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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?

#311

Post by aj7 »

Sharlin wrote: post #233
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.

Matrices are funny. You can encounter them as a teenager reading 3D graphics tutorials on the internet, learn that they can compactly represent scalings, rotations, and translations, and that several transformations can be conveniently “stacked” using this thing called matrix multiplication which looks like this… and that’s it, now you can use them for a cool practical purpose, but the tutorials never derive or attem…

And a lot of dynamics is e to a matrix.

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

#312

Post by mabbo »

9804 wrote: post #274
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.

I completely agree with this. I loathed Shakespeare in school. Now I try to get a visit every year to the Stratford Festival (in Stratford, Canada) to see at least one or two Shakespearean plays.

I also remember reading 1984 on my own time in high school- it wasn't in the curriculum the year I might have. It blew me away. But if I'd been forced to read it, I probably would have been bored.

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

#313

Post by machina_ex_deus »

9804 wrote: post #274
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.

I never hated reading, it's just that I didn't get the point of it. What are we even doing here and why?

What's the point? Math has clear purpose. I do enjoy some books. I just didn't get the point of studying them beyond reading. Why are they babbling about ? Is there any use for this information or is it just a torture in memorization? Why would I ever care about all these abstract literature terms?

Ironically they missed telling the meta story: why would anyone care about stories.

If stories are just something you read for fun, why would anyone care to teach me how to analyze them?

EDIT: To be clear, these were the questions that weren't answered back then.

Only now, years later with life experience the purpose is clear.

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

#314

Post by slotrans »

For me the big one was relational modeling & normalization. I took a database class in college and I thought normalization was idiotic. It seemed obviously foolish and wasteful and I couldn't imagine why anyone would do this to themselves by choice. Then ~2 years later I got a job working with data, at a company with quite a big database that was designed largely by experts. Within a few months of starting to work with real data I had internalized the Why of normalization and become a believer. Ironically I've been doing database work ever since.

Lately I've worked for a number of companies where no one -- like seriously, absolutely zero developers on the team -- understand normalization. They may perform a shadow of it, because someone somewhere told them to, or some article said this is how you model data that looks like X, but they don't get it. Predictably, their data models are absolute garbage. Teaching them is an uphill battle because they don't care, they're not curious, and their web frameworks (cough Rails cough) have taught them to distance themselves from the database and treat it as dumb.

The other one was Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy", which I first watched in 2013. I enjoyed it even then but I didn't really understand what he was getting it. After working with, and building, some systems done in a functional style, I feel like I figured most of the ideas. That would have been some time in 2017 so, definitely took a while to soak in.

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

#315

Post by layer8 »

analog31 wrote: post #169
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…

I read the earliest articles on OO and SmallTalk in Byte Magazine, which IIRC would have been the early 80s. OOP was totally and utterly bewildering to me, a BASIC and Pascal programmer. It "clicked" much later, in two stages, using languages that were "kind of like" OOP, even if not rigorously so: LabVIEW, HyperCard, Visual Basic. I think VB had a decent strategy for introducing OO to the rest of us. Out of the box,…

> the first couple volumes of the Win32 programmer's manuals

What books exactly are you referring to here?

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

#316

Post by vidanay »

fortituded0002 wrote: post #196

1. 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…

#3 really hits home when you realize we have rules for killing each other (war). And we have separate legal trials to determine if someone broke those rules while trying to kill someone else. The penalty for breaking the rules about killing someone often is to be killed.

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

#317

Post by buzzert »

For me, it was the difference between “is” and “ought”.

It sounds obvious when you first think about it, but I spent a vast majority of my 20’s with a view of the world filled with “oughts” instead of “is’s”, especially when it comes to things I can’t control. I.e., people “ought” to behave a certain way, versus the way people actually behave. The way companies/governments “ought” to operate, versus the way they actually do.

Thinking in terms of “oughts” can really cloud your judgement in ways that you might not be totally aware of. I guess this is kind of like the “realpolitik” philosophy, but coming to this realization in my early 30’s actually made me a lot happier and less confused about why the world is the way it is.

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

#318

Post by atentaten »

ww520 wrote: post #176

Shader and OpenGL programming. It was many foreign jagons, concepts, and computation models. Took me a while and couple tries to get a hang of it.

What were you trying that allowed you to get the hang of it? Also were there any online resources that helped?

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

#319

Post by ShredKazoo »

moloch-hai wrote: post #276
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…

DD?

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

#320

Post by skatanski »

I think I've read about git multiple times before I started using it. And even then at first it was with a dash of scepticism. I can't put my finger on that moment, the moment of clarity but it had to be quite glorious. Before, I was "what else do you need we have svn". Sounds horrible now that I think about it.
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