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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?

#421

Post by satvikpendem »

ngalaiko wrote: post #174

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 i…

You should learn Haskell, that's what I'm doing now, in order to learn functional programming from the ground up. Languages like JS which have FP concepts aren't really functional programming fully.

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

#422

Post by akira2501 »

nivethan wrote: post #226
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…

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.

> makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.

This makes me curious. Would you mind answering, from your point of view, why do you think that is? Is it a specific scenario or type of scenario you wish to avoid or is there a generalized concern that comes with it? Is that due to uncertainty or past experience?

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

#423

Post by carapace »

icepat wrote: post #310
texuf wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s old and perhaps a little controversial, but “ NLP: The New Technology of Achievement” has good examples and abstractions that could help you with #1

Controversial in that it's generally considered a pseudoscience. I'd advise against anyone looking to figure out how to navigate this wasting their time with pseudosciences.

> it's generally considered a pseudoscience.

Only by people who have no experience with it.

NLP ("Neurolinguistic Programming", not Natural Language Processing) is pre-scientific, yes, but that's not the same as being a pseudoscience, and calling it such is a disservice.

We have pretty much discovered the operating system of the human mind. applying the principles and techniques discovered and systematized under the rubric of NLP one can do amazing things.

- - - -

It is strange that academic research psychologists seem to have trouble with it. But that's their problem, it doesn't change the fact that people all over the world are learning and using this stuff every day. If academic psychologists can't understand it that just makes them irrelevant, it doesn't change the facts.

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

#424

Post by a_c »

People never change because of YOU. This applies to work, relationship and family.

It made me click about the saying that science advances one funeral at a time. It is easier to rally people of similar thought than to change people of opposite opinion. Not impossible, just more difficult. It explains a lot of thing in my opinion.

1. It is easier to start a start up than to convince your boss to take a certain product direction. E.g to not pursue certain pursuit, as outlined by John carmack's departure from meta. The ultimate judgement will be whether YOUR idea survive rather than whether your boss buy your idea. And I prefer bootstrap, at least for now, for that reason.

2. Never attempt to change your spouse. Find the common ground instead.

3. Empathy is mostly about experience sharing. You can't have people feel something they never experience before. If you can empathize, it means you have experience to draw similarity between. Imagine teaching a 18yo to be a father, that's how preaching people to be empathetic felt like.

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

#425

Post by dehrmann »

shrimpx wrote: post #342

I studied functional programming and I took terms like "expression", "evaluation", and "value" for granted until it clicked that these terms have intuitive meaning when interpreted in colloquial/human terms. - Expression as in someone expressing themselves, a tentative gesture. - Evaluation as in scrutinizing something to learn what it's really about. - Value as in "valuable". We don't know if an expression is valuab…

Have you ever studied compilers? You'll gets a good idea of these concepts from a toy compiler for an imperative language.

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

#426

Post by sirsinsalot »

rramadass wrote: post #66
robg wrote: post #8

The autonomic nervous system and the adrenal cortex. Homeostasis is taught as a textbook fact, the body reverting to a baseline over time. What’s not taught is how much the impacts of daily life events drive a continuous stress response. Fight or flight is not just a reaction to deadly threats. It’s active every moment of every day to ensure survival. The adrenal cortex is always active, to traffic, your boss and col…

Any books you could recommend? I presume you already know of this book: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.

Thank you. Bought and reading.

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

#427

Post by klysm »

hakanderyal wrote: post #127
klysm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the develop faster thing is a poor argument for static typing. The refactoring piece of the equation is the most important to me. Static types provide confidence (and speed) while making sweeping changes to code.

That's what I meant by developing faster. Refactoring is an indispensable part of the building process.

Yeah totally agree that refactoring is part of development but I don’t think people frequently think about in comparison to maintenance.

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

#428

Post by crackercrews »

yieldcrv wrote: post #264
nivethan wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similarly this gives me pause about Ivy League MBA programs. Although a small sample size, despite their ambitions the BIPOC people I know haven’t been able to reap any professional benefits from it. Whether from access to executive roles, getting taken seriously by venture capital firms, or in their attempts to join venture capital firms. There is a level of discretion in these team forming situations that is not ex…

So even with all the BLM advocacy, there is no pipeline for Black people with MBAs from Ivy League schools? That doesn't fit with what I've seen in other industries. Companies fell all over themselves to hire Black people. Is this not happening in MBA-land?

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

#429

Post by enos_feedler »

rajin444 wrote: post #295
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…

> 2. Representation matters. Strange, I had the opposite encounter. I realized the only thing keeping me from doing things was myself. There are definitely real barriers (hiring quotas, affirmative action, etc.) but without artificial constraints the only thing stopping you is you. You might feel a little uncomfortable but that's something easily overcome - and almost like a superpower when you realize you can overco…

I would tread carefully when saying any kind of discomfort is “easily overcome”. We are human beings after all and it’s a pretty generalized statement.

Being a white male but simply being unique in coming from a poor community in a poor city was enough for me to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain on myself through undergrad by seeing myself as different from the majority of elites in my program.

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

#430

Post by mesarvagya »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #144

Dynamic programming made very little sense to me when I first encountered it, then a few years later I read the DP section of Algorithms by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani and it somehow clicked for me. Now I enjoy dynamic programming problems when I get them in interviews because they are usually pretty easy once you understand the trick.

DP is just overlapping recursion with caching. That's it.

Richard Bellman just wanted to give a fancy name for mathematical work he was doing without being suspected of it.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

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