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The New Year is the perfect time to reflect. Reflect on what all you wanted to do in life and now no longer have the time or resources. Think about why you stopped doing all those things, or stopped trying at all. Or maybe just think about how far you've come since starting out as a newbie programmer. For me, the answer is about parity. I've been waiting for a parity answer to a problem for a long time. When I wrote my first program, I looked at it and thought: hey! this is actually really ... simple (I'm quite proud of myself). But what does it do? It can tell me how many people voted in the last election in California. And while that's not terribly useful, I was satisfied that I'd just written something that could do something. To be honest, after about an hour of programming, it goes completely out of my head and I get distracted by the awesomeness of gawk at all those objects and methods and classes and functions and functions with one parameter.... And then I ran into my first parity problem. You see, there were two states that voted the opposite way on the issue. Now, this is an easy problem to solve with set theory (and these days everyone uses set theory). Unfortunately, I never took set theory in college. All I knew was that if you had +1 and -1 it didn't matter what they were because you could just negate either side of the equation to get the other side. Plus, I had no idea what set theory was---I wasn't nearly geeky enough for that at the time. So I just made up a solution... actually, more like hacked one together with code that more closely resembled binary code instead of C code. Anyway, the result was a program that determines whether a vote split was a touchscreen malfunction or a bug in the code. And it worked great! I was ecstatic that my first program worked at all! I even had the gall to show off this program to my friends and they all saw how awesome it was and they asked for my source code. I proudly handed over my hacked-together source code, only to realize later that I didn't really have any source code. In fact, my program is now completely undocumented and unusable because you can't actually read the source code from the command line without writing it from scratch. Parity. My first attempt at parity. And I instantly knew I had it wrong after running the program. Just like you can always tell your first science project is crap, you feel when you make an error in parity, you know it the instant after executing the program. There are three tricks to parity. So about this time, my brother-in-law came over for dinner and asked me if I was still doing programming because he'd heard that writing numbers backwards would solve all your problems. And since he's a math professor at a local college, that sounded plausible to me. cfa1e77820
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