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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?

#271

Post by binarymax »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #31

The power of an outline when writing. Over the past few years, I've been teaching myself how to write better. I'm not talking about elementary syntax or grammar. I'm not talking about writing the traditional, American English five paragraph essay. I'm talking about writing longer pieces of prose, articles or blog posts or short chapters with word counts ranging anywhere between 1500-3000 words. On this journey of imp…

I also love and need outlines. It’s carried forward in not just writing, but making great presentations, plans, and decision making.

Also, obligatory RiffTrax on outlines: https://youtu.be/yfcyVtD8-Dk

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

#272

Post by ruune »

Long time ago, but mathematical functions.

In hindsight stupid, but it took me embarrassingly long to understand that a function just takes a value for x, calculates it with the rest of the numbers in the function and that way basically assigns a y-value to every x-value. No idea why it took me so long, I didn't have any similar problems with high school math

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

#273

Post by urthor »

parasti wrote: post #38

One 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…

Save humans time with a workflow.

Save humans time.

Save humans time.

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

#274

Post by 9804 »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #220

Learning history / literature in school is important. I was a total STEM math nerd in school. I used to frequently complain how I don't get what's the point of it, or how it's a waste of time and I'm learning nothing. I still think the emphasis of school was off, but I get the point of it now. Stories are like code for humans. You can't tell someone what it means to be good or bad, or to give them a course in philoso…

I think people come out of school hating reading because nobody likes being forced to read specific books, as everyone's tastes are different. It sounds like this might have been what happened to you.

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

#275

Post by evanpw »

This is true of almost everything in math. You learn some definitions and techniques in one class, and it doesn't all become clear what's going on until you've used those to as the base layer for solving some other problems in the next class. Part of it is just that it's hard to teach you need the first concept in order to understand the second, but you need the second to understand why you should care about the first, so it's all a bit circular.

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

#276

Post by moloch-hai »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #110

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to fully grok what object oriented programming really means. It's one thing to have someone tell you what an object is, but it's another thing entirely to build a fully object oriented system. I remember what made it click: I was designing an animation system, which had a bunch of different interdependent moving parts. Once I started treating each part like an object and lett…

You don't really understand OOP until you recognize it as one style among many that you may use in different parts of each program. Some parts are naturally OO-y, others DD-y, others declarative, often an unholy mix in each place. The problem dictates elements of the solution. Shoehorning a solution into a particular style makes a bad solution.

Never forget who is in charge. Deferring to a style dodges responsibility for your choices.

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

#277

Post by JanisErdmanis »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #230
monero-xmr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea is to make the functions pure and return the state ‘a(s_1) -> s_2, value’. Makes so much easier to test and write concurrent programs.

Though it’s not always practical, like when needing to push an element to an array for making updated state. It is nevertheless possible to shave of pure parts considerably making mutability easier to maintain.

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

#278

Post by CSDude »

Sadly, React. Was using Angular 1, and Vue made much more sense. I'm not a Frontend Developer though, but needed to learn React but it happened to late. At least, when I needed to learn, components were not classes anymore but functions which made learning curve somehow simpler for me although its not much difference.

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

#279

Post by sampo »

bob1029 wrote: post #236
pfdietz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something in linear algebra clicked for me when I realized the infinite dimensional case is different from the finite dimensional case.

What are some applications / examples for the infinite-dimensional case?

Quantum mechanics

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

#280

Post by bgoated01 »

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.

Linear algebra in general for me was kind of one of these concepts. Aced my university linear algebra class with no idea what the heck I had learned. It didn't start to click for me until I started using it for tangible problems.
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