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Comment on Ask HN: How to reduce sloppy mistakes?

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“The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.” ~ Piet Hein

In other news, I try to check my answers by deriving them two ways. If they agree, then I at least have a good defense :). If I'm working on something that can only be reached one way (like pulling data from a database), I assert boneheaded things that should be true about code + data structures. Sometimes it's superfluous, sometimes it catches mistakes.

If you don't work in a language that provides stack traces on crashes, add logging. You'll get a rudimentary stack trace of what was happening when everything went to hell, as well as have a small radius for where the crash occurs.

+1 for Piet Hein - I love his hypererllipse and super eggs, as well as Melior (based on hyperellipes).

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