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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?

#371

Post by vorpalhex »

raffraffraff wrote: post #338
vorpalhex wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here. If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail. Success isn't a game of…

There comes a point in your life where this may not still be true. At 70 I doubt I'll be pushing "to failure" in training sessions. In fact, I'll probably consciously reduce the intensity of my training sessions and use them to maintain muscle mass for as long as possible into old(er) age. The same goes for work. I'm a hard worker, but I'm not gonna bust my balls at some startup so the CEO and his buddies can make a…

You've confused personal growth and "the hustle".

You should, as a person, work to grow and be stronger no matter your age, whether that's squatting 400lbs or doing your water aerobics. Work the correct weight for you.

You should not bust your balls at some startup so someone else can get rich. That isn't helpful. Don't do that, regardless your age.

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

#372

Post by Ancapistani »

pnutjam wrote: post #317
giraffe_lady wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ha, lucky. I have a similar constellation of problems and never found an employer willing to tolerate it long term. I can put large volumes of high quality work for 3-5 weeks at a time followed by 2-4 weeks of a low output slump. I usually get fired on the fourth or fifth cycle, freelance for a while, then try again. Always hoping to find somewhere willing to accept the inconsistency in output but haven't found it ye…

Larger enterprises should tolerate this better.

Yes, but some small ones do very well.

Those of us who are like this are a “good value” to them - both in terms of relative pay, and because we tend to be VERY loyal when we find a “home.”

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

#373

Post by xmodinfinity »

eternityforest wrote: post #219

A lot of those are pretty domain specific. Calculus is 10x only because it lets you get into fields where calculus is 10x. I have no idea what a general everyday coder would do with it. I could list tons of design patterns, like separate mutable and atomic readonly copies of the same data, but they wouldn't be universal, although patterns are wonderful. The closest thing to a real 10x I know is laziness and respect f…

I agree, it’s not usually a good use of time to reinvent the wheel, but what if there are unacceptable (e.g.) security risks with all the existing solutions? Then “just right” means “adequately addresses realistic security risks, where core fails to do so.” Developers correctly focus on building things, these aren’t often solid from a security perspective, and sometimes that matters. Abstracted, my point is that your point is correct in one domain, and there’s probably always another, peripheral domain where that’s not true: underlying assumptions mean whole ecosystems are flawed when used for a specific purpose: security, high availability, parallelism, etc

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

#374

Post by xmodinfinity »

jp42 wrote: post #185
rsync wrote: post #150

Here’s one that can be widely applied - from inside the cpu to your daily commute: context switches are expensive … and yes, sometimes so expensive that not knowing this might, indeed, have a 10x penalty.

Can someone care to elaborate more on this?

Excepting kernel scheduling, dealing with the set of problems i,j,k and being interrupted to deal with the set of problems x,y,z means all your short-term memory dealing with i,j,k disappears, and whatever mental work you’ve done to deal with i,j,k needs to be repeated once x,y,z is “problem solved” - but that’s a waste of time, compared to solving i,j,k completely and then moving on to x,y,z, and it’s annoying for the person solving the problems

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

#376

Post by s3micolon0 »

cmetzger4 wrote: post #310
runjake wrote: post #306

- Learn to code. (not everyone here codes) - Once you learn how to code, learn how to automate. Design everything you can to be declarative. - Learn how to speak and write well. - Learn how to negotiate and influence people (read the "classics", eg "Never Split the Difference...", "How to Win Friends...", and so on.) - Work to increase your EQ/Emotional Intelligence. (Yes, these are all actually productivity multipli…

Will you explain what you mean by "Design everything you can to be declarative"?

I believe, by "Design everything you can to be declarative" runjake is talking about is above creating good abstractions that satisfy a particular use case, abstracting the user from the implementation details.

Wikipedia defines Declaration programming as "In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow." [1]

By decoupling a user from the low level imperative understanding of the system and focusing on the high level abstractions, if the interface is well designed, it enables the user to think at a higher level of abstraction and expands their boundaries in expressing what they want to achieve using the higher level constructs.

One of the most famous declarative interface is "React.JS" which allows to think at the level of the "components" [2], while in acuity, it's abstracting the DOM from the user as a virtual DOM [3] level and performing reconciliation[4] internally for rendering to the actual DOM. But, as an end use, they don't really have to think about these implementation details and can just work with the "components" abstraction.

Most user interfaces I have seen are abstracted in a declarative / markup language. The most famous declarative interface is SQL.

In relation, I would also recommend reading this wonderful article about leaky abstractions by Joel Spolsky to understand the flipside of abstractions, in general: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

--

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

2: https://reactjs.org/docs/components-and-props.html

3: https://reactjs.org/docs/faq-internals.html

4: https://reactjs.org/docs/reconciliation.html

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

#377

Post by dmos62 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #334
kalev wrote: post #226

Earlier 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'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here. If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail. Success isn't a game of…

> that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure.

Umm. Actually, as far as I know, that's completely false. What you're describing is a bad way to train your body. If you're failing reps, you're training your body to fail. I.e. "one more rep" culture is misguided. You don't want stress or exhaustion hormones in your system. If your goal is enhancing your body, that is. Looking at my notes, my source is Pavel Tsatsouline #1399 episode on Joe Rogan's podcast. If you can get a hold of that podcast, it's very informative.

I won't comment on what you said about the mental aspect of failure.

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

#379

Post by nicbou »

joeman1000 wrote: post #358

I use these tips as a civil engineer (who knows how to program): - fully specify the problem before jumping in. Write what you know, the context and the unknowns. - Write the steps of the solution before jumping into a problem. - If writing a report, create the outline/heading structure before doing any other writing. - If you want to do something non-trivial, quickly search the web to see if someone has written a li…

You sound like a pleasant coworker

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

#380

Post by CyanDeparture »

dmos62 wrote: post #67

- Writing as form of (or tool for) thinking; Leslie Lamport said (maybe quoting someone) that if you're thinking, but not writing, you only think that you're thinking; - 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 i…

Wow, I've never thought of "functional programming, immutability, state machines, reactive programming" as time savers, just better ways of coding stuff, I'm a self-taught engineer and literally all of these just seem like correct way to code stuff beacuse it's much smoother and less faff.
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