Being able to walk into a machine shop and make a part, right then and there.
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
291–300 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable; I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?
I will give you a fairly specific answer that comes from my history of going to therapy for anxiety and depression. Whenever I find myself in an anxious or uncomfortable situation, the thing that I need to remind myself is that things are going to turn out okay for me, whatever happens. I do this by working my way up a version of Mazlowe's hierarchy: 1. Am I physically safe? Can I breathe? Can I move my body? 2. Do I…
During stressful times, I’d have agoraphobic attacks in the car. They were pretty terrifying. I’d open all the car windows and blast the radio. But you know what worked much better? Solving math problems in my head.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#293There is no list. It's not possible to say, "I know these 5 things, and they'll make me more productive." Feynman solved all his physics problems with Calculus. That's it. One tool. Part of is is knowing your tools. The other part is being able to see a problem, break it down, and understand how to manipulate it into something that's attainable. That's it. I worked with this guy Pat several years ago, and he was on a…
> This will be easy to remember. Lots of 3's." I looked at him for a moment puzzling his response. He says, "2745, lots of 3s." I cannot for the life of me figure out what he means by this
(3^3)3.3.5 ? Maybe…
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#294Patience.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. or as Peter Drucker puts it (he is dubbed as "the founder of modern management" on Wikipedia) : "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
"If you don't know where you are going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there."
nice one as well !
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, as I wrote the calculus example I remembered this post about a medical researcher rediscovering integration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26384357 But it still feels more like unknown unknowns causing you to put in a lot of extra effort; I wouldn't classify these as productivity multipliers.
That's actually not so bad. Physicists in the 20's reinvented matrix math.
Interesting? What would be a good reference on this?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#297There is no list. It's not possible to say, "I know these 5 things, and they'll make me more productive." Feynman solved all his physics problems with Calculus. That's it. One tool. Part of is is knowing your tools. The other part is being able to see a problem, break it down, and understand how to manipulate it into something that's attainable. That's it. I worked with this guy Pat several years ago, and he was on a…
> This will be easy to remember. Lots of 3's." I looked at him for a moment puzzling his response. He says, "2745, lots of 3s." I cannot for the life of me figure out what he means by this
The number is divisible by three I guess.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. or as Peter Drucker puts it (he is dubbed as "the founder of modern management" on Wikipedia) : "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
And likewise, this theme shows up in Tom DeMarco's classic book Slack , which contrasts "efficiency" (the rate at which an organization is moveing towards some goal) vs "effectiveness" (the ability of the organization to choose and steer towards better goals). An important theme of the book is that an organization running full-tilt (maximum "efficiency") intrinsically reduces/eliminates its needed human "slack" to re…
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
Damned, I had to search for the author and... it's also from Peter Drucker !
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#299I mean, this sounds narrow, but going off of what you think are 10x multipliers, in terms of getting more bang for your hour/buck: * Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies * Embracing garbage collection in JITted runtimes, mainly JS for now * Being able to diagnose and replace a squeaky belt in your car * Know what a cat is saying when it meows at you and indicates something in the vici…
> Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies That might be very useful for me, but my career has taken a different track, and I have never needed that. I almost never touch SQL, and never in a situation where performance matters. However I know that I can look that up if I need it (or more likely find someone else - I expect looking it up will take months)
Understanding the architecture of your database engine is important. I've had numerous "I told you so" moments in my career when devs didn't believe me, and when ahead and do things like:
a) Let's speed up the SQL processing by creating 40K connections and each connection running a stored procedure. Unless your particular SQL instance has enough memory and cpu to support 40K connections, you are performing a denial of service attack on your own server.
b) I hate stored procedures and scripting; I am going to write a big ass SQL query that is 200 lines long. Your giant SQL query is too complex for the SQL engine to create an optimize query plan. It will effectively reduce your database engine from using set based logic to one row at time. One time, a developer complained SQL sucks and blow big time blah blah blah. It took me four hours to figure out his ungodly query. I was able to performance tune the query by breaking it into many small steps using temp tables and putting it all into a stored procedure. Execution time improved from 10 minutes to 9 seconds.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#300Knowing how to use Google (or another search engine) is probably the biggest multiplier of all. Odds are someone has done something on the sort of problem you are trying to solve.
Those are exactly the things that anybody else could do just as well as you. What makes you valuable (if you are) is exactly the things that nobody can just as well look up on Google.
Googling well is an underrated skill.