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Becoming Foolish

hmemcpy.com

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Becoming Foolish

#11

Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

I have seen imperative / OOP Python written in the style of Java. It's not great.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#12

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes. One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

I thought it was a good read and gave me a little motivation to learn Haskell. I upvoted... is that a problem?

Re: Becoming Foolish

#13

Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

Not everything can be expressed in C#, and it usually requires much more boilerplate. Try writing a method which abstracts over a generic type, such as List and Queue, for example.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#14

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes. One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

There's a HN clone that ranks stories higher if they have less comments. More comments can just mean more controversial.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#15
Nice article.

One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore.

Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge.

I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremental and in small dozes. This means that I end up rejecting solutions that invalidate my prior knowledge, because those require a leap of faith and resources that I don't have.

Maybe this is what growing old feels like — experience and responsibilities ends up getting in the way of learning.

I do feel the need to become foolish again.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#16

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes. One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

(Genuine Question) Is an article only considered good if it generates a large discussion? What about if people read it, found it thought provoking, but didn't have anything to add, to discuss?

I would prefer this over the "me too!" or "here is my irrelevant/off topic opinion" comments we get all the time. Not everything has to generate 100 comments of debate.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#17

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes. One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

Given that I downvoted you and your comment did not turn gray, I have to assume that you've been up-voted by other people.

Shooting down a blog article written by somebody from his heart, while upvoting yellow journalism — that's a common phenomenon here on HN — and I should know because this is my 9th year as an HN visitor and contributor.

So such mean comments being upvoted, that doesn't look good, but on the other hand I can't say that I'm surprised. But to answer your particular comment ...

HN actually does a pretty good job at detecting voting rings, along with upvotes triggered by mailing / social list. HN's detection is so aggressive in fact that it has many false positives, making it easy to bury stories you don't like ;-)

And to blog authors out there — please write more, as I'm interested in genuine feelings and opinions, not by PR pieces written by corrupt media outlets.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#18

Nice article. One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore. Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge. I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremen…

Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#19

Nice article. One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore. Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge. I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremen…

On this note, I highly recommend Edward Kmett's talk -- Stop treading water: Learning to learn

Talk slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin...

This is the only link I can find to the video, which unfortunately seems inaccessible now: https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en

EDIT: I found this -- https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by...

It would be great if someone could link to the video.

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