Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Learn Stuff Quickly

joshwcomeau.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#11

Post by BarryMilo »

Jensson wrote: post #10
thundergolfer wrote: post #3

Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…

You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.

What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#12

Post by Jensson »

BarryMilo wrote: post #11
Jensson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.

What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.

There is a lot of knowledge you can't write down since you yourself don't know what it is, you just know how to apply it. For example, how do you structure your programs? You can write down some rules of thumb, but you can't write down your entire decision process as a flow chart that can be used on any program to structure every function in them. How to structure big programs is one of the biggest hurdles for new programmers, they just have to learn it themselves since nobody can teach them that. You can get a bit of feedback for simple program structures, but for more complex cases you wont even get good feedback, to continue to improve at that stage you just have to rely on yourself.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#13

Post by Barrin92 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #3

Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…

+1 for a mentor. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument knows the value of a good personal teacher.

Slightly odd personal recent example, a friend who is really good at speedrunning Super Mario 64 taught me for a few hours and I got better at it in an hour than I did in the three days before trying to learn on my own.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#14

Post by akersten »

So-called programming "tutorials" have never sat right with me. The idea is fundamentally wrong. It's like trying to learn painting by watching a series of videos in which you're taught which parts of canvas to paint what exact hue to recreate famous works of art, instead of being taught how to mix paints, negative space, and color theory.

"I'm stuck in tutorial hell, I understand the tutorials for how to multiply 3 digit and the tutorial for how to multiply 4 digit numbers. But when I try to multiply 5 digit numbers on my own, I just can't figure it out and have to go look up a tut."

Programming shouldn't be taught piecewise via 15 minute videos on YouTube of how to accomplish one particular specific task. It needs to be built from the ground up, from first principles of the environment in which you're programming, and the instruction given to pupils must be "determine the solution you need, break it into a series of building block steps, and then perform those building blocks." Not "try to re-create the tutorial of how to make a React component send a JSON request step by step without looking at the video." But no one makes video "tutorials" about the building blocks. Which is a shame, because that's the actual learning part.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#15

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

akersten wrote: post #14

So-called programming "tutorials" have never sat right with me. The idea is fundamentally wrong. It's like trying to learn painting by watching a series of videos in which you're taught which parts of canvas to paint what exact hue to recreate famous works of art, instead of being taught how to mix paints, negative space, and color theory. "I'm stuck in tutorial hell, I understand the tutorials for how to multiply 3…

> It's like trying to learn painting by watching a series of videos in which you're taught which parts of canvas to paint what exact hue to recreate famous works of art

I have some bad news for how artists traditionally learned how to paint. I agree with the overall thrust that only learning by copying with no theory behind it is bad, but the problem isn’t the copying it’s the lack of theory. A python flask how-to that also explains how flask works while doing the step by step process seems just fine to me.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#17

Post by DeathArrow »

I think every successful learner in CS or programming is doing a large amount of experimenting. Many books I've read encouraged or even required the reader to extend the software or algorithms written by the authors.

Growing in a poor Eastern European country with a cheap Z80 computer, meant experimenting was needed for me to learn as a kid. There were only a handful books about Z80 programming and all were about Basic and also very basic. The other books were either in abstract CS territory, full of high level math or about some big iron machines and languages that did not run on my Z80.

So after reading somewhere that I can poke some address to obtain a particular effect, without explaining why, the next question was what happens if I poke another address?

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#18

Post by galaxyLogic »

Jensson wrote: post #12
BarryMilo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.

There is a lot of knowledge you can't write down since you yourself don't know what it is, you just know how to apply it. For example, how do you structure your programs? You can write down some rules of thumb, but you can't write down your entire decision process as a flow chart that can be used on any program to structure every function in them. How to structure big programs is one of the biggest hurdles for new pr…

There is so much software out there in a way it is not too different from biological systems. Programs are like creatures you can study and observe. There is no single book explaining all of software. You must be a bit of scientist yourself. Discover how thing work and what works best.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#19

Post by ZephyrBlu »

BarryMilo wrote: post #11
Jensson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.

What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.

At some point it becomes more like knowledge extraction and synthesis rather than being explicitly taught, because there are intangibles that your mentor can't directly teach you.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#20

Post by ZephyrBlu »

alexashka wrote: post #8

What a strange article. First, there is no need to put pressure on yourself to learn 'quickly' - that's counter productive. Second, you need to find a good teacher. Finding good teachers is how you learn 'quickly'. Now the way to do that is to have parents who can help you. Really, the way to learn 'quickly', is to be born into a family that's loving and competent at life. Then it just happens - by the time you devel…

Being able to learn quickly is extremely valuable, and you don't need a teacher to be able to do so. In saying that, I'm not sure it's something that can be taught.

Don't really get what your parents being "good at life" means though, and everyone's parents have shortcomings.

Post reply on HN