Being able to walk into a machine shop and make a part, right then and there.
Where can one learn such skills?
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
321–330 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#322All those little bits of knowledge are nice tools and patterns, they're definitely good to have. And if you have curiosity, you will naturally keep learning dozens of those over time. But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere. The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but…
The OP is not about 10x more productive, it is about 10x productivity boosts. Using regexes can easily be 10x faster than manual editing, and property-based tests can easily be written 10x faster than a more or less equivalent battery of tests.
I agree with you :)
I actually like those little patterns a lot, there are problems where you might absolutely take 10x longer because you didn't know the algorithm or the right machine learning concept.
The OP talks about becoming "significantly more productive when solving a large class of problems", and where my interpretation differs is what you mean by large class of problem.
What's large for you is really going to be relative and will vary based on your personal experience, so I can't say you're wrong. I know I speak at least for myself I when I say that in my day to day, most of what I do is not leetcode-type problems, so despite knowing many algorithms I don't think I would be 10x slower if I didn't know them.
If your interpretation of OP is that these boosts will on average give you 10x more productivity, that's the only place where I really disagree.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#323I don't think parser combinators or parser generators should be included in a list of productivity multipliers, personally.
Are you implying that they are more work in the end than manually coding a parser? Has that been your experience?
Yes in my experience it's absolutely easiest just to write your own from scratch.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#324Never parse a data file with regex or string functions. Always spend the small extra time to at least write a state machine.
Could you elaborate on how this might be done?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for personal investing I've used calculus amidst some basic modeling to estimate probability of getting certain outcomes under certain assumptions and compute an expected value. This is just to sanity-check my thinking, or to see what the market's thinking. To understand basic financial concepts, like the present value of an annuity, or implied volatility, requires calculus. In boring software, simple questions…
I took calculus in high school and did really well in it - but I honestly can’t say whether I’ve used it or not as an adult, because all of my mathematical knowledge kind of runs together in my head. I realize it’s a big ask, but is there any way you’d be willing to put together an example of when and how you’ve used calculus for a specific purpose where it really shines?
Work-related, I built a backend of a database engine on top of a transactional distributed key-value store. When building a secondary index, suppose you traverse the primary index in a series of transactions, reading a batch of key/values and updating the secondary index. With the scheme that was used to build the index, this has the chance of conflicting with an incoming write, which will also try to update the secondary index. You'll have some kind of backoff/retry strategy. What is the optimal batch size? Treating it as a clean calculus problem with static, homogeneous workloads, you could model the probability of getting a conflict, the performance of a given batch size, set the derivative to zero and find the maximum. (In reality instead of modeling the probability, you can measure it.)
In another instance, I got a summer job working at a company that made an optics-related product, and that involved a bunch of numerical integration, Fourier transforms, some optimization problems in stuff like calibrating equipment. So naturally, there was calculus.
Fun-related, recently, I noticed that a long-term call option I was holding seemed surprisingly expensive compared to just buying the stock on margin, given current and expected future interest rates, and comparing against the option's theta and delta values. Then I realized I was assuming the stock only goes up, ignoring short-term vs. long term taxes, etc. To get a general sense of how an alternative strategy of just buying the stock and adjusting position sizes at a few price points might work out, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I considered this problem: on average, how many times will a Wiener process W(t) completely cross the small interval [a,a+h] in the time interval 0Edit: I'll add, that's also taking for granted a lot of stuff with infinite series in comp sci that is also part of calculus. Like, if you want to pick a random number from 1 to 5, you know you can pick from 1-8 and retry if it's too large, and with calculus you know it will average a finite number of tries (8/5, specifically) because the infinite series passes the ratio test.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will give you a fairly specific answer that comes from my history of going to therapy for anxiety and depression. Whenever I find myself in an anxious or uncomfortable situation, the thing that I need to remind myself is that things are going to turn out okay for me, whatever happens. I do this by working my way up a version of Mazlowe's hierarchy: 1. Am I physically safe? Can I breathe? Can I move my body? 2. Do I…
During stressful times, I’d have agoraphobic attacks in the car. They were pretty terrifying. I’d open all the car windows and blast the radio. But you know what worked much better? Solving math problems in my head.
I like this one too!
A big part of learning to deal with anxiety is understanding that an anxiety attack is rooted in a chemical, physiological response that you can't control; sometimes what you need to do is just ride it out, and let your body get back to normal.
Math problems, loud music, singing songs -- great ways to "get out of your brain's way" as my therapist used to put it.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable; I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?
I will give you a fairly specific answer that comes from my history of going to therapy for anxiety and depression. Whenever I find myself in an anxious or uncomfortable situation, the thing that I need to remind myself is that things are going to turn out okay for me, whatever happens. I do this by working my way up a version of Mazlowe's hierarchy: 1. Am I physically safe? Can I breathe? Can I move my body? 2. Do I…
This is great, and it made me realize I had started doing something similar recently: when I become anxious about something, say money, I ask myself: are my kids healthy and safe? The answer, so far, has always been yes, and that calms me down immediately.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#328Never parse a data file with regex or string functions. Always spend the small extra time to at least write a state machine.
Why? Aren’t all regular expressions equivalent to some finite state machine?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will give you a fairly specific answer that comes from my history of going to therapy for anxiety and depression. Whenever I find myself in an anxious or uncomfortable situation, the thing that I need to remind myself is that things are going to turn out okay for me, whatever happens. I do this by working my way up a version of Mazlowe's hierarchy: 1. Am I physically safe? Can I breathe? Can I move my body? 2. Do I…
This is great, and it made me realize I had started doing something similar recently: when I become anxious about something, say money, I ask myself: are my kids healthy and safe? The answer, so far, has always been yes, and that calms me down immediately.
That's awesome! Glad to help you put a concrete framing to it. The more intentional you make it, the more effective it is, I think.
There's a reason people keep pictures of their family at their desks; it's not just for decoration :D
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#330All those little bits of knowledge are nice tools and patterns, they're definitely good to have. And if you have curiosity, you will naturally keep learning dozens of those over time. But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere. The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but…
You may wish to read Gould's Mismeasure of Man, and about thw fallacy of reification. And brain plasticity, and the characteristics of high performing groups or institutions. Changing the way your group works together is going to have a more profound difference on the outcomes than focusing on individual performance.
I think you're right that focusing on group effects will be more productive, but I probably reach the same conclusion for different reasons :)
I intuitively don't like the idea of the 10x programmer, my core argument is actually that you should not try to become a 10x programmer, and that there's no order of magnitude productivity you can gain in a vacuum, ignoring group dynamics. So you shouldn't focus on individual performance too much! There's not much you can do about it, anyways
Managing groups of people is hard, and there's often big inefficiencies that are going to be obvious to some people (engineers love to complain about management!) but that have a true multiplier effect when fixed. Because for the time invested, you have an effect on the whole team. That's a true multiplier.
I don't know what specifically you think I should learn about the fallacy of reification, but please feel free to elaborate.