Understanding your data representation is more important than understanding how to write code. It makes sense once you've used code to solve problems a few times, but when you're just starting out you don't get it.
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
441–450 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed #2 with my 4 year old. She won't do anything unless there's a girl doing it. My other kids don't seem to care though.
There are some interesting studies about girls and women playing chess. When blind, the two sexes perform on average about the same, but when they know the gender of their opponent, girls and women underperform. It is hypothesised that the reason behind this is because chess is a boys’ club, so to speak, and thus there is not a lot of representation. Absence of representation means that it may seem that you are the o…
I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#4431. 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…
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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#444Earlier 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.
Growing up this was a big realization for me the other way. I was raised by evangelicals in Kansas, including going to a mennonite school for most of my education. As a teenager I realized how at my school, at my church, at basically everything in my family's shared life, there was not a single person with brown skin. Not even one. And worse, no one had real awareness of this, and would not understand how it could be…
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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#4451. 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…
While I do see merit in the idea that representation matters, to me, it all depends on what representation in particular. Racial representation gets all the attention but I find that one less compelling. But for example, seeing that a philosophy major can have a successful programming career, can encourage others in the humanities to see themselves do it too. Or seeing someone with ADHD run a business successfully an…
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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how a paid course works?
Yeah, but I'm not going to start a course if I don't know what tools and equipment I need for it, upfront.
They have a free trial. And a YouTube. And the courses are republished on tons of platforms, each of which has some sort of preview.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, mathematics classes are like that as well. Instructors start throwing equations on the board, expecting us to somehow connect it all together. The best math textbook (Theory of Algebra) I ever read had little sections about the person who revealed a particular subject, why they were studying it, and how the subject is used.
Sadly many professors fall victim to the Curse of Knowledge. It doesn't help they need to follow a tight schedule and intuition isn't something you can develop in a single lecture. I suppose self-study and repetition is the most likely solution. >The best math textbook (Theory of Algebra) I ever read had little sections about the person who revealed a particular subject, why they were studying it, and how the subject…
Exactly, understanding the intentions and history behind a concept is key to achieving comprehension. I've had to teach myself nearly all of the more advanced mathematical concepts I know, and I'm finally starting to reach a point where I feel I have a nice approach toward achieving an understanding:
- Learn the definition - Learn the motivations and history - Peruse a few examples - Try to map the above to a brief synopsis that explains the concept in intuitive terms that relate to your own life. Rely on pictures.
Finally, I find it helpful sometimes to try and "deduce" identities from "first principles". e.g. assume I didn't know that n^0 = 1. How might I reach that conclusion? If I have an understanding of what exponentiation means I should be able to come up with a few different propositions (these could even be relatively informal) that make such a conclusion make sense.
My childhood was rife with mathematics teachers that focused more on rote memorization of identities instead of careful explanation of definitions and development of "intuition". There's pretty much no better way to ensure you'll produce students that dislike and suck at math for the rest of their lives than proceeding by mind-numbing rote memorization.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#448I wouldn't say years, but it took quite a few weeks, maybe even months:
The idea that the expansion universe is akin to the surface of a balloon expanding (albeit in 4D).
I don't know why. It is so absurdly simple in my mind now. But when I was first told this (after naively asking where would the center of the expanding universe be), I just couldn't put my head around it, it seemed absolutely gibberish to me at that moment.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#449It 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 didn't fully grok OOP until I saw how composition and dynamic dispatch can be used in real code to create abstractions and flexibly swap out different implementations for your interfaces. You could build a chatbot that supports Discord, Slack, and IRC dynamically at runtime, or a web app that can use multiple different database engines, or a social network with multiple types of posts that can all be rendered in a…
> What really frustrates me is that almost none of the OOP instruction I've encountered ever showed these kinds of real, practical examples. They always over-emphasize harmful inheritance-based approaches and never really explain composition.
So true. The canonical example used by OO pundits is often a "Person". A Person can be either a Contractor or an Employee (inheritance).
Having spent a lifetime in HR systems, there really couldn't be a worse example. It turns out that people may become contractors or employees, and then change back again, leaving the company and then returning. Some people may even hold the role of contractor and employee contemporaneously. Any crazy shit is true for humans. Instead of using simple OO classes to model people, IRL you end up with many, many tables that capture their lifecycle.
Good OO candidates/examples are usually non real worl things. Window managers and windows. Progamming concepts. That kind of thing, where the rules are simple and point in time.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California,…
I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming…
I find the unatonable original sin spin placed on white people these days in the USA to be a tad bit repulsive personally.