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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

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Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#151

Post by giantg2 »

lanstin wrote: post #129
giantg2 wrote: post #24

"Calculus for solving all sorts of problems." Is this really common? I know I'm not in a top tier job, so maybe they don't give dummies like me the hard problems, but I've never had to use calculus to solve a real world problem.

calculus is irreplaceable for understanding system dynamics. Every meta-stable computer system is an incarnate approximarion of some differential equations relating the different parts of the system and the way changes propagate from here to there. I don't often use numerical methods, but analysis of stability, classification of fixed point types, topological limits to what small changes to the system can do to the b…

I mean, you could call that basic logic and just take a philosophy course. That would provide formal and informal methods of evaluation without the need for actual calculus. This informal understanding and balancing is more closely aligned with philosophy than it is to calculus.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#153

Post by graycat »

(1) Linear algebra. E.g., part of it is part of the crucial, core math of my startup. Also as we see today, Jack J Dongarra just won a Turing Award, and one of his best accomplishments is what he did for LINPACK, numerical linear algebra.

(2) Integer linear programming set covering. A super nice way to get likely very close to optimal solutions to some really nasty real world problems in combinatorial optimization.

(3) My favorite text editor, Kedit. It is a PC version of the IBM text editor XEDIT, written by an IBM guy in France, apparently on his own time. It used Rexx as a macro language, and Kedit uses Kexx, its version of Rexx, as its macro language. XEDIT and Kedit are elegantly designed; the macro languages are also elegant. Kedit is my most important tool.

(3) Hierarchical file systems, e.g., Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system). I just find the hierarchy in the file system as a natural a taxonomic hierarchy for organizing information.

(4) Yes, once I used Monte Carlo simulation of a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process to estimate the surviveability of the US SSBN fleet under a special scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. So, it was potentially an enormously complicated calculation but due to the simplification of the Markov assumption, how the continuous time was handled with a Poisson process, and the Monte Carlo to do the numerical part, I got the whole project done in just two weeks.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#154

Post by giantg2 »

softwarebeware wrote: post #127
giantg2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a paywall. Yes, a calculus formula might have been used somewhere in that process, and was used by the finance person and dev. That doesn't mean I, or any other person, needed to know it. As a dev at a financial institution, I've never needed to implement calculus formulas. Most calculations and formulas I've dealt with are algebra and stats. These usually are just a matter of using standard libraries too.…

> Looks like a paywall. That's odd. It loads up just fine for me with no paywall. Check this out for more: https://allusesof.com/math/51-amazing-uses-of-calculus-in-re... The point is that calculus is used to solve all sorts of problems. Sure, you can say "...not in my experience" but that's one experience and not representative. You just happen to a) not work in a realm where Calculus is used and/or b) work within t…

I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying that it isn't commonly used. Objectively, a great majority of people can live their lives without even thinking about or performing calculus outside of the classroom.

That is why I questioned whether knowing calculus is really a piece of fundamental knowledge that allows a 10x performance increase. For the majority of people it's not going to help them. Even if they deal with calculus in their field, I don't see it providing a 10x increase because unless one is mathematician, the calculus portion of their job will be inconsequential and likely be automated or computed for them.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#156

Post by wittycardio »

exdsq wrote: post #107
warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

I love this idea. You don’t need to be at the top 1% of a field to do cool innovate stuff, just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. Currently going down this rabbit hole with computational archaeology and having a whale of a time :)

This is complete bs, real innovation happens exclusively in the top 1 percent of the field. This is just coolaid that some people like to drink to de emphasize the value of real skill and inflate their own egos.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#157

Post by wittycardio »

gjvc wrote: post #38
jorgeleo wrote: post #20

I would like to challenge the underlaying idea: Asking "what fundamental knowledge" is like asking what telescope makes the best astronomers. The problem with knowledge is applicability. You can know a lot of fundamental things, but if you cannot recognize the patterns were they are useful is dead knowledge. My personal experience through my life (30+ years in the field) and observing and interviewing developers in m…

this is an unhelpful response: the guy asks a straight question and the response is to "challenge the underlaying [sic] idea" It would be better to answer their question, rather than attempt to knock it down. (good example of zero-sum bias.)

Most people on hn don't have deep technical knowledge and don't like to be told that it matters

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#158

Post by graycat »

futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

Nice: Ah, FedEx founder F. Smith just booted himself out of the CEO slot and to just Chair of the BoD.

At one time he was scared of the problem of scheduling the fleet. Yup, if describe the problem in complicated terms, then the scheduling problem gets wildly complicated, e.g., in NP Complete, etc. -- could have a big team working months on just the first version. But he needed answers right away and, to satisfy concerns of some investors on the Board, needed the answers also to apply to the whole, planned company (eventually it grew to something much bigger than the initial plans).

I was in a meeting looking for a solution with several people, and it was all confused. Finally I just announced that I'd solve it.

I was teaching computer science at Georgetown and had 6 weeks to go to the end of the semester. So, I wanted to be done in six weeks. How'd I do that? Sure, just concentrated on what the business actually needed and threw out the rest. So, in six weeks had the software putting out nice schedules.

Our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics and major investor evaluated the schedule and announced "It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable.". The BoD was thrilled.

At one point Smith stated that my work "solved the most important problem" facing the company. The 10X, maybe 1000X, difference was essentially just in delivering what the business needed and dropping the rest.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#159

Post by rtourn »

hermannj314 wrote: post #74

Can someone elaborate on how they use reg ex as a productivity boost? Do you use it for text transformation? How do you use it exactly? Do you use it as code itself or as a tool to help you explore/write code? I am a huge fan of Macros, I 100% understand their role in text transformation, but what problem does regex solve? I spend so much time trying to remember the correct syntax, it only ever works for me when solv…

A good text editor will have regex ability, and once you learn it, it’s super convenient to have it handy. Writing macros to do stuff is more of a hassle. RegEx is most useful for me as a super quick and easy way to solve a one off problem that isn’t important enough to write code to solve.

I once walked in on a coworker (who’s not a developer) who had copied a pdf into text and was laboriously scrolling through thousands of lines of text to remove footer text with page numbers. He spent hours doing this, it’s a 10 second problem with using regex.

In the same job, sometimes our clients would give me large files in the wrong format (like a word document) that couldn’t be normally be import. Notepad++ and some regex magic pulled out all the data I cared about in a minute. It would have taken years if my other coworker did it his way.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#160

Post by thunkshift1 »

catchclose8919 wrote: post #111

Learn to delegate/outsource at all levels from technical to mathematical: the best kind of delegation is to tools/systems/languages/type-systems (eg. "outsource your attention to the type-system") since it's always cheap enough to be in-budget...

Why is delegation important?
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