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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

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Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#141

Post by brimble »

hyperman1 wrote: post #8
jstx1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, as I wrote the calculus example I remembered this post about a medical researcher rediscovering integration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26384357 But it still feels more like unknown unknowns causing you to put in a lot of extra effort; I wouldn't classify these as productivity multipliers.

Back in the day, I saw someone ripping a CD to MP3s. He lazily named the first one 1.mp3, the seconde one 2.mp3 etc. After 9, he found he ran out of numbers. So the next one became ... A1.mp3 ! I always wondered, if he thought this trough a little bit further, he'd independently reinvent the arabic number systems.

Some interfaces will sort 10.mp3 so it's directly under 1.mp3, instead of under 9.mp3. This could be a totally sensible hack to evade that problem.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#142

Post by warrenm »

npsimons wrote: post #124
exdsq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this idea. You don’t need to be at the top 1% of a field to do cool innovate stuff, just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. Currently going down this rabbit hole with computational archaeology and having a whale of a time :)

> just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. "Jack of all trades, master of some ." That's been my goal for most of my life.

The 300+ year-old quote is "A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one"

Too often, we cut the first part off, and it sounds horrible!

The whole quote is highly insightful

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#143

Post by the_other »

kqr wrote: post #136
breckenedge wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about what you’d consider concrete examples of these inefficient solutions? The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.

One example from my employment history was a customer that kept asking for (and unfortunately getting) one special reporting feature after another in a data processing system. After a couple of years and several such reporting options someone asked, "Can't we just generate a spreadsheet and then your business analysts can do whatever reports they want from that?" and the customer responded, "You can do that?! That wo…

> That's literally time taken out of someone's life that they could have used to be with family or whatever they wanted instead of transcribing ridiculous reports.

Only if the product is run by one or two people who give each other that much time off. *Much* more likely, this work not commissioned by the client, leaving space for other work to be done.

This "automation will lead to more free time" is a utter utter myth, because those with the power to pay staff will just sell their staff's time+skills to someone else/some other problem.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#144

Post by lanstin »

hermannj314 wrote: post #74

Can someone elaborate on how they use reg ex as a productivity boost? Do you use it for text transformation? How do you use it exactly? Do you use it as code itself or as a tool to help you explore/write code? I am a huge fan of Macros, I 100% understand their role in text transformation, but what problem does regex solve? I spend so much time trying to remember the correct syntax, it only ever works for me when solv…

I use them when there is some data hidden away with an unresponsive team as far as fetting a good api to read the data, and i don't have a lot of time, so i will just toss together a quick scraper from however the data is exposed (could be html, could be csv, could be some terrible json or xml format). I will use regexp, but even more crap like line.contains() or .endswith or line.split("nc]")[1] or json.get('whatevs',[{}])[0].get('sub1', {}) etc.

Dreadful, but fast enough to let everyone know, there are 58 Java 7 taking prod load within an hour of the meeting where it was assumed there are zero Java 7 apps.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#146

Post by kqr »

the_other wrote: post #143
kqr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example from my employment history was a customer that kept asking for (and unfortunately getting) one special reporting feature after another in a data processing system. After a couple of years and several such reporting options someone asked, "Can't we just generate a spreadsheet and then your business analysts can do whatever reports they want from that?" and the customer responded, "You can do that?! That wo…

> That's literally time taken out of someone's life that they could have used to be with family or whatever they wanted instead of transcribing ridiculous reports. Only if the product is run by one or two people who give each other that much time off. *Much* more likely, this work not commissioned by the client, leaving space for other work to be done. This "automation will lead to more free time" is a utter utter my…

You're right, of course. In practise, the organisation would likely make up some other bullshit work to fill up the time, because God forbid people get to enjoy life!

(There's a tiny chance the void would be filled with useful work, and that's also a good outcome in my book.)

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#147

Post by lanstin »

guillem_lefait wrote: post #35
shiv86 wrote: post #16

Learning small amounts everyday. Accumulation of knowledge provides compounding return E.g. reading books, curated twitter, https://getsuperpower.com/ , https://www.blinkist.com/

Learning and not forgetting. Or learning more than you're forgetting.

There is nothing more useful than learning what to forget. At least I manage myself for rapidly reshaping my mind to fit the tasks of the year. Despite my postings here, the gcc options for gcc 2.72 don't help much compared to my curre t muscle memory for terraform.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#148

Post by amatic »

exdsq wrote: post #107
warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

I love this idea. You don’t need to be at the top 1% of a field to do cool innovate stuff, just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. Currently going down this rabbit hole with computational archaeology and having a whale of a time :)

Computational archeology sounds great, what do you do? Is there more demand?

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#149

Post by mw888 »

stncls wrote: post #93

If you deal with computationally hard problems, I think there's a whole toolbox of utilities with unbelievable performance, in which millions of PhD-holder-hours have been poured, but that get ignored more often than not. - SAT modeling languages & SAT solvers - same for SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) - Constraint programming - MIP (mixed-integer programming) and its special cases, like - TSP (traveling salesma…

I could certainly read more about this, it sounds fascinating. Will appreciate more of your knowledge or a thoughtful hyper link.
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