The Lesson to Unlearn • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#61

Post by bonoboTP » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

daly wrote: post #51

I took a class from John White at UCONN. He gave us a couple dozen CS papers at the start of the year. Every class had 3 paper presentations, 20 minutes each. A random student was picked for each presentation. So you had to read and understand each of the upcoming 3 papers because there was a random chance you would have to present one of the three. The result is that you eventually read all of the papers well enough…

But the person who presented the very first paper won't have to care about the rest of the semester right? Or can you get randomly picked multiple times?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#62

Post by pojzon » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

volume wrote: post #39

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

"The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable" For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.

"Self-judgement" as an impostor syndrome ?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#63

Post by xorcist » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #8

Not sure I agree with this. The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests. It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job. It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding. The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone…

That is only true if your life ambition is securing a job with that successful tech company.

If your ambition is being successful on your own, as an academic, an entrepreneur or as an artist, there are no standardized tests to beat.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#64

Post by anonytrary » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #26

This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing. > And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades. > When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones,…

> This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing.

I love reading his tweets! They're all so down to earth and illuminating. That said, I'm not a fan of his blog writing as much. I find it full of overly-sparse nuggets of wisdom. It needs to be more concise, to the point, with fewer clever metaphors. This article could've been compressed 70% and still have been human readable.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#65

Post by jimbob45 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

daly wrote: post #51

I took a class from John White at UCONN. He gave us a couple dozen CS papers at the start of the year. Every class had 3 paper presentations, 20 minutes each. A random student was picked for each presentation. So you had to read and understand each of the upcoming 3 papers because there was a random chance you would have to present one of the three. The result is that you eventually read all of the papers well enough…

I had a high school professor do a somewhat abridged version of that for our final. It was impossible to spend an adequate amount of time on all three so you really had to focus on two and hope you got lucky.

Easily the most stressful final I've ever taken.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#66

Post by daly » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

I got into "computer science" before there was a CS degree. Our CS classes were taught in the math dept (fortran), business dept (cobol), or engineering (assembler).

The profs were literally 1 chapter ahead of the students.

I, however, was in love with the subject. I was the "student advisor" in our "machine room". We had 5 teletypes connected to a remote mainframe at Rutgers. I lived and breathed CS.

I wrote tests for the profs (even thought I was also in the class) and I answered questions for students about the tests when they came for computer help.

Pick a subject you love so deeply that you're always at the leading edge (which essentially means a new subject the school wants to teach). For example, CMU introduced an AI curiculum. Learn how to do NNs, DNNs, GANs, etc. Read the latest papers. Write working code. Chat with the profs. Hang around the dept.

Proof systems are a hot topic. Learn LEAN, COQ, AGDA. Learn to write proofs by machine. Read the papers. Get ahead of the curve. It is hard to "fail" a student who knows a lot more than you, especially when they help craft the tests.

Intel stuck an FPGA inside its CPU. Learn Verilog and learn to hack new CPU instructions (e.g. read Gustufson's book "The End of Error" that introduces a new kind of floating point arithmetic). Write code that outperforms BLAS code.

Learn BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) so you can do impossible things about the kernel in User mode. Make your networking class look like it is stone-age.

I could go on but you either "get it" or you don't.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#67

Post by daly » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #61

daly wrote: post #51

I took a class from John White at UCONN. He gave us a couple dozen CS papers at the start of the year. Every class had 3 paper presentations, 20 minutes each. A random student was picked for each presentation. So you had to read and understand each of the upcoming 3 papers because there was a random chance you would have to present one of the three. The result is that you eventually read all of the papers well enough…

But the person who presented the very first paper won't have to care about the rest of the semester right? Or can you get randomly picked multiple times?

There were only 10 students allowed in the class. So you got picked about every 3rd class (sometimes more than once per class).

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#68

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

It gets worse:

In my view schools/universities are institutions for mass indoctrination. Noam Chomsky has said something along similar lines. I borrowed the words from him.

A bunch of my other observations:

https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world...

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#69

Post by girvo » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #49

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

> but as long as he is in school, we have to take care that his interest doesn’t go south. [...] During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure. That does not sound like exercises themselves would be bad or that he would cease to be interested in learning overall. It more sounds like…

My parents and teachers gave up on attempting to assign me homework and make me do it. I despised homework. Interesting assignments were great! But day to day homework? Never did it, which isn’t a good thing (and this isn’t me attempting to brag).

The only reason they stopped is I was getting top marks in every subject anyway, and the only reason I had that was I had a tutor who pushed me so far beyond high school level that I was finally interested in the topics again.

The neat part was: to learn those topics, she gave me a crash course of most of the year 11 and year 12 curriculum in 3 or 4 months or so, because I needed the base knowledge to learn the cool stuff

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#70

Post by daly » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

daly wrote: post #66

I got into "computer science" before there was a CS degree. Our CS classes were taught in the math dept (fortran), business dept (cobol), or engineering (assembler). The profs were literally 1 chapter ahead of the students. I, however, was in love with the subject. I was the "student advisor" in our "machine room". We had 5 teletypes connected to a remote mainframe at Rutgers. I lived and breathed CS. I wrote tests f…

BPF link: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-02/bpf-a-new-type-o...