3 ms·
Ask HN: What would you say is the single most important idea across all of CS?
- mister_hn 6y agoThe ACID test
- juangacovas 6y agoBasic bit and byte knowledge, like some other "foundation" stuff. Basically, that everything in computers are numbers under the hood. A bunch of things I can just think where the bit and byte stuff has helped me: - Database structures: smaller is usually faster, and you save storage. If you know a column can only store numbers from 0 to 16, make it TINYINT UNSIGNED (one byte, 8 bits) instead of 4 bytes (32 bits). Think of x4 storage gain, think when you have hundred of thousands of rows... - Encoding stuff: learn some hexadecimal to be able to scratch your head around the bytes of anything instead of being blind about it. - For critical or limited storage (or making smaller packets/transfers), you can use "bit masks". Instead of using 8 bytes for 8 flags, you can use just one byte (8 bits) and just "flag" each bit of it. Etc.
- elviejo 6y agoAbstraction: extract the essential for this problem in this situation and make it so easily to understand for someone with domain knowledge. Composition: the output of a function/ program / server should be digestible by another function / program / server that doesn't know anything about the first one.
- snow_mac 6y agoDry. Don’t repeat yourself