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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#421
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first question for recruiters is always about how a company trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses out of the 100's of times I've asked that question. It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

Do you have any tips or guides for creating good training programs? I find it challenging to think from a newcomer point of view and I significantly underestimate their challenges. Consequently I feel the learning curve I set for the team is either too steep or too shallow. This happens to me irrespective of whether I went through the painful learning curve just recently or several years in the past. Once I am comfor…

One issue I've seen is: assign the job to someone with experience as a instructor/mentor.

A friend recently told me the story of a very predictable train wreck at his company... management knew he had the background to do a good job with the training, but that wasn't the priority I guess.

End result estimated to be ~3 person years wasted because of a lack of good training/process onboarding/mentoring. The newcomers weren't incompetent, but they needed more than they got.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#422

3blue1brown linear algebra + the linear algebra chapter from “all the math you missed but need to know for graduate school” - linear algebra and abstract vector spaces in general finally feel familiar. Also, timbuktu manuscripts - showed a history that I had never really heard of. These are written manuscripts of african scholars which are hundreds of years old, and still exist today. Some record the history of great…

If it weren't for those Sapolsky lectures I would have never become intellectually curious. Beautiful lectures from a beautiful mind.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#425
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño.

It is a story about two young men, told through the perspectives of people they met along the way.

Some perspectives have a different enough perception of the protagonists that they could be talking about different people.

It clicked for me that everyone has a different idea of who I am, including myself. Before this, there was just me and my identity right now.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#426

I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…

I wish someone can suggest me similar links for Python. Asynchronous programming has always been elusive to me.

These might help:

* Async Python in real life - https://guicommits.com/async-python-in-real-life/

* Python Concurrency: The Tricky Bits - https://python.hamel.dev/concurrency/

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#427

I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.

> The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation. Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this insight's of limited—though perhaps not no —utility in understanding religion.

This prompts a perhaps crazy thought: "The mind's poor ability at introspection does not invalidate the observations of another mind about about the first mind."

. o O ( Somehow the wording of that thought makes me want to re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid )

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#428

I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…

I wish someone can suggest me similar links for Python. Asynchronous programming has always been elusive to me.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#429
post #30

I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life). Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done( https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ... ). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that mos…

I second "A Philosophy of Software Design" as a great set of loose principles. Just some really good stuff to keep in mind in a succinct book. Would love for Ousterhout to write some more.

Thirded, I'm reading it now and it's a lovely book. Dense with good ideas.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#430
For me it was CS50 Web Programming with Python and JavaScript taught by Brian Yu.

By background is non-technical and tried to learn web programming by reading books and watching YouTube videos. However, I failed multiple times because these sources lacked in depth or breadth or explained poorly.

In early 2022 I enrolled in CS50W through Edx. The course contained the right mix of depth and breadth, and the topics were very well explained: Brian is an amazing teacher. The course also included interesting projects that I had to implement. For example, building a Wiki, a small scoped Twitter clone, and finally a project of my own. I had so much fun learning! Since taking the course I built two web apps from spec to launch on my own.

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