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Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#171

Post by kippinitreal »

sjaak wrote: post #29
tails4e wrote: post #11

The fourier transform. Encountered it first in my undergrad engineering degree, it was presented as dry mathematics, with no real explanation, just threw complex exponentials at us, and pages of derivations. Years later I actually use it in my job, and through that and other material can see its beauty, and how its actually not that complicated. Some great resources like this helped a lot: [0] https://betterexplained…

This is what made it click for me, can recommend it: 3Blue1Brown -- But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY

That video did the same for me. I also like the reducible video for Fast Fourier Transforms as well as the Veratasium piece that shares some fun history.

Reducible - FFTs the most ingenious algorithm ever https://youtu.be/h7apO7q16V0 Veritasium - The Most Important Algorithm of All Time https://youtu.be/nmgFG7PUHfo

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#172

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

everybodyknows wrote: post #14
bsuvc wrote: post #2

Unit testing and using dependency injection to write test-able code. I'm not sure if it was years, but it wasn't immediate. I just didn't understand why dependency injection was good at first, and not just someone's weird personal code style choice. I thought it was just people being "Enterprisey" which I'd encountered many times over the years. Once I committed to unit testing, I realized how necessary it is. Unfort…

> dependency injection The term is unfamiliar to me -- is it related to "fault injection"?

I think the poster is referring to Guice or something similar - that there's a framework which selects which instantiated runtime object gets injected as a dependent into another, thereby automatically "figuring out" what object needs to get instantiated first, and then next etc.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#174

Post by ngalaiko »

for me it was functional programming. and not just fp as is, but it's relation to another popular concept - oop.

i was properly introduced only to oop, and grasped a little of fp here and there, especially learning go and javascript.

what i consider a 'click' for me is when i realised that all of these paradigms are interchangeable. like, an abstract method is just a function, or a function signature is the same as in interface with a single method.

after that i write code however it feels more appropriate for the situation i am in and don't think too much about fancy words and patterns. it really feels like programming languages are becoming 'native' for me.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#177

Post by thesnide »

mattbaker wrote: post #137
thesnide wrote: post #125

Working with others. Really. I was super annoyed and insanely annoying to work with for years. Then I understood that difference is hard to cope with, but more often than not, good. As it trades some short term efficiency to long term one. Same with your output. If it is dumbed down to a level everyone can understand it, you really learned it.

That’s cool, what kinds of things helped you learn this? I bet those things would be really valuable to a lot of people if you felt like sharing.

I'd say parenting is the one that really made a difference.

Not because I had a strike of common sense, but because I actually cared very much and started to listen to others. I didn't want to be horrible to my kids.

So "starting to listening to others". Every troll has a kernel of truth. And sometimes what you consider a troll isn't one in the first place.

Which is very apropos those days, where everyone is confined in their own echo chambers by all those clever social media algorithms that always favor short term bliss.

And yes. Trying to explain things to my kids enables me to understand those things way deeper.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#178

Post by jliptzin »

enkid wrote: post #132
DylanSp wrote: post #115

Matrix multiplication. First encountered it in high school, where the textbooks presented matrices without any real motivation, and matrix multiplication just seemed like a weirdly-defined operation. Once I got to linear algebra in college and matrix multiplication was presented as the way to compose linear transformations, it made a lot more sense.

It took me taking a class in neural networks in my thirties to really understand matrix multiplication

Which class?

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#179

Post by zozbot234 »

api wrote: post #114
harimau777 wrote: post #47

Socialism 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…

A big one for me not necessarily for “socialism” but for questioning the bog standard capitalist narrative was seeing how the quality of content often goes down when creator monetization is added on a platform. That’s not supposed to happen. Adding a way for people to make income is supposed to incentivize better content and allow people to invest in that content. Instead what you get is a flood of addictive and sens…

> ... Adding a way for people to make income is supposed to incentivize better content and allow people to invest in that content. ...

What it does is incentivise more content. More is not always better for everyone, and is even less likely to be better for those who were early adopters to the platform - but what it is usually is more popular. It's just democracy in action: the largest numbers decide, and sometimes privileged minorities lose out.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#180

Post by luuuzeta »

ISL wrote: post #7

That professors were thinking real hard about which problem sets to give us in hopes that we would actually learn something. I don't think I really understood that completely until I started TA-ing.

Tangentially related but that's something I've come to realize too as of recent. Asynchronous programming in JavaScript is new to me so as an exercise, I'm writing a document where I explain the concepts to myself and once I shifted from "how I understand" to "how I would this to someone else", figuring out a good enough scenario/problem harder.

Good problem sets that aid studets' intuition aren't easy to come by, oftentimes they're either too easy or too hard.

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