is for me, but the truth is it depends largely on the person trying to learn. Different people learn in different ways, some learn better if they do a lot of reading ahead of time, while others will find it easier to just jump in and try stuff and poke around. Try different approaches and figure out what works best for you
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Someone on quora asked:
Don’t waste your time worrying about people who aren’t helping you grow.
Develop an attitude towards learning and discovering new things.
Be kind and understanding to people, even assholes.
Every so often, walk down an unfamiliar road.
Tell your family and friends how much you appreciate them.
Exercise at least a little bit every day.
Try to improve some aspect of your life by 1% every day.
Thank people who help you and help others in return.
Don’t be seduced by pretty appearances or the lure of easy money.
Don’t insist on helping people who don’t want to be helped.
Don’t compromise yourself for the sake of other people.
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Someone on quora asked:
It can be a little bit of both, depending on how you use it and how you view life. Don’t let being smart make you full of yourself. As long as you approach life with an attitude of there being much more to learn and discover, it’s hard to go wrong no matter how smart you are.
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Someone on quora asked:
Not necessarily. Programmers get better with practice, good experience, and an attitude for learning.
The reason young talent is prized over old talent is that older talent tends to expect a lot more pay, and nonprogrammers typically don’t understand how much valuable a good, experienced programmer is.
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Someone on quora asked:
Depends on the crowd. Sometimes you’ll feel out of place. You have to resist the urge to correct people all the time (many people don’t like it). You have to avoid sounding like a smartass. You have to know when it is appropriate to use your smarts.
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Someone on quora asked:
Could technology develop infinitely faster using a simulation?
It would depend on the problems you are trying to solve. If they can be solved by brute-forcing all the possibilities within a given scope, then yes computer programs can help solve them. Typically however, any problem that would be solvable by this method already has been solved.
Also, it will only work for problems that can be perfectly simulated. For most physical experiments this is not feasible; since the computer program can only simulate what humans know well enough to be able to input that data into a computer. Quantum mechanics tells us that there will always be uncertainty at the quantum level so perfect simulations are not possible. In theory, simulations might be able to help narrow the scope of a problem though.
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Someone on quora asked:
How do you know what to do with your life if you don’t know what you want in life?
A vast majority of people in the world don’t really know what to do in life or what they want in life. They/we all just kind of stumble along to where life takes us. Many people take up a degree in college only because they believe that course will lead them to a good job, so they can get promoted to a high position, get married, raise a family, etc. Most people are on this “default path” that society provides instead of figuring out what they really want to do or where their passions lie. Many people live their entire lives not finding a passion or what they want in life.
So don’t worry too much if you are finding it difficult to find out what you want in life, because most people are in that state. The difference between you and other people is you are aware of it, that you want more in life but are not yet sure what that something is.
Explore life. Say yes to more random encounters. Take up new opportunities when they appear. Increase the scope of your activities. Do all these things to increase the odds that you will be able to find and figure out what you want in life.
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Someone on quora asked:
How can you read and study a large software project source code?
Attacking a large, existing codebase that you are unfamiliar with can be a daunting endeavor. Don’t expect that you will be able to easily navigate the codebase quickly after just a few days of studying it. Familiarity will come with experience.
Some things that can help:
- Don’t try to understand everything all at once. Figure out what is interesting to you and focus your efforts there
- Follow the path of data. Easiest way to see how the program works. For example, if I were studying a web application that processes request parameters to generate a search result, I would trace how the program captures the parameters from the requests object, formulates it into a search query, sends it to the database, receives the results, formats the results, then sends it back to the browser. Looking at the typical paths through which data traverses the system can give you a good overview of where everything is.
- Try to fix a bug or implement some sort of change. If it’s an open source project, this is probably the best way to familiarize yourself with the codebase and get more involved at the same time. I’d suggest starting with minor UI bugs, those tend to be easiest to figure out since a text search of the source will often point you to where the correction needs to be made. For example, if the bug is that a particular error message is being shown under the wrong conditions, you can use a text search to find where the error message is declared, then trace all the code points that generate that message, figure out which one you need to update (probably by trial and error) and fix accordingly
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Someone on quora asked:
Can I become an software engineer without CS bachelor’s degree? I’m very interest in AI and VR now.
Yes. I’ve worked more than a decade as a software engineer, my degree is in Electronics and Communications Engineering. I did take some programming classes as part of my course though.
Just be aware: The further your background is from computer science, the more work and learning you will have to put in.