The meaning of "adaptive" in the sense of evolutionary theory, and the capacity of species to evolve to extinction. Reading the selfish gene as a youth I missed the point; "an alien god" [0] and some Hanson articles got the point across finally.
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
51–60 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> dependency injection The term is unfamiliar to me -- is it related to "fault injection"?
Going to steal a description I wrote for a blogpost several years ago, when I had recently understood DI for the first time so it was very fresh in my mind: https://hasura.io/blog/build-fullstack-apps-nestjs-hasura-gr... Dependency Injection solves the problem of when you want to create something, but THAT something also needs OTHER somethings, and so on. In this example, think about a car. A car might have many sepa…
I know the car is a classic, cliche OOP example, but for any semi-experienced programmer, I feel like it's a really bad choice of analogy which only serves to obscure how you would use a technique like DI in actual real-world code, rather than an artificial toy example.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#53theory of reliativity, took me a while, but now I think I got the main gist
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#54For me it was pointers. I used C throughout college and I never really grokked the "address to a value" description, but one day it finally just clicked and now I love pointers
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seven years into my career I'm increasingly convinced that the emperor has no clothes with respect to unit tests that are just transcripts of the code under test with "mock.EXPECT()" prepended to everything - 95% by volume of the unit test code I've ever read, written, or maintained.
Yeah, the mere presence of unit tests is not enough. It has to actually assert something useful. When I code review, I try to make sure I call out "fake tests".
That’s a great point. Seeing lots of mocks and assertions that certain functions are called is often much ado about nothing since no actual code functionality is exercised. I do sometimes see the return value functionality of mocks used as a stub, just because the dev hasn’t internalized the distinction and can “make it work” with a mocking library.
One of the only legit use cases for mocks that I have personally come across is validating things like a sequence of API calls to an external service, or queries to a database where there is a check that certain efficiencies are guaranteed, e.g. verify that an N+1 select problem doesn’t creep in, or knowing that a app-level caching layer will prevent redundant API calls.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#56Lie Groups... I signed up for a grad level course in my second year, and had no idea what was going on. Eventually I did my PhD on algebraic combinatorics, which works with Lie Groups quite a lot, but it took years to internalize all the ideas needed to have any intuition at all. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_group
Although I still don't understand liegroups with significant mathematical rigor, I do think I finally understand why they are used in code for computer vision and state estimation. It took me a shockingly long time to understand why.
This paper was the catalyst to me finally grasping some of the details: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01537
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#57Basic music theory. Almost no one I encountered bothered to actually explain anything. They simply regurgitated things and I guess expected me to somehow intuitively understand something or other.
Any good resources that do it the right way?
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#58One of the biggest realizations recently for me was realizing that a nearly all of software development is basically about turning a slow, manual process into a faster, automated process. Modern CI/CD stems from a bunch of shell commands that somebody wrote and manually executed to test an app and upload it to a server. Modern automated software testing stems from humans writing small test apps and running them to co…
This is a great way to understand complex, new-fangled technologies. Ask "what manual process does this speed up"?
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain the concept? I feel I didn't grok it fully
Not sure about poster above, but I found a large amount of value in writing tests when developing API backends. I knew the shapes and potential data. Was easier to write tests to confirm endpoints looked right than manually hit the api endpoints.
Always amuses me when I see tests spin up a http server, just to call a function.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#60Socialism When I got out of my middle class bubble, made friends with people working multiple jobs and struggling to make ends meet, and experienced a period of financial instability; I began to realize that something wasn't working in our current system. Then I started struggling with burnout and other issues and found that corporations were happy to just replace me. I also found that management wanted programmers t…
>In particular the "social democracy" strains of socialism as opposed to those advocating central planning or anarchist organization.
Yes; Most people get hung up on terminology and/or specific interpretations but i am convinced this is the natural order of things for the Human species. The balance without going to extremes is what is important.