+ I suggest books from Shane Parrish – The Great Mental Models, which are exactly about solving all or at least many problems by using several (80-90) mental models.
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
401–410 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#402I use these tips as a civil engineer (who knows how to program): - fully specify the problem before jumping in. Write what you know, the context and the unknowns. - Write the steps of the solution before jumping into a problem. - If writing a report, create the outline/heading structure before doing any other writing. - If you want to do something non-trivial, quickly search the web to see if someone has written a li…
Using "primo" and "buggering" like that: I think I spotted a Kiwi?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#403If you are doing too many parallel things and context switching become a PITA, have an org document for each of your tasks, write your thought, experiments with code and output, your decisions, keep a references list with links and other important things. Is also quite commnon to go back to some tasks to copy some code or pattern which you used, this will save you a lot of time. If you have ADHD, us it to keep focus,…
what is an org document? is it orgmode?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#404I use these tips as a civil engineer (who knows how to program): - fully specify the problem before jumping in. Write what you know, the context and the unknowns. - Write the steps of the solution before jumping into a problem. - If writing a report, create the outline/heading structure before doing any other writing. - If you want to do something non-trivial, quickly search the web to see if someone has written a li…
Using "primo" and "buggering" like that: I think I spotted a Kiwi?
Close! Aussie. I thought primo was a yankee word though.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#405* Dynamic Programming and the related concept of Memoization. * Recursion - most complex problems seem to have a recursive solution which you can actually implement in a language like Scheme or Haskell that does not limit stack size. * State machines. * Monte Carlo methods. * Unification - see SICP. * Hand-rolled parsers instead of regular expressions for debug-ability and readability.
Hi!
could you recommend some books to learn more about it?
And how did you apply those skills to your day-to-day job?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#406Reading literature helps with comprehension and this will extend to technical comprehension.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#407Regex has been very useful in my career. I would also add SQL as well. Everything else on your list is highly domain specific and mostly useless outside of their domains. > Calculus for solving all sorts of problems I even like calculus, but the number of times i have used it in the tech industry is precisely zero (not counting big-oh notation which can be defined in terms of limits,because obviously that is not what…
I've built high scale and high available systems. I've leveraged calculus exactly once - I used the built in non-negative derivative function in Grafana to understand the rates of change in some metrics. Restated: I leveraged my calculus understanding to understand what the graph would represent. A couple of years of study to understand a definition on sight lol
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#408A lot of those are pretty domain specific. Calculus is 10x only because it lets you get into fields where calculus is 10x. I have no idea what a general everyday coder would do with it. I could list tons of design patterns, like separate mutable and atomic readonly copies of the same data, but they wouldn't be universal, although patterns are wonderful. The closest thing to a real 10x I know is laziness and respect f…
I would say either a field requires calculus or not. If yes, then you need to know it, full stop. And if it doesn't you don't need it, full stop. It's not the case that if you need it, it makes you 10x more productive.
All architects needs architecture knowledge; you can't just say "knowing architecture makes architects 10x more productive".
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#409Attitude: a "can do" type person will be 10x compared to a hesitant doubter. (But still good to _also_ have a sceptic in the team for risk management.)