That sometimes the extreme needs to manifest in order to pull toward the middle
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
221–230 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#222Visual thinking! [1]
I had read a bit about different types of thinking but I didn't really understand it so well until I saw a kid who had amazing visual thinking capability and could visualize years' old memories in a very detailed manner. It has also been related to photographic memory according to some research.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Nikola Tesla's Creative Thinking Secrets: https://www.sers.si/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/angle%C5%A1%C...
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#223The idea that atheism is a form of religion.
Or just a personal relationship with reality. :P
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#224Unit 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…
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.
I think my favorite of these was a function that called 4 other functions and didn't do anything else, its unit test mocked out all 4 other functions and asserted that each was called.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me taking a class in neural networks in my thirties to really understand matrix multiplication
I did a fairly rigorous linear algebra course in school, and it went over my head despite passing it. Saw it explained in a single slide of Andrew Ng's ML course and everything clicked perfectly. Where I lived math was taught like fucking shit, it was all algebra and zero context as to why it could be useful in real-life scenarios, zero abstraction such as visualization or metaphor. Everyone involved in concocting th…
The Coursera one? That's the exact course I was thinking of.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#2261. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…
2. Hits home for me as I’ve begun to realize the same thing. Not seeing any person of color in an activity makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me taking a class in neural networks in my thirties to really understand matrix multiplication
Which class?
A sibling comment to your mentioned Andrew Ng's class, and I actually had the same experience as them with the same class. You can find it by searching for Stanford CS229; the lectures are available on YouTube.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#228Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#229Computer networks. For years I was dumbfounded how IP addresses, VPN, ports, etc, all worked and tied together. Then, when I was interning as a software developer a fair while ago, a colleague drew the analogy of "IP address" = house on street, "port" = something you ask for when you knock on the door of a house. Then it all just clicked. I still remember that day all these years later. Other notable mentions, in no…
> Then, when I was interning as a software developer a fair while ago, a colleague drew the analogy of "IP address" = house on street, "port" = something you ask for when you knock on the door of a house. Hey thanks for sharing! Can you maybe expand on this in any form? I'd love to get that kind of analogy. Maybe you have a blog post about it? That'd be amazing!
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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting rid of data abstraction and encapsulation is throwing the baby with the bath water. The abstract concept of OOP (messages between complex objects, as defined by Alan Kay) is an attempt at mimicking biological systems. Most modern languages implement data abstraction, but call it OOP, where they encapsulate some functionality with the data it operates on. Really helped with varying data formats in the AirForce…
I believe that combining state and functionality - the root of OOP - is a mistake. Tons of programming patterns and concepts exist to solve this fundamental mistake. When you stop using classes all of your code becomes so much cleaner, easier to reason about, test, debug, and so on. You can never create only pure functions in the real world but you get closer to this ideal. I stand by my statement that OOP is totally…
Yes but if you represent 2 functions over some state a(s) and b(s) then you have the same issue with this as if it was:
Class s: fun a(self)... fun b(self)...
The problem is mutability not how state is bound to a function.