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Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

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Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#21

Post by bitsai »

1. When I grew up in Taiwan, I was an avid reader of a certain PC gaming magazine. In addition to the usual strategies and walk-throughs, every issue also contained hex editing guides for various popular games. I could follow the instructions well enough, but I didn't understand hexadecimal numbers, so it was just monkey-see-monkey-do. Then one day, while flipping through computer books at an underground store, I "got" hex numbers, and my mind was blown. A whole new game hacking vista opened up in my mind's eye.

2. While learning Clojure, I tried my hand at implementing the Lisp interpreter described in PG's "The Roots of Lisp" paper. There were many "aha!" moments along the way, but the biggest one came when I understood how I could define the "eval" function inside my interpreter, which allowed me to run a Lisp interpreter inside my Lisp interpreter (which was running in Clojure, which was running on the JVM, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#22

Post by aridiculous »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #15
Dylanlacey wrote: post #9

When I realized that I hadn't learned languages, I'd learned techniques, and I could just change languages given a bit of time to bootstrap and some common starting points. Basically, paradigms were my Aha. Kinda lame, but apparently there are a lot of developers who haven't figured them out yet.

Not lame at all, the ability to think in and see abstractions is one of the most significant realizations in any/every area of life, regardless what field it occurs in. My biggest Aha moment was when I realized that abstract art uses similar thought processes as computer science and software engineering to produce abstract representations of some aspect of reality. The specifics and logical rigor differ, but the gene…

I agree. I thought I was raving genius when I unlocked the concept of abstraction into different fields. It's something that's very difficult to explain to people who haven't done it yet. I don't mean to be condescending in tone; 2 years ago, I would've had no clue what I'm currently talking about.

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#24

Post by aridiculous »

1) When I discovered there was a general order to learning web development. Beforehand, learning web programming was a giant mess of half-complete youtube videos and inaccurate articles.

2) Nested loops. Awesome.

3) Finally getting it through my thick skull that using fewer different moving parts in hacking, design, learning, etc is a way to actually get things done that also impress people. Before, I dove in and tried to use all kinds of variation, inventions, hacks. Now I use those things as accents, not the foundation of anything I do.

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#25

Post by shaunxcode »

Understanding db normalization - subsequently realizing normalization should also apply to code.

Attempting to implement conways game of life and accidentally creating mesmerizing mandalas made of ascii characters!

"getting" lisp, writing a lisp, Figuring out how to implement TCO, macro expansion, quasiquote etc. then doing it all over again!

Realizing that almost all programming is a form of macro expansion/parsing/compiling. (taking the plunge from generating html/sql/css to generating an entire language is seriously not such a huge leap when you think about it)

Picking up and reading the smalltalk-80 reference manual, lisp 1.5 manual, and SICP cover to cover. Wishing I was 30 years younger and then realizing I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to just absorb all of the work that has come before me and build upon it.

APL - finally the magic of the characters I had only accidentally typed in dos when pressing alt + num keys were mine to wield! (seriously though I really dig APL and its children) The book that finally made it click for me was "APL With a Mathematical Accent" - highly recommended.

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#26

Post by hasenj »

I wrote my own deployment scripts to deploy django-based projects. Before that, I used to deploy manually; it was a long, frustrating process that was error prone.

The "aha" moment being that it's just a bunch of scripts to automate mundane tasks, "how didn't I think of that before?". Everything really is just that. All the tools we use are just programs that automate things we'd have to do manually otherwise.

This is kinda embarrassing to admit as a programmer, but in my windows days, it never occurred to me that I could just write scripts to automate mundane tasks. It seemed like everything had to come from "real" companies or "real" projects. If no company made it, or no open-source project exists for it, then you're stuck doing it manually.

I also now realize that this is the mindset of the average company that has no clue what it's doing. They also think if a tool doesn't have a GUI, it doesn't exist. 'git' is not a real system because it's all from the command line.

Incidentally, I had that aha moment around the time when I was transitioning from GUI tools to command line tools.

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#27

Post by yousuffauzan »

Apart from every page in Cormen's Algo book (which I will ignore because of the share number of those), my biggest AHA moment was about 3 years back when I realized that I can say "return a,b,c" to return 3 variables in python. Till then I had been only using C++ and could not fathom that a programming language can be painless.

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#29

Post by mahmud »

27182818284 wrote: post #7

A big "Aha" moment for me was that I could just grep the big scary tar.gz source code of a project. (And that the big scary tar.gz wasn't that scary) Before that moment, I had to post a question to the project's forum or submit a bug report if I had a problem with a project. Then one day, all of a sudden, I realized I could just go ahead and grep the source myself and that the source wasn't scary. I realized that not…

Ummmm, any introductory book on Emacs or Vi would have a chapter on cross-referencing tools, specially etags/ctags.

Do people really not know how to "dive into" code bases?

Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?

#30

Post by khafra »

mahmud wrote: post #29
27182818284 wrote: post #7

A big "Aha" moment for me was that I could just grep the big scary tar.gz source code of a project. (And that the big scary tar.gz wasn't that scary) Before that moment, I had to post a question to the project's forum or submit a bug report if I had a problem with a project. Then one day, all of a sudden, I realized I could just go ahead and grep the source myself and that the source wasn't scary. I realized that not…

Ummmm, any introductory book on Emacs or Vi would have a chapter on cross-referencing tools, specially etags/ctags. Do people really not know how to "dive into" code bases?

I haven't had e's "aha" moment yet; but thanks for the reference in a direction to look that will improve that moment if and when I have it.
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